[Kalimac]

Voralphion, I see what you mean, but I wasn't trying to say that Eowyn's strike was more important than Merry's in the book, just that they'd probably make it so for the movie. It's true that in the book it's Merry's sword that unlocks the spell, so to speak - then Eowyn takes advantage of that to destroy the Witch-King. But since the subplot of Merry's sword being a magic Sword of Westernesse has so far been cut from the movie (and I can't see where they'd get room to shoehorn it into TTT) they'll have to find another explanation for the Witch-King's demise, and the next-best thing for them would be to adapt ROTK as little as possible and just turn the prophecy about "no mortal man" in the main cause rather than just the immediate cause. The point is that it would make sense to an audience that hasn't read Tolkien, especially if they remember their high school Shakespeare and that tricky prophecy about how "no man of woman born" could harm Macbeth. (Hmm, looks like neither Macbeth nor the Witch-King read the fine print in their prophecies). <P>The prophecy didn't say that the witch-king couldn't be killed by a man, just that he wouldn't die by by the hand of man.<P>For the Witch-King's purposes those two things are pretty much identical. We never see anything to contradict his statement (and the prophecy) that no man will be able to kill him. It's just that he assumed that "man" meant "The race of men" and not "persons of the male sex." <P>And you're right, despite what Eowyn says to the contrary, it's never absolutely PROVED that she would have been able to kill him had Merry not broken the spell; perhaps the prophecy did mean "The race of men" after all. But there's certainly a heavy enough implication (in the "They say that not by hand of any mortal man shall he fall" sense) that the moviemakers would be justified in assuming that women were in fact exempt from that clause, however much assistance they may have required from hobbits (also not of the race of men).