How Prophecy Is Dealt With
David Eddings, along with having different gods be real, also created a system where prophecy is real and hasn’t been lost. Along with that, there are key characters involved who are very old and were around at the time some key past events happened. This sets up an interesting way to solve issues and figure out what to do. There is the real-world, real-time research and exploration, and then there is finding these prophecies and reading what basically will happen. It is written like a normal fantasy prophecy would be—kind of vague and in some biblical language—but nonetheless it’s all there.
We also see, especially in the first book, the idea of competing prophecies. For lack of a better term I’ll use the prophecy of good vs. the one of evil. Leading up to the last battle they mirror each other. Then they diverge depending on the outcomes of the last-battle events. I like this as an idea because two things can be correct at the same time, and there isn’t a lack of self-determination or what is basically the elect at play here.
This is a little opposed to something like Wheel of Time. There, in my view, the people in the Age of Legends (before the Breaking, or the big event that the series starts from years later) knew exactly what needed to be done and created the tools to go and do it. They just never got along enough to work together to carry that plan out. As the years went by, what were basically instructions turned into fragments that third parties had written down, and that’s all we see in the story. Here, Eddings has all of them intact, and basically in the libraries they should be in.