Nostradamus, history’s most famous prophesier, continues to fascinate. Claims that he foresaw the rise of Napoleon and of Hitler, among other world events, are being supplemented by assertions that he divined the terrorist strikes of September 11, 2001, and the end-times brouhaha over 2012.

I have taken a fresh look at several of his more famous quatrains, translating them from sixteenth-century French into rhymed English verses—no easy task!

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1. The Death of King Henry II. One of Nostradamus’s most famous prophecies—number I:35—is also “the verse that made his reputation” (LeVert 1979, 67):

Le lyon ieune le vieux surmontera,

En champ bellique par singulier duelle,

Dans caige d’or les yeux luy creuera:

Deux classes vne, puis mourir, mort cruelle.

My translation:

The young lion shall overcome the old,

On field of battle by single duel;

He’ll smash his eyes with a casing of gold:

Two fleets one, then to die, a death cruel.

Published in 1555, this verse is said to predict the accidental death of King Henry II, the quatrain’s “old lion.” Reportedly, during a French jousting tournament in 1559, a splinter of a broken lance went through the visor of the King’s golden helmet (Nostradamus’s “cage of gold”) and thence through his eye into his brain. He subsequently suffered and died “a cruel death” (Roberts 1949, 20).

Alas, the quatrain was clearly not intended to refer to Henry. Just three years after publishing it, in mid-1558, Nostradamus penned a letter to the king, saying that he expected him to live a long life and predicting wonderful things in his future. Moreover, a tournament is not a “field of battle”; the verse refers to “eyes,” plural; and there is no known precedent for a golden helmet (gold is a soft metal), certainly not in the case of Henry (Randi 1993, 175). So Nostradamians are simply retrofitting, attempting to adapt later events to the French seer’s murky statements. The same is true of the word classes—interpreted by some Nostradamians as “wounds” (from Greek klasis).1 (It may mean “classes” or “knells” or—if the word is really the Latin classis—“fleets.”) The sense of the verse is that an old leader is slain by a younger one, thus unifying their forces.