Prophecies seem to have become a staple of fantasy literature. Most of them are either self-fulfilling prophecies, where the characters’ attempts to circumvent the prophecy are what makes it come true, or they are riddles – symbolic language or plays on words that are puzzles for the characters (and the reader) to work out.
In the first case, the reader is basically watching an inevitable train wreck – no, no, Laius, don’t try to kill your son to prevent the prophecy from happening; no, no, Oedipus, those are your adopted parents, don’t leave in an attempt to avoid killing them…also, don’t lose your temper and kill random-seeming guys on the road…
The second sort of prophecy – the riddle or play on words – is a mystery for the reader to solve. What does it really mean? How can it happen? “No man can kill you” – ok, then it’ll be an animal, or an accident…or a woman. “Macbeth shall never vanquished be until great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill shall come against him” – which happens symbolically, when Malcom’s attacking army cuts branches from Birnam Wood to use as camouflage.
The problem with the first sort of prophecy is that it’s easy for the characters to look stupid, even if they aren’t. The reader has more information about the situation than the characters do, so they can spot the mistakes the character makes (even though the character is mostly behaving reasonably, given what he/she knows at that point). The prophecy acts as a spoiler, because the end is inevitable (since prophecies in literature always come true, no matter how hard somebody tries to keep them from happening…see Oedipus, above).
The problem with the second sort of prophecy is that the puzzle has to be something that the reader will accept as inevitable and even obvious in retrospect, without being so obvious that a) it’s a spoiler for the plot and b) the characters look dumb for not figuring it out. The author has to keep the real meaning of the prophecy a mystery by holding back the “twist” – the sometimes convoluted interpretation that allows the outcome the reader wants, even though it has been looking more and more as if the bad guys were going to waltz to victory.
Ambiguous prophecies are close kin to the puzzle prophecy, but to most modern readers, they’re clearly hedging their bet: “If your army crosses the river, a great kingdom will fall” is the classic example. Which great kingdom isn’t specified, so whoever wins the resulting battle will have fulfilled the prophecy.
Most modern fantasy seems to go with the puzzle prophecy, especially a puzzle with a twist. It’s made prophecies something of a one-trick pony. The thing is, there are other ways of playing with prophecies that don’t have these problems.
For instance, there are clearly worded prophecies that give a character a choice. The prophecy Achilles’ mother gave him was of this sort: he can either stay with the army attacking Troy and die young but with “glory that will never die,” or he can go home and die old but obscure. He gets to pick: life, or lasting glory. He goes for the glory, but from the point where the prophecy is revealed up to his death, the reader knows that he could change his mind at any point, drop everything, head home and live…if he weren’t so stubborn. That bit of underlying tension remains, and underlines Achilles’ character.
There’s also the way the author chooses to position the prophecy. In the Harry Potter books, Rowling puts the prophecy about Harry and Voldemort at the center of the series. It’s a combination of the self-fulfilling prophecy and obscurely worded puzzle – “the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal” means that if Voldemort hadn’t tried to circumvent the prophecy by attempting to kill Harry, he wouldn’t have “marked” him and set the prophecy (and the main plot) in motion. There’s a whole room of other prophecies, but the only ones we actually hear in the series are about Voldemort.
In The Lord of the Rings, by contrast, there is no one big prophecy about Frodo and the destruction of the One Ring. There are, however, tons of prophecies, predictions, and dreams about multiple different characters. They range from Boromir’s dream telling him to “Seek the Sword that was Broken/In Imladris it dwells” to Sam’s vision of the destruction of the Shire in Galadriel’s Mirror to Bilbo’s poem predicting that “The crownless again shall be king.” All these different predictions have the paradoxical effect of making the reader believe that prophecy in Middle-Earth is both true and not really a big deal. It’s commonplace, just one more bit of information that may or may not be useful; it’s not something that anyone goes chasing around trying to fulfill or prevent.
My favorite use of prophecy, though, is in the Arthurian legends. This is something you don’t see much in modern fantasy fiction: a clear, unambiguous prophecy (“Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil, is rightwise king born of all England”), the fulfillment of which starts the hard work of the story. It takes Mallory five chapters to get the sword out of the stone and Arthur on the throne…and there are another 502 chapters to go.
And then there are the Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter in Good Omens – very much the wordplay/puzzle type, but often impossible to decipher until you’re actually in the middle of the events being prophesied.
On the other hand, there’s “Do not buy Beta Macks.”
True! One of Agnes’s more straightforward efforts.
I think I like Tolkien’s method of many prophecies better. When there is just one big plot-driving prophesy, it stands out like an artificial alien structure; when there are multiple prophecies then even the big ones look like part of the world. Also, if you can show the various smaller prophecies turning out in different ways, you have tension as to how the bigger ones will work out.
Note also that “Not by the hand of man shall he fall” has a double meaning, which Tolkien knew all about.
Many Indo-European languages, including Old English, had one word [or several] for “man” as distinguished from a woman or a child, and another [or several] for a man as distinguished from an animal or a god.
And it came to pass that the Witch-King was killed by the combined actions of a woman and a Hobbit.
“Tolkien’s mind was one of unmatchable subtlety, not without a
streak of deliberate guile.”
T. A. Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth, p. 4.
I dunno, I write more sf than fantasy, and I’ve never put a prophecy in.
See, if I write fantasy, it’s a magical world. Since I value internal consistency, then the magic has to make sense, if only to my subconscious.
So if there’s magic and prophecies, ***to me*** that means magic can affect time somehow, and why does time magic only result in vague foretellings? Does fire magic only result in some warmth and smoke? So far I haven’t wanted to do the world-building involved in answering those questions.
My favorite line regarding prophesy comes from the end of The Hobbit:
“Surely you don’t disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself?:
One of my characters has prophetic dreams; he has the first one about twelve hours *before* he learns that war is at hand, and he has others throughout the story … until the war is over and he never has any more.
They aren’t always completely accurate, though; and a friend of his, educated in the classics as well as in theology, tells him that in the old days it was said that true dreams came through the gate of horn, false dreams through the gate of ivory. And the trouble is, you can’t tell which is which until it’d all over.
And then there’s the Licanius trilogy option: clear prophetic visions that definitely will come true, and everyone in-universe has to deal with the idea that predestination is a thing. (For those of you who haven’t read it, it’s a very rare example of prophecy and time travel done right.)
Prophecies are all too often used as a way to evade the question of why the main character is doing what he’s doing.
Or how he knows what he knows.
I understand the temptation as a writer, but as a reader it usually feels like cheating.
“Who – who are you?”
“I am called the Seer. I am here because I foresaw myself coming here and speaking to you.”
“You did? What did you see yourself saying?”
“I saw myself saying, ‘I am called the Seer. I am here because I foresaw myself coming here and speaking to you.'”
Yeah, I’m not into putting prophecies in stories much…
Although with a *few* recursions, you could get a good short-short out of that.
Good point. Just because I can make fun of it doesn’t mean there isn’t a story kernel there. Or maybe *because* I can make fun of it…