coup de grâce - French
ku də ɡʀas - noun - a final blow or shot given to kill a wounded person or animal.
Quote:
(1) Bêthberry: "...with a sword she slew the Witch King."
(2) William Cloud Hicklin: "... The Witch-King had apparently never even considered the possibility of facing a woman in battle."
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Both of the statements above, correct as far as they go, overlook the positively critical role of Merry the Hobbit and the rather special sword gifted to him by Tom Bombadil when Tom rescued the Hobbits from the tombs of evil barrow wights early in
The Fellowship of the Ring.
As regards Eowyn and her confrontation with the Witch-King at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields (as related by Professor Tolkien):
Quote:
Out of the wreck rose the Black Rider, tall and threatening, towering above her. With a cry of hatred that stung the very ears like venom he let fall his mace. Her shield was shivered in many pieces, and her arm was broken; she stumbled to her knees. He bent over her like a cloud, and his eyes glittered; he raised his mace to kill.
But suddenly he too stumbled forward with a cry of bitter pain and his stroke went wide, driving into the ground. Merry's sword had stabbed him from behind, sheering through the black mantle and passing up beneath the hauberk had pierced the sinew behind his mighty knee."
...
"So passed the sword of the Barrow-downs, work of Westernesse. But glad would he have been to know its fate who wrought it slowly long ago in the North-kingdom when the Dunedain were young and chief among their foes was the dread realm of Angmar and its sorcerer king. No other blade, not though mightier hands had wielded it, would have dealt that foe a wound so bitter, cleaving the undead flesh, breaking the spell that knit his unseen sinews to his will."
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With Professor Tolkien's authoritative text in mind, then, a more complete rendering of introductory statement (1) above would say that
Eowyn administered the coup de grâce to a fatally wounded Witch-King made vulnerable to ordinary swords by Merry's blade of Westernesse.
A more complete rendering of introductory statement (2) would say that
the Witch-King had apparently never even considered dealing with a Hobbit in battle, either, especially one armed with the only blade that could fatally wound him and render him vulnerable to the ordinary swords of ordinary persons, human or Hobbit, "not-man" or otherwise.