Board Thread:Lore Discussion/@comment-10561605-20130820164006/@comment-4148373-20131004161549

The thing is, it's actually quite hard to know for certain if any of the Septims were Dragonborn, since there were no dragons around to absorb the souls of. However, that does not mean they aren't Dragonborn, just that we don't know for certain.

But the thing is, this argument started when someone said they couldn't study Alduin's Wall if they didn't have Dragonborn, but SajuukKhar just showed that the prophecy was also recorded in the Book of the Dragonborn, rending the origin of this argument superfluous. They don't need the wall, someone already wrote it down and got it published.

As such, here's some reasons why no one studied it and predicted the events of the first four games:

1. They questioned the legitimacy

2. Several of the lines are only clear in retrospect. Hell, the first line could just mean: 'we had a horrible emperor'.

In that vein:

There was a book explaining away Dragonbreaks, and they're not exactly easy to believe in to begin with.

Thrice blessed is vague, and the 'Red Tower' is actually a friggin' mountain.

The fourth line is fairly clear, but unless you decided to assume that every emperor would be the last, you'd be kinda stupid to try to predict it ahead of time.

The Snow Tower part is just confusing, it's a metaphor for Skyrim in it's entirety (I think), where as the other towers have been much more specific in what they are. And again, when precisely will this uprising occur? That's not an easy thing to predict.

3. Would you really expect most of these events to have occurred within the reign (or shortly after, in Oblivion's case) of a single emperor? And even if they did say afterwards 'Hey, everything that happened in Uriel VII's reign matches this prophecy', they'd be waiting for the last line to happen, and that took 200 years to show up, so people are probably skeptical it'll ever happen.

The only people I can think of who'd even think about this are the Blades, and apparently they even started to disbelieve it, if what Delphine said was anything to go on. So yeah, using a a mostly either vague in meaning or unpredictible in timing prophecy to predict events ahead of time isn't easy.