Ends of times prophecy that I can't shake

[robvalue]

Exactly. If you hadn't been raised to think this book was somehow magic, you'd dismiss this "prophecy" entirely out of hand as a joke (in my opinion). You'd no more take anything it has to say seriously than you would Lord of the Rings. You'd pick it up off the shelf, and class it as fiction almost immediately.

As Jorm pointed out, the prophecies tend to come true within the very same narrative, they're not even talking about the future. They're literary devices, and are often just trying to explain what had already happened at the time of writing into a way that makes the victors sound more respectable. People now try and retrofit events to these "prophecies" regardless, pretending they had something amazing to say. They didn't. It's part of a story taken out of context. It may as well be Harry Potter talking about an evil statue he will face later in the book or something.

This is the rational explanation.