#ehlnofey

so let’s get down to basics by starting with square one: what are they and where’d they come from? i think it’s fairly well understood that they’re sort of the “half-elves” of the setting, despite looking nothing like elves, really. they’re the result of a bunch of nedes (a race of men probably from atmora who were especially populous in the deathlands, aka hammerfell) making their way into high rock and finding out some elves already lived there. 

those elves were altmers who’d found the adamantine tower (where convention took place, establishing linear time and also shooting lorkhan’s heart across tamriel) and kinda decided to settle around there, while basically the rest of the elves decided to go and make their own towers elsewhere. this clan of elves who stayed in high rock were known as clan direnni. it seems that with little conflict the nedes kinda just fell into a subservient role to the direnni in a strict feudal system, with the elves at the top and the nedes at the bottom.

part of this seemingly accidental arrangement (i’m not sure how i feel about the supposed “ease” with which the nedes were enslaved - ahem, “integrated”) was a particular privilege the direnni enjoyed: the “perquisite of coitus”. this kinda gross rule/law made it that any mer could at any time “engage in recreational intercourse” with any man (i’m using this term gender-neutrally) they wanted.

apparently the direnni didn’t know how protection worked or just didn’t care. see, in the tes universe, when two races can interbreed, the offspring always follows the race of the mother, with some traits from the father inherited. so we start seeing a bunch of biracial children result from this “perquisite”; those with elvish mothers seem to have all been integrated into the direnni society, whereas the ones with nedeish mothers are rejected by their elvish fathers. buuuuut these elvish-fathered nedes, due to having elvish blood, begin to be considered higher-classed than the rest of the nedes. they’re still rejected by the direnni, and at some point it seems the perquisite is canceled, but at that point there’s already a lot of nedes with elvish blood.

so over time, since they can’t mate with the elves anymore, the beratu, which is ehlnofex for “half,” begin to mate with the other, pure-blooded nedes. eventually, the nedes go extinct simply through this integration (as well as through war elsewhere, esp. in hammerfell w/ the ra gada), in a similar way to how we likely made neanderthals go extinct by interbreeding with them.

a more complicated feudal system then arose, where bloodlines and legacy become extremely important to high rock society. the direnni were at the top, then there was a spectrum of power from bretons (the eventual corruption of the ehlnofex beratu) with the most elvish blood being dukes and counts, to those with hardly any at all being serfs. eventually, the overzealous expansion of territory by the direnni overcame them, and they fell back to the isle of balfiera in the iliac bay. a bunch of nords flooded into the northern territories the direnni couldn’t hold anymore. 

but the bretons and their new feudal system went on just fine without them, and eventually they remained the dominant force in high rock, despite the nords from the north, the redguards from the south, and the orcs from orsinium. apparently, this wasn’t even done through war - it was done through trade, and also by further assimilating the nordic population.

okay, everything i’ve said so far is canon history stuff. you’re probably here for more interesting speculation, though. trust me, i just had to get this stuff out of the way for a bit of context.

so we know that the bretons are really magical b/c of their elvish heritage. we know they’re very sectarian, having had likely almost twenty (i couldn’t find an actual number, sorry) contesting kingdoms and city-states constantly squabbling over territory prior to the warp in the west, which brought us down to five. they’re also pretty big in the empire business, seeing as probably most of the emperors have been bretons, and high rock have always been avid supporters of the empire. (except maybe in the 4th era? i seem to remember them seceding, but i might’ve been thinking about hammerfell, b/c i can’t find anything about it.)

bretons worship basically the nine divines, but they also have a few other gods. they worship magnus, the guy who left mundus and didn’t bother to close the sun-shaped hole behind him; jephre, which is another name for y’ffre, which you can’t convince me isn’t pronounced “yiffer”; and phynaster, who uh, sounds important, but.....doesn’t seem important. (they also acknowledge sheor, aka “the bad man,” which was a way of the altmer demonizing the nords’ shor. there could possibly be breton cults devoted to him, but we just don’t know.)

magnus makes sense, seeing as he’s the god of magic and all. jephre though, he’s interesting. he/she was worshiped by the altmer and falmer as well, but he’s most notably worshiped by the bosmer. he’s the guy that started the green pact and all! BUT, even more notable than that: he’s not an aedra, or even just some ancestor spirit. he’s an earthbone! meaning that she completely sacrificed herself to create and stabilize nirn and the mundus.

but, you may ask, why’re the bretons so invested in him? they’re pretty distant from valenwood, and they were ruled by altmer, not bosmer! to which i say, well, the altmer worshiped him too! and you say oh. yeah, right. i forgot.

BUT that would be giving you the short answer. the better answer? they worship him b/c he’s right under their feet! the adamantine tower’s smack dab in the middle of high rock! that’s where convention happened, and the spirits who made nirn decided what to do about it! that’s where they got separated into aedra, daedra, magna-ge, ehlnofey, and earthbones. 

so, depending on how you interpret earthbones, or how they work or whatever, you could say y’ffre either became an earthbone in high rock, or is the earthbone of high rock. i’d argue against the latter, tho’, b/c he’s obviously the earthbone of valenwood, which i think most people will agree with. but....her influence definitely lingered in the place where she made that choice. especially considering that place was literally the first freakin’ tower, one of the pins holding up reality on nirn.

and this definitely has an influence on a lot of the things we know about high rock and the bretons. we know there’s a lot of magical creatures not found many other places in high rock, and we know that there are witches covens there, and we have a hint that there is some kind of group called the druids of galen.

okay, what? druids of galen? what’s that? oh, it’s fine if you don’t know, they’ve been mentioned literally only once in the entire series. when you pick to be a breton in the first game, arena, it mentions them. literally just name drops them and doesn’t elaborate. that’s not a lot to go off of, but that’s never stopped me before.

first, let’s get this out of the way: the whole “beratu” etymology is obviously just a retroactive excuse for the fact that they’re called bretons after the real-life bretons of northern france. the bretons were/are a celtic culture, in the same vein as the irish and scottish and welsh. and if you know anything about celtic cultures, you’ll know that they traditionally had people called druids, who were sort of like clerics or wizards (as in “wise-men,” not dumbledore), and are associated with the various stone circles in the british isles, like stonehenge. and, nowadays, thanks to a lot of fantasy stories of the past century or so, druids have come to be heavily associated with nature and magic associated with protecting nature and stuff.

so it’s fair to say that the “druids of galen” were probably modeled after that more contemporary concept of druids. then who the heck is galen? i reckon he was an elf or half-elf nede who somehow discovered or invented a kind of nature magic akin to that of the bosmer. the way i reckon it to have worked was that the trees they worshiped were somehow “connected” to the earthbones, probably through the roots. and then he started an order of druids to continue the practice.

what’s really interesting is the fact that this magic likely somehow manipulated or used the power of the earthbones. we have other canon examples of this kind of magic: the thuum of the nords, the tonal architecture of the dwemer, and i think also the spinners of the bosmer. this earthbone-magic is extremely potent, b/c the earthbones are a huge part of what lays down the laws of reality. if you can make them do what you want, either by yelling really hard, banging metal together, or telling weird stories, you possess REALLY great power. 

(and here’s something i just found out while writing this: apparently there’s another reference to the spinners in the eso crown store, which notes that “in high rock, [they’re called] the vicars of jephre”. which is just a really huge bonus for me!)

i think that the druids of galen were able to somehow tap into a similar power to the spinners through their nature worship. i once also suspected that this cult might’ve had political influence in getting rid of the direnni, but i’m not really sold on that anymore. it definitely seems, though, that by probably the 2nd era or so, the druids of galen were no more. (perhaps they or their remnants became the vicars of jephre, but i’m not sure if they hold the same power or recognition as they did as the druids. if they do, they likely are no longer able to tap into the power of the earth-bones, and are simply a religious cult to jephre.)

there’s also the witch wyrds, or covens, of high rock, which may also be descendants of galen’s traditions. there’s a few notable ones, such as the skeffington coven of phrygia (mentioned in the 2920 series), the beldama wyrd, who the book “the witch covens of northern high rock” outright claims to worship jephre as an ehlnofey and earthbone that established the laws of nature, and the glenmoril wyrd, most members of which having become hagravens. 

ok! part one! first of all, we got the aurbis. the aurbis is basically just, everything. it includes aetherius, mundus, oblivion, nirn, etc. it might also expand beyond aetherius? but i think that’s just The Void, so we won’t worry about that. nothing interesting really happens in The Void.

so what’s aetherius? it’s god city, god central, super mystical being heaven. it’s where various heavens are located, like the nords’ sovngarde, and the redguards’ far shores, and khajiit’s sand behind the stars, and the imperials, uh, less imaginatively named “heaven.” it’s where dead people of all kinds hang out, and chill with some gods, like the magna-ge, led by magnus, who all left mundus b/c they didn’t like it and chilled in aetherius instead. except they left a bunch of holes in mundus, like they just forgot to close the door behind them after they left or something. on the bright side, all those holes (which we call the sun and stars) give us the magicy magic stuff from aetherius, where everything is magic, probably.

ok, “magicy magic” is not what it’s called. it’s called creatia! it’s basically the substance of pure creation, what everything that ever existed is made of. except it needs to be given form and purpose to actually be Things. otherwise it’s just Stuff, not Things. basically the whole purpose of making the mundus inside of aetherius was to turn some Stuff into Things, b/c lorkhan thought it was a good idea and most people agreed at the time. 

so “mundus” is everything inside of aetherius, in like a bubble. (a lot of how this stuff works is bubble-based. aurbis is a bubble in the void, mundus is a bubble in aetherius, planets and planes and stuff are bubbles in mundus, etc.) but there’s actually a lot of empty space in the bubble, b/c at first they (here referring to the et’ada, or primordial spirits) couldn’t quite make up their mind on what world they wanted to make, so they made a bunch, but then scrapped all that and used some of the leftover pieces to make nirn. so at this point nirn’s just this little ball in space, not a lot going for it. not even an atmosphere! (fun fact: air just doesn’t exist in the elder scrolls! dunno why! just doesn’t!)

but then the et’ada get together and try to liven up the place. except they’re like, “woah, all this creating makes me feel like i’m dying,” b/c they kinda were. here’s the thing: everything’s made of creatia, even the gods. and y’know, equivalent exchange and all, so to make a World with Things in it, they had to use up some of their power. 

this was generally considered to be a bad thing, and lots of people got mad at lorkhan, who really just expected them to be more dedicated to this project. i really don’t think he intentionally tricked anybody. he just had an idea for a fun thing to do with/for his friends, getting enlightened and stuff, and maybe omitted some of those finer details at the beginning b/c he knew nobody would go along with it if they knew. but he wasn’t being malicious about it, no matter what those darned elves say.

so everybody got together on top of a big ol’ tower to talk this through, b/c it was time to buckle down and decide what to do now. that lil chat was called convention, and was basically the first important thing to ever happen. it was actually kind of the first thing to happen, too, b/c one of the members was like “hey, let’s make linear time a thing” and so it was. 

anyways, all those et’ada were sorta split five ways about this. some, like magnus and the magna-ge, just flat out refused to stick around and give up any of their power, and ran off and became stars. some, who would be later called daedra, didn’t wanna give up any power either, but they kinda had a vested interest in the thing at this point, so they went out into oblivion, where there was a bunch of leftover, unused creatia, and they made their own little planes and proceeded to screw with the world for funsies.

on the other hand, some folks were still gungho about making this world, and were willing to sacrifice themselves completely to let it survive and prosper. those would be the earthbones, who literally just gave up themselves and established a lot of nirn’s physical laws. some folks also thought this was worth saving, but also didn’t wanna die. so they gave up a little bit of their power, but kept the rest of it. those are the aedra!

(fun side note: the aedra are the other planets in mundus! we know at least akatosh, julianos, and arkay are stationary, b/c they make up part of some constellations. arkay has a little buddy orbiting him called arkay. there’s also the planets zenithar and kynareth, who might actually move, but we don’t know for sure, i guess. also, zenithar has a buddy orbiting him called mara, and MARA has a buddy orbiting her called dibella.

(what i really want to get at here is that while the planets are absolutely the divines, i believe it’s only part of them! hence why they’re kind of in the middle of the road between the earthbones and the magna-ge. i think they left those planets behind to sort of be their eyes-and-ears on nirn, and also probably to help stabilize it, but after that, they took what they had left back to aetherius. maybe through the sun, but also maybe the planets are sort of like, if they were peaking in on us from aetherius. so what we see as the planets is just what little of them is in the way of the hole. but anyways!)

the rest of the et’ada went a similar route to the earthbones, except they didn’t sacrifice anything really. they just kinda decided to live on nirn! they’re the ehlnofey, who eventually become the mer and men of nirn. (presumably all the beast races and stuff were just already there, or somehow imported from somewhere else [the argonians might literally be transplants from one of those leftover worldbits nirn was made from]).

ok, one last thing. i think nirn orbits the sun, so isn’t really the center of mundus. it’s the metaphysical center, b/c it’s what mundus exists for. but i just can’t wrap my head around how the sun would be said to rise through constellations during their seasons if nirn wasn’t moving around it and changing its perspective on the sun. maybe it’s possible somehow in a nirn-centric model, but i just don’t know how.

ok! that’s wraps up what i think about the cosmology of the series, i think. i’m actually going to make a separate post for the metaphysics, for two reasons. 1, this post has gotten long enough already, and 2, ho boy do i have a lot to talk about there. you might notice that it’ll probably be pretty different in tone - sure, i could describe all that stuff in my usual plucky sort of way, but this kinda stuff always just works out better when you take a bit more of a serious tone. i’ll undoubtedly get a bit poetic about it too, b/c it’s damn good stuff.