From Aldmora to Empire

[Backstory notes for the Falmer/Nord conflict. Discuss.]

In Aldmora

Nords, as their name implies, come from the north. As a people, they originated in the northern-most place in the known world, a continent known as Atmora. Little is known of the geography and history of Atmora, as at the time of the migration from there, humanity did not possess a written language. What little is known comes from old Elvish records which are not open to Imperial scholars, but which are known to refer to the continent as ‘Aldmora’, meaning “Elder Wood”. It is likely Atmora is a human corruption of this word. In a historical sense, the humans who live there are called Nedes, as are those humans living in Tamriel before King Harald, thirteenth of the Ysgramor line, seceded from Atmoran rulership, after which they are historically annotated as Cyro-Nordics, to illustrate that the Cyrodiil people had not yet gone separate from the original trunk of human population.

Even in ancient times, Atmora must have been extremely cold, at least as much so as modern day Skyrim, because the men who lived there are very well suited to live in cold climates. UESPWiki on Nords

From Aldmora to Falmora

Pre-literate humans, the so-called “Nedic Peoples”, from the continent of Atmora (also ‘Altmora’ or ‘the Elder Wood’ in Aldmeris) migrate and settle in northern Tamriel. “The Nedic peoples were a minority in a land of Elves, and had no choice but to live peacefully with the Elder Race. In High Rock, Hammerfell, Cyrodiil, and possibly Morrowind, they did just that, and the Nedic peoples flourished and expanded over the last centuries of the Merethic Era.” (from FRONTIER, CONQUEST, AND ACCOMODATION: A SOCIAL HISTORY OF CYRODIIL) Nordic hero Ysgramor, leader of a great colonizing fleet to Tamriel, develops a runic transcription of Nordic speech based on Elvish principles, and is the first human historian. Ysgramor’s fleet lands at Hsaarik Head at the extreme northern tip of Skyrim’s Broken Cape. The Nords build there the legendary city of Saarthal. Merethic Era timeline and notes from the Imperial Library

It is said that during the time of the migration, a protracted and bloody civil war had gripped Atmora, and, as the story goes, a man named Ysgramor rallied those people from all sides who desired to live in peace, and set sail to the south, eventually arriving in Skyrim; the extreme northern tip of the continent of Tamriel, at a place known as Hsaarik Head. They named the new land “Mereth” in tribute to the many Elves which lived in the forests there (Elves having arrived in Tamriel several millennia prior). UESPWiki on Nords

A Night of Tears

As it goes, Elves and men lived in relative peace and prosperity for a great deal of time, however, the Elves, upon observing the staggering birthrate of the human populace, quickly realized that men would overtake the wild places and become the first major threat to Elvish civilization in the known world. Of course, this would not have happened for many centuries, and it would have occurred unnoticeably slowly from the human point of view; however, in the Elvish mind, this would be the equivalent of the statement “The day after tomorrow, we will be overtaken.” UESPWiki on Nords

Ysgramor’s provocations and blasphemies have, of course, been long forgotten. PGE: Skyrim

Falmer taught Ysgramor, sons, and Saarthal of Lorkhan in terms of overcoming His works to regain divine nature and rebirth through baptism in the waters of Oblivion (normal water transformed with a philosopher’s stone, which actually did work, turning aedric souls into daedric through Lorkhan’s favor). Ysgramor, sons, and Saarthal, less biased against their true creator, interpreted this power as a gift from Lorkhan as the One True God, creating a great religious awakening (Ysgramor’s “provocations and blasphemies”). Falmer saw that they had created a city and a people of heretics which would only grow, and so put them to the stake.

For genocide to happen, there must be certain preconditions. Foremost among them is a national culture that does not place a high value on human life. A totalitarian society, with its assumed superior ideology, is also a precondition for genocidal acts. In addition, members of the dominant society must perceive their potential victims as less than fully human: as “pagans,” “savages,” “uncouth barbarians,” “unbelievers,” “effete degenerates,” “ritual outlaws,” “racial inferiors,” “class antagonists,” “counterrevolutionaries,” and so on. In themselves, these conditions are not enough for the perpetrators to commit genocide. To do that—that is, to commit genocide—the perpetrators need a strong, centralized authority and bureaucratic organization as well as pathological individuals and criminals. Also required is a campaign of vilification and dehumanization of the victims by the perpetrators, who are usually new states or new regimes attempting to impose conformity to a new ideology and its model of society. Wikipedia on genocide in history

Soon thereafter, the Aldmer launched a series of pogroms against the settlements of humanity, and in what was to become known as the Night of Tears, an Elven militia razed the capital city of Saarthal to the ground, killing the defenders and everyone unable to flee, well over a thousand people. The Nedic men were scattered to the coast and systematically hunted down in an act of unmitigated cleansing, and only Ysgramor and his two sons survived, fleeing in the last available longship while the port they launched from was burned. UESPWiki on Nords

According to the ancient writings and oral traditions of the Nords, the Nordic god Shor creates Sovngarde, the place that is built to honor those Nords who have proven their mettle in war. (For more information: Sovngarde, a Reexamination.) Merethic Era timeline and notes from the Imperial Library

The Philosophers’ Stones Shattered

Ysgramor and sons returned to Aldmora for support, but only got it by appealing to Aldmorans in terms of the gods all the Aldmorans worshipped. Privately, Ysgramor and his sons continued to believe in the One, creating the ancient Nordic cult that Tiber Septim glorified with the Temple of the One. (Akatosh summoned in the temple to preserve the plan of dead Lorkhan, whom She killed to enact the plan.)

After the Night of Tears, some Aldmorans were holy warriors on a crusade of vengeance rooted deep in their culture, and some weren’t (ironically, those more sympathetic to the idea of the One, who worshipped Mara).

Arriving in Atmora, and observing the tumultuous peace which had developed, they quickly propagated their tale of a vicious and deceitful alien race, the Elves, bent on scouring men from the face of the world. Rallying the various factions to their cause, they conscripted an army composed of the heroes of the war, which history would know as the “Five Hundred Companions”. Upon their return to Tamriel, they expediently slaughtered the Elves living there and laid the foundations for the ascendancy of Men to the power they now hold, and thusly sparked a long fuming hatred and prejudice between the two races which exists, by degree, even today. UESPWiki on Nords

[Atmoran tactics: see Wikipedia on Viking arms and armor, weapons and warfare.]

In Falmora the Age of Men began dramatically in the late Merethic Era when the Five Hundred Companions destroyed the temple complex in Dawnstar, a center of learning famous across the continent. Monks were killed in the abbey, thrown into the sea to drown or carried away as slaves along with the church treasures. The devastation of Altumbria’s calm city shocked and alerted the royal Courts of Mereth. Never before has such an atrocity been seen, declared the Altumbrian Scholar, Alcuin of Lainalten. [Polarizing opinion and redirecting internal criticism away from the Falmer pogroms and the Night of Tears.] More than any other single event, the attack on Dawnstar cast a shadow on merish perception of Aldmorans for the next milennia. Adapted Viking Age historical consideration of Lindisfarne

Alcuin of Lainalten declares: In this year fierce, foreboding omens came over the land of Altumbria. There were excessive whirlwinds, lightning storms, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky. These signs were followed by great famine, and on the Day of Blood Eagle the ravaging of heathen men destroyed the Gnostic Study of Lorkhan at Dawnstar. The heathens poured out the blood of the students on the stones of the Garden of Celestial Pattern, and trampled in the meditation rooms on the drained and mutilated bodies of the enlightened. Adapted Lindisfarne history

Land of Rape and Honey

Strategically, the ideal was to swiftly effect an adversary’s collapse through a short campaign fought by a small, professional army. Operationally, its goal was to use indirect means, such as mobility and shock, to render an adversary’s plans irrelevant or impractical. Wikipedia on blitzkrieg

The battlefront was lost, and with it the illusion that there had ever been a battlefront. For this was no war of occupation, but a shocking, awful war of quick penetration and obliteration. Swift columns of tongues and cavalry plunged through Falmora while gale-force winds bearing lightning and driving, immobilizing rain from an allied sky heralded their coming. They sawed off communications, destroyed animals, scattered civilians, spread terror. Working sometimes 30 miles (50 km) ahead of infantry and battle mages, they broke down Falmoran defenses before they had time to organize. Then, while the infantry mopped up, they moved on, to strike again far behind what had been called the front. Adapted TIME magazine account of the fall of Poland in WWII

Collective and arbitrary murder, systematic abduction of children to raise them away from their parent’s culture, active and degrading religious propaganda, forced work, expulsion from the homeland or compulsory abandonment of cultural habits and social structure, all these practices, described by Robert Jaulin, have in common a deep despise for the other man and woman as representatives of a different cultural world. Wikipedia on ethnocide

[Falmer reaction: see Wikipedia on the strategy of Fabian, thirty-six strategems, and the hashshashin.]

The Courts of Mereth did not react with unity to the lightning war and following purge, partly because they did not realize that these men had such power—they figured that the gods were on their side—and partly because they weren’t too fond of a merish culture that delved so deeply into the study of Lorkhan. The common mer called them worshippers, and derided them for communing with mannish ancestors, both not true. The Falmer felt that the path of transcendence lay through self-effacing study (gnosis, experiential knowledge) of their divine spark from Lorkhan, since they believed they were in the deadric plane of Dawn’s Beauty. The Courts decided that the Ayleids had the right idea, enslaving men to suppress their will to power, but the Falmer could not effectively break the Aldmorans.

It may be that the exploits of the near-mythical Ysgramor conflate the reigns of several early Nord Kings, as the Elves were not finally driven from the present boundaries of Skyrim until the reign of King Harald, the thirteenth of Ysgramor’s line, at the dawn of recorded history. King Harald is also remembered for being the first King to relinquish all holdings in Atmora; the Nords of Skyrim were now a separate people, whose faces were turned firmly toward their destiny, the conquest of the vast new land of Tamriel. Indeed, the history of the Nords is the history of humans in Tamriel; all the human races, with the exception of the Redguards, are descended from Nordic stock, although in some the ancient blood admittedly runs thin.

King Vrage the Gifted began the expansion that led to the First Empire of the Nords. Within a span of fifty years, Skyrim ruled all of northern Tamriel, including most of present-day High Rock, a deep stretch of the Nibenay Valley, and the whole of Morrowind. The Conquest of Morrowind was one of the epic clashes of the First Era, when ensued many a desperate contest between Nord and Dark Elf in the hills and glades of that dire kingdom, still recalled by the songs of the minstrels in the alehouses of Skyrim. The system of succession in the First Empire is worthy of note, as it proved in the end to be the Empire’s undoing. By the early years of the First Empire, Skyrim was already divided into Holds, then ruled by a patchwork of clan-heads, kings, and councils (or moots), all of which paid fealty to the King of Skyrim. During the exceptionally long reign of King Harald, who died at 108 years of age and outlived all but three of his sons, a Moot was created, made up of representatives from each Hold, to choose the next King from qualified members of the royal family. Over the years, the Moot became permanent and acquired an increasing amount of power; by the reign of King Borgas, the last of the Ysgramor dynasty, the Moot had become partisan and ineffective. Upon the murder of King Borgas by the Wild Hunt (see Aldmeri Dominion – Valenwood), the Moot’s failure to appoint the obvious and capable Jarl Hanse of Winterhold sparked the disastrous Skyrim War of Succession, during which Skyrim lost control of its territories in High Rock, Morrowind, and Cyrodiil, never to regain them. The war was finally concluded in 1E420 with the Pact of Chieftans; henceforth, the Moot was convened only when a King died without direct heirs, and it has fulfilled this more limited role admirably. It has only been called upon three times in the intervening millenia, and the Skyrim succession has never again been disputed on the field of battle. PGE: Skyrim

For at that time the Elves were as damned and near death as ever they had been during the great skirmishes of Solstheim. The Battle of the Moesring was to be the final stand between Nord and Elf on our fair island. Led by Ysgramor, we had driven the Elven scourge from Skyrim, and were intent on cleansing Solstheim of their kind as well. Our warriors, armed with the finest axes and swords Nord craftsmen could forge, cut great swaths through the enemy ranks. The slopes of the Moesring ran red with Elf blood. … It is common practice to burn the corpses of our fallen foes. This is as much a necessity as it is custom, for death brings with it disease and dread. Our chieftains wished to cleanse Solstheim of the Elven horde, in death as well as life. Fall of the Snow Prince

Children of Saarthal

Some victors and veterans of the campaign against the Falmer, after crushing their spine in Solstheim, banded together to continue to hunt them down individually, and in their small refugee groups. Continuing to search and destroy, they became a tacitly endorsed military order (mentioned in the holy canticle), making the lands safe for the ancient Nordic cult of the One.

The purpose of ethnic cleansing is to remove the conditions for potential and actual opposition, whether political, terrorist, guerrilla or military, by physically removing any potentially or actually hostile ethnic communities. Wikipedia

The Children of Saarthal is now a group of pure-blooded Nords descended from Aldmoran stock whose mission (greatly reduced since ancient times) is to hunt down all Falmer and destroy their works, and sustain belief in the One. They’ve had long enough, been granted enough resources (especially under the First Empire of Man based in Windhelm), and were thorough enough that no pureblood Falmer lives above ground, no Falmer ruin stands above ground, no obviously Falmer ruin entrance is visible in any reasonably accessible location, and the Temple of the One (partly) stands in the Imperial City. The Falmer Boundary Runes mentioned in the PGE annotation records a confession of the Night of Tears from the Falmer, dictated by the Children of Saarthal, so it’s actually a monument to their success.

Fallout Across Three Ages

Spreading out from the north, Ysgramor’s clan stretched its arms, proving that no ancient force was more fearsome than the Nords. In the 113th year of the First Era, the entirety of modern Skyrim was under the reign of King Harald, and still, it continued to expand. Leaving their snowy valleys and mountains, the Nords attacked the Dwemer of neighbouring Resdayn, the Altmer and Bretons of High Rock and lent aid to the rising slave rebellion in Cyrodiil which was to end the Ayleid rule of the south.

Ayleid to Alessian rule in Cyrodiil: The Last King of the Ayleids.

In the centuries that followed, Skyrim expanded and contracted as battles were won and lost. Though Cyrodiil was considered a separate domain, the Nords and the early Imperials formed a loose alliance against their elven opponents, their cultures mixing together, creating the foundations of modern day Aedric worship. Yet Skyrim remained the dominant human nation in Tamriel until it was torn apart by rivalries within the Ysgramor clan. As individual chieftains fought each other, Skyrim gradually lost her holdings in present day Morrowind and High Rock, and certain localities in Skyrim became independent kingdoms. For brief periods, one ruler has managed to unite all of Skyrim, but the Nord character is one essentially of conflict, and the confederacies never last. The Cyrodilic Empire and later the Septim Empire was able to take advantage of this tendency and recruit the warlike Nords to their side before they became a force of the opposition.

Not until the Third Era did merish scholars outside Skyrim begin seriously to reassess the achievements of the Aldmorans, recognizing the artistry, the technological skills and the seamanship. Until Tiber Septim’s reign in White-Gold Tower, Aldmorans were portrayed as the most violent and bloodthirsty of men: the chronicles of the Aldmeri Dominion had always portrayed them as rapacious ‘wolves among sheep’, compared to the compromised races of men who interbred with mer. Adapted Viking Age historical consideration of Lindisfarne

In the third era, if Cyrodiil has been the heart of the Empire, Skyrim has been its strong arm. The greatest threat to the Empire’s unity occured in the 120th year, when the so-called Wolf Queen of Solitude, Potema, aunt of the Empress Kintyra, launched a rebellion that became a blood civil war. Though it was eventually quelled, the repercussions are evident to this day. There is a strong underground movement called the Horme that believes Potema and her deposed son of Uriel III to be the last of Tiber Septim’s true blood and under that principle lead raids against Imperial interests in the province.

Under the Imperial Simulacrum of Jagar Tharn, cold animosities between the kingdoms of Skyrim and their neighbors in High Rock and Hammerfell were fanned into the fire of war. Upon the true Emperor’s return to his throne, this war ended, but not before Skyrim had reasserted itself on territory it had not held since the 1st Era.

The War of Bend’r-Mahk increased the territory that is considered Skyrim considerably, allowing the Nordic counts to swallow up many miles of eastern High Rock and Hammerfell. Resistance by the Bretons and the Redguards is feeble in the cities of Jehenna and Elinhir, and more active in the border zones of the countryside. The city-state of Dragonstar continues to be divided into western and eastern sections, walled off from one another, each with its own government, and each with an atmosphere of mistrust and fear. There are few days without an act of terror from one resistance group or another, though, so far little territory has changed hands since the days of the Imperial Simulacrum. PGE3: Skyrim

Late Merethic Era

From the UESP timeline.

The original First Era High Elven wizard towers along the coasts of Tamriel are also abandoned about this time. Pre-literate humans, the so-called “Nedic Peoples”, from the continent of Atmora (also ‘Altmora’ or ‘the Elder Wood’ in Aldmeris) migrate and settle in northern Tamriel. Nordic hero Ysgramor, leader of a great colonizing fleet to Tamriel, develops a runic transcription of Nordic speech based on Elvish principles, and is the first human historian. Ysgramor’s fleet lands at Hsaarik Head at the extreme northern tip of Skyrim’s Broken Cape. The Nords build there the legendary city of Saarthal. The Elves drive the Men away during the Night of Tears, but Ysgramor soon returns with his Five Hundred Companions.

Find a highly evolved (artificial ok) runic writing system whose pale shadows look like Nordic runes.  Tolkein’s Elvish words in Dwarven runes, or Dwarven speech if it’s elvish enough (not black speech).  If we have 500 or more runes, each rune can be a concept, and a collection of runes can tell a story like chinese characters.

Write excerpts from this text in this language, painfully and incompletely translated by a rosetta-stone like marker with P.Q. (Falmer) above and Old Norse (Atmorans taught by Falmer) below, to demonstrate the limited grasp and different view of the Nords.