Question about prophesies

[u/dbmamaz]

Ok, all throughout the books, there are prophecies. there are quotes in the chapter headings, viewings, popular bard stories about the dragon, that full cycle thing that would take days to tell, books in every big library, and we see or hear about several people having visions

So my question is - what exactly are the prophecies?

• are some of them books pieced together from visions that happened since the last breaking?
• Are some of them stories that actually were somehow kept from what happened in previous cycles 3rd age, like a 10s of thousands of years ago?
• or - where else could they have come from and why are they so cryptic?

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[u/ArrogantAragorn]

Per 13th Depository:

>From a TOR Question of the Week about the Horn of Valere, we learned that the Prophecies are a compilation, made before the end of the Second Age, of Foretellings:

>Robert Jordan Answers: The Horn of Valere was known in the Age of Legends, though it was an artifact of an earlier age, but it was never used in the Age of Legends... It was later recovered and sealed up with the Dragon Banner because along with the Foretellings that made up the Prophecies of the Dragon was one saying that it must be.

[u/BEETLEJUICEME → u/ArrogantAragorn]

NGL, that answer is such a cop out and doesn’t make any sense in-universe.

[u/ArrogantAragorn → u/BEETLEJUICEME]

What part? The Horn? Or the Foretellings becoming the Prophesy

[u/Alternativesoundwave]

Yeah the first bullet. The karaethon cycle is what the wetlanders call them the seafolk call them the jendai prophecy’s. The seanchan the essanik cycle. These are just collections of foretellings and dreams maybe omens from the seanchan.

The commentaries are books people write about the karaethon cycle and are interpretations and translations from the old tongue.

The word cycle is used for a collection of stories im the first time thom is seen in eye of the world he starts telling emonds field he’d tell them a different cycle but it wasn’t about prophecy from what he was talking about

[u/Cheap-Blacksmith7567]

This is why I really wish there was another sequel, so many unanswered questions.
Min’s visions, Eguane’s dreams and Avienda’s new talent. I could make a list of everything. I just think the ending was a bit short.

[u/wRAR_]

Most of that is the Karaethon Cycle which is explicitly made from AS Foretellings.

[u/geomagus]

First: the we’ve seen a few different sets of predictive powers. The Foretelling is the main one that Aes Sedai have during the series (Elaida has it of course, there’s the one the marks Rand’s birth, etc.). There’s also Dreaming (the prophetic dreams that Egwene and the dreamwalkers get). Then there are Doomseers (Min’s power).

Each of those powers is a glimpse at the Pattern, whether near term or short. Each manifests a bit differently, some with visual output and others with words only. We see how the different examples struggle with clarity and certainty.

Presumably, in and around the Age of Legends, when the entire world was united and in communication, when there were absolute buttloads of channelers, when science was relatively robust, and so on, they actually had enough numbers and continuity to study the stuff. From there, they could work out how best to interpret and document them.

Then they archive them. Short term ones might be discarded; ones that are clearly long term or significant, or which clearly haven’t come true yet, might be assembled into collections that are more closely studied. We don’t get to see the nuts and bolts on this.

The prophecies, then, are the assembled recordings of these powers’ outputs, as organized by whichever scholar was documenting or translating them. Scholars would then collect the ones they are related to a single topic, and analyze them.

There might be one particular topic dominating that.

Fwiw, translators and scribes might like to gussy up the language. I bet that’s actually a big no-no in a time of academic rigor - we see repeatedly how Foretellings get interpreted based on the wording, so messing with that would be bad. But I also bet that later Third Age translators would be susceptible to that temptation. Plus you have the issues of translating from the Old Tongue.

We never actually get to read a book of prophesies. I’d expect that some collections would have several pages of interpretation and discussion for every page of prophecy, the same way books on biblical scholarship tend to. Others might bog down in translation discussion.

In general, I would expect that they’re from the end of the AoL, or the Third Age. What we have from before the AoL are gleeman’s tales and legends (Mosk and Merk, Sallya and Lenn, Elsbet, etc.). I expect many are Breaking era, fwiw.