Visions vs. Prophecies

[Mal Malenkirk]

For the sake of this topic, I will differentiate between visions of the future that a seer has had and that were verified shortly (a few hours to a few years in the future) and prophecies that are recorded in uncertain manners and are supposed to be fulfilled in the distant future.

We have seen proof of a limited ability to predict the future in a handful of seers.

In all cases, it is either known or is at least likely that the wheels were already in motion when the vision occurred. That is to say that the direct causal chain of events leading to the vision was well underway.

So here’s my concern; the farthest reaching vision that has proved accurate that we know of is the vision of the Doom that saved the Targaryen. That vision was about 15 years in the future at that time.

Now Prophecies are a completely different beast. It presumes a prophet/seer anticipate events that occurs in the distant future and records them accurately for interpretation and to be acted on by future generation instad of himself.

First of all, we have no case, that I know of, of a prophecy successfully anticipating events a mere century or two in advances. Yet the AA, TPTWP, Three heads of the dragons, STMTW etc. are prophecies that are far more distant than that, some of them well over a millennia! It’s a completely different order of magnitude. Again, we have a best case confirmed scenario of fifteen years, so should we take at face value predictions made, in some case, thousands of years ago?!

And if these prophets indeed had accurate visions thousands of years ago, how would contemporary westerosians even know for certain what that prediction was?

First of all, these prophecies are so old we don’t even seem to know who the original authors were! Makes it rather hard to collect the teachings of a particular prophet and do proper scholarly work. Also, what percentage of the texts written even survived? Martin knows it’s a problem; in TWoIaF, the maester writing the section on Valyria mentions he is using a reputed historian as his basis but notes that the citadel is missing about 25 scrolls of his definitive account. And Valyria fell less than 400 years ago! Just how complete do you think are the records concerning these millennia old prophecies?

Also, do you have any idea how hard it is for a text to survive intact through the millenias? It’s almost impossible for the original paper to survive so these things are copied and recopied. Here is a thing you should know about that: mistakes are made during the copying process and then carried into the next copy. Add in the translation mistakes. Did you know that if you collect all the surviving ancient bibles, arbitrarily set one as the original and compare it to the others, there are more differences between these bibles than there are letters in the entire book! Most of these are minor but sometime they entirely change the meaning of the sentence, as in the case where some ancient bible has a line where Jesus died with the grace of god and others that he died apart from god. And that’s not accounting for the fact that some people sometime added entire passage that suited their ideological needs while copying. For example, the classic passage of Jesus and the adulterer ('Let he who has never sinned cast the first stone') is found in none of the most ancient bibles and is therefore probably not by the original author. It is likely a later addition by some monk who thought it was a great story that needed to be included. It clearly caught on because it got copied and copied and eventually set in stone when printing was invented.

On top of these issues it seems some of these prophecies would originate from before writing came to Westeros (stuff relating to the Last Hero for sure) and therefore any text detailing them would just be thousands of years old recording of oral stories that were then already thousands of years removed from their source! How accurate do you think they’ll be?

In conclusion; we have no example of a seers effectively seeing more than 15 years in the future. And if we believe that some super seers saw thousands of years in the future, bypassing making some useful predictions a mere century in the future (that’s for losers), why would we assume that these predictions where transmitted to contemporary Westeros accurately?

So even if the gist of the prophecies turned out real (A messiah is coming! Eh. That's what all religions say!), trusting the details and trying to act on them strikes me as silly.

[Mal Malenkirk]

No one has any opinion on that?

It strikes as releveant to the multitude of threads about Rhaegar, at least.