The Castle of Otranto

“They attributed this hasty wedding to the Prince’s dread of seeing accomplished an ancient prophecy, which was said to have pronounced that the castle and lordship of Otranto ‘should pass from the present family, whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it.’”

The beginning of the novel grounds the events that are about to take place in a prediction Manfred fears, connecting the newly emerging genre of realistic fiction with earlier chivalric traditions in an instance of Blending Medieval Romances and the Novel. Conrad, Manfred’s son, is to be married quickly because a prophecy augurs that the Castle of Otranto will soon fall out of the family’s ownership. Manfred’s actions in subsequent chapters revolve around preserving his family’s legacy and ownership of Otranto.

“[…] he beheld his child dashed to pieces, and almost buried under an enormous helmet, an hundred times more large than any casque ever made for human being, and shaded with a proportionable quantity of black feathers.”

After Conrad is crushed to death under a giant helmet, Otranto’s servants recognize it as having come from a suit of arms on a statue of Alfonso the Good located at the Church of St. Nicholas. The weapon presents readers with an eerie mystery of how something so large could have fallen from the ceiling of the castle—it is far too large to have been moved by any person. Though no one is willing to believe it yet, the helmet is the first supernatural event that presages the hauntings to come.