Prophecies Rhyme All the Time: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
{{quote|''"Most of the prophets of the past millennium were more concerned with scansion than accuracy. You know, '[[Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe|And thee Worlde Unto An Ende Shall Come, in tumpty-tumpty-tumpty One.]]' Or Two, or Three, or whatever. There aren't many good rhymes for Six, so it's probably a good year to be in."''
|'''Aziraphale''', ''[[Good Omens]]''}}
{{quote|'''Fates:''' In eighteen years, precisely, the planets will align ever so nicely...
'''Hades:''' [[Lampshade Hanging|Oy, verse.]]
|''[[Hercules (1997 film)|Hercules]]''}}
Whenever characters are reading from an ancient prophecy or magical spell, it will rhyme, as if every ancient scroll and tome was written by Dr. Seuss. Even funnier, the translation makes it rhyme ''in English'', regardless of what culture it came from. It's like an attempt at [[Gratuitous Iambic Pentameter]], running headlong into [[What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome?]].
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That foreign-language '''Prophecies Rhyme All the Time''' is one of the most blatant forms of either [[Conveniently Precise Translation]] (if the characters actually translate it or use [[Translator Microbes]]) or [[Translation Convention]] (if they don't). In [[Real Life|reality]], it's hard work to translate a rhyme in one language into a rhyme in the other, not the kind of thing that you could easily do on the fly.
Mind you, the translators of the classical poets like Homer, Virgil, the author of Beowulf, or Dante often find it worth the effort to make their translations rhyme. But the harder you work at something like this, the more you sacrifice things like keeping the actual meaning of the prophecy intact. And surely most prophecies are vague enough already without translating them in a way that carries their meaning even farther away from the exact events that fulfill the prophecy. In that sense, if you hear a translated prophecy that rhymes, you should be worried that it was an especially ''In''conveniently ''Im''precise translation. Remember, a poem is a toy, but a prophecy is a tool.
Possibly justifiable, as rhyming when translated into the language spoken by the people who have to do something about it, and not in any language existing at the time the prophecy was written, is a clever way to prove that it's a real prophecy. But that only works if it's a sufficiently straightforward translation to show that the prophet did it rather than the translator.
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* Not only does the prophecy in ''[[The Darkangel Trilogy]]'' rhyme, but it is also revealed a couple of stanzas at a time in each volume.
* The two prophecies central to ''[[The Dark Is Rising]]'', each of which are some twenty lines long, read like this.
* The inscription of the One Ring in ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]'': ''Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulûk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul,'' which rhymes "find them" with "bind them," and (depending on your definition of "rhyme") "them all" with itself. "One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them." Considering that Tolkien was explicitly invoking the [[Translation Convention]] for his work, this suggests that it's a rhyme in at least ''three'' languages (our English, the Black Tongue, and the Westron language the notional "real" text was translated from).
** Also, ''All that is gold does not glitter'', about the return of the King (though that was more of a hopeful poem than a prophecy as such).
* Ithlinne's Prophecy in Andrzej Sapkowski's ''[[The Witcher]] Cycle'' is, in its pure form, a partial example, consisting of both non-rhyming and rhyming parts. However, it is subverted and lampshaded when another character gives a concise, non-rhyming summary of this prophecy to the eponymous Witcher, who then [[Deadpan Snarker|expresses sarcastic disbelief]], because all the prophecies worth the name rhyme.
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