[davem]

'You cannot enter here,' said Gandalf, and the huge shadow halted. 'Go back to the abyss prepared for you! Go back! Fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your Master. Go!'

This always interested me - 'the abyss that awaits you!' 'Fall into the nothingness that awaits you & your Master.'

Gandalf says that the 'abyss' has been prepared for the WK & for Sauron, that 'nothingness' awaits them. Prepared by whom? Only by Eru. Their fate has been decided, their 'free will' taken away? What's interesting is the WK's response: Gandalf fortells that 'nothingness' awaits him, he throws back his hood to reveal...?

The Black Rider flung back his hood, and behold! he had a kingly crown; and yet upon no head visible was it set. The red fires shone between it and the mantled shoulders vast and dark. From a mouth unseen there came a deadly laughter.

Well, nothing. 'Nothingness' does not await him - it has already taken him. He is literally 'nothing'. Interestingly, Eowyn will name him dwimmerlaik (lit. 'phantom/illusion'). His laughter is 'deadly', because it is the laughter of one who is dead, a ghost, a 'nothing'. He has become the 'abyss'. He goes on to admit this:

'Old fool!' he said. 'Old fool! This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it? Die now and curse in vain!' And with that he lifted high his sword and flames ran down the blade.

Gandalf's threat has failed to cow him - not because it was vain bluster on the Wizard's part, but because what he has threatened has already occured. So the WK can laugh his 'deadly laugh'. I think this is where his sense of 'indestructibility' arises - when he says none may slay him, he believes it, because he knows he has already been slain. What he will threaten Eowyn with later - her flesh shall be devoured & her shrivelled mind be left naked to the Lidless Eye - this has been his own fate.

Finally, we have the second animal in the story whose thoughts are given. First was the fox in the woods of the Shire, curious about the doings of Hobbits, now we have the cock in Minas Tirith.

This bird has no interest in 'wizardry or war' - he only feels welcome for the dawn:

Gandalf did not move. And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the City, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed, recking nothing of wizardry or war, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn.

Whether there was in Tolkien's mind any connection between the crowing of this cock & the crowing of the cock in the Gospels is a question I can't answer, obviously, but its interesting that that cockcrow signalled the lowest point of the Christian story, but the point at which everything was about to turn around with the Crucifixion & Resurrection of Christ. Here we have a similar symbolic cockcrow, & many will die this day, but by the end of it a new king will have 'arisen'....