Yeah I always hated this line, it doesn’t even work in a lot of languages we have today. No way it would have worked in whatever language those two were using to talk to each other.
The point is that there was nothing special and the prophecy wasn’t real, it was only that people believed in it and they were generally very difficult, but not impossible, to kill. Ironically the witch king believed it too because if he acted more cautiously, as they had always acted before only in the dark and stealthily, he would have been safe.
I’m going to need a source for this, because I think common consensus is that this (along with the trees (Ents) literally “marching to war”) was a critical response to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, where Tolkien considered Macduff being born by C-section a cop-out solution to the prophecy “cannot be killed by a man born of woman”.
Playing with ambiguous language in ways like this, especially with regards to prophecy, is a trope thousands of years old in myth (Croesus and the Oracle at Delphi probably being the paradebeispiel), and so I see no reason to think that a scholar of myth like Tolkien would not do the same in his own take on the genre.
I know where the prophecy is from - I just see no reason to interpret this as fake when high elves like Glorfindel are already canonically known to have the gift of sight and the prophecy was fulfilled. Given the Macbeth connection, without evidence from Tolkien there really isn’t any good reason to assume the prophecy was fake.
The language they were using was almost certainly Westron, since that’s what almost all of the Red Book of Westmarch was translated from (with the notable exception of Bilbo’s Translations from the Elvish, of course), and since Tolkien is the one who invented the language, it would have worked exactly as well as he wanted it to.
The real question is whether Sindarin also works this way.
Yeah I always hated this line, it doesn’t even work in a lot of languages we have today. No way it would have worked in whatever language those two were using to talk to each other.
The point is that there was nothing special and the prophecy wasn’t real, it was only that people believed in it and they were generally very difficult, but not impossible, to kill. Ironically the witch king believed it too because if he acted more cautiously, as they had always acted before only in the dark and stealthily, he would have been safe.
I’m going to need a source for this, because I think common consensus is that this (along with the trees (Ents) literally “marching to war”) was a critical response to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, where Tolkien considered Macduff being born by C-section a cop-out solution to the prophecy “cannot be killed by a man born of woman”.
Playing with ambiguous language in ways like this, especially with regards to prophecy, is a trope thousands of years old in myth (Croesus and the Oracle at Delphi probably being the paradebeispiel), and so I see no reason to think that a scholar of myth like Tolkien would not do the same in his own take on the genre.
It was a prophecy from Glorfindel, He will not return to this land. Far off yet is his doom, and not by the hand of man will he fall. , which isn’t much but the nazgul were aware of it. https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/59204/in-the-lord-of-the-rings-was-the-witch-king-aware-of-the-prophecy-about-his-dea
That can be viewed as a real prophecy or a fake self fulfilling prophecy.
I know where the prophecy is from - I just see no reason to interpret this as fake when high elves like Glorfindel are already canonically known to have the gift of sight and the prophecy was fulfilled. Given the Macbeth connection, without evidence from Tolkien there really isn’t any good reason to assume the prophecy was fake.
The language they were using was almost certainly Westron, since that’s what almost all of the Red Book of Westmarch was translated from (with the notable exception of Bilbo’s Translations from the Elvish, of course), and since Tolkien is the one who invented the language, it would have worked exactly as well as he wanted it to.
The real question is whether Sindarin also works this way.
deleted by creator