Which Vala tripped Gollum?

[jallanite]

Originally Posted by blantyr

What I don't recall seeing is relatively minor characters at not particularly important times attempting to foretell victory.

There is a good point glossed over here.

In fantasy stories almost all foretelling comes true, at least in a sense, though it may be a point in the story that it does not come true as originally understood. But in real life prophecies, even when issued by a top financial wizard or a top political columnist, or one of National Enquirer’s ten top prophets, never come true, or don’t come true more often than expected by non-believers.

I recall some years ago in The Globe & Mail, Toronto’s chief financial newspaper, they set up a feature to encourage investment by showing how easily one could make money in this way. The writer made fake investments using non-existent money, to demonstrate how one could make one’s fake portfolio grow in value. The feature was stopped when the writer had lost sufficient fake funds to destroy his credibility.

Readers of fantasy books like to believe, or perhaps better like to pretend, that the words spoken on one’s deathbed will invariably come true. But they mostly know in fact that such words have no more likelihood of coming to pass than words spoken at any other time in the speaker’s life.

How did Saruman become such a bad prophet compared to Gandalf? Because in fantasy worlds being a bad person also makes one a bad prophet.