Turns Out The Dwemer Are Still Alive

hey how's it going guys it's nate here and the disappearance of the dwemer is quite possibly the greatest mystery in the history of the elder scrolls universe the dwemer or deep folk or dwarves as they're so often referred to were race of elves that built what was easily the most advanced and technologically impressive society the world had ever seen that spread across northern tamriel between the marithic and first eras thousands of years ago they created inventions eons ahead of their time developing robots mind-reading devices and even airships inventions that even today in 201 of the fourth era have never been replicated since notably the dwarves preferred to build their cities and fortresses underground affording them an extra level of secrecy and isolation from the races above the soil of course this magnificent society came to a very strange and abrupt end when out of the blue sometime in the first era they all just disappeared at once that's right every single dwemer just randomly vanished all at the same time and they were never heard from again now all that remains are the ruins of their ancient structures and some of their still humming machines the questions of what happened and where they all went are some of the most debated topics in the community if you're anything like me you probably always just assumed that those questions are totally without answers or clues and there's little investigation to be had however after literal years of studying elder scrolls games basically for a living at this point and reading all of the books and looking into some discoveries that have been made a bit more recently i can safely tell you that we actually know quite a lot more about what really happened to the dwarves than you probably think and the reality is that there were a lot of clues left behind and wherever they went the deep folk are almost definitely still alive in today's video what i would like to do is go over everything we know about the dwemer disappearance analyzing all of the pieces of evidence we have exploring the most likely theories and paying particular attention to some of the details other videos and discussions on this subject seem to look out as well as some of the incredible insight the elder scrolls online provides which almost always seems to get overlooked at the end of the day i'm certainly not going to promise we're going to solve this whole mystery but we'll be a lot closer than i ever thought possible and i think we'll understand the real question is where the dwarves went not if they're still out there and we'll have some good ideas on where so without any further ado let's do further and begin to figure out what the heck happened to the deep folk all right so i feel the best way to start this video is by describing the history of the dwarven civilization from the beginning all the way to their disappearance with an emphasis on what happened towards the end i know that might sound a bit tedious but it'll make sure that we're all on the same page going forward and give me the opportunity to point out some very critical details then once the history's done we'll delve into some specific pieces of evidence left behind in skyrim and eso and even more wind alright let's jump into it well starting with history the beginnings of the dwarven people are frankly just as mysterious as their conclusion we know for a fact that most of the various elven races have their origins in the summerset isles a pair of islands off of tamriel's southwestern coast way back in the early marathik era some of these elves migrated off of the somerset isles and began settling inland in tamriel these myrrh would then split off to become the wood elves and the dark elves and you get the idea a similar story is true for humans humans are really from the continents of atmora and yokuda and they too sail down here and split off and uh you get the picture well strangely despite the fact that the dwarves are definitely elves we have no verifiable information that suggests they too share a heritage in the somerset isles in fact it's said that as other elves were arriving in northern tamriel they found that the deep folk were already there and had beaten them to it so if that's the case what happened maybe the dwemer left the summerset isles before everyone else and before people started recording what was going on or perhaps they really come from a different continent likewise the snow elves who early in history inhabited modern day skyrim also share those mysterious origins we're not sure where those guys came from either another quality that made the deep folk unique among their fellow elves was the fact that they never worshipped any gods or participated in any religions at all while their fellow elves were praying to ariel and some daedric princes and the humans were pledging allegiance to shore and akatosh the dwemer worshiped no one it's not that they doubted the existence of the gods just that they didn't care all that much the dwemer knew the gods were real they just saw themselves as equals the way their society would progress was not through divine favors but their own mastery of the sciences it's also said that some dwarves believed they could ascend to a similar divine plain as the gods and quite literally become their equals that time another thing that distinguished the dwarves from all the other races at the time was their mastery of a concept we call tonal manipulation tonal manipulation is essentially the manipulation of the fabric of reality through sound or tones think of your player characters dragon shout that's not really magic it's tonal manipulation well the dwarves took that concept and used it to the extreme it's what would be responsible for most of their defining achievements through tonal manipulation they were able to construct and power robots it's how they were able to keep those airships powered and they'd even use sounds to hollow out entire caves to build new cities in tonal architects were those who were responsible for experimenting with sounds and trying to harness its power for a variety of new purposes these architects occupied an incredibly high status in dwarven society they would often advise powerful rulers and governments in many ways you can think of tonal architects as court wizards from skyrim and as you can probably guess by the amount of attention i'm giving this subject tonal manipulation is going to play a pretty big role in the dwemer disappearance later on or at least it probably will but i'm getting ahead of myself so the first dwarves we have record of inhabited modern day skyrim and morrowind and they were particularly well established in the velothi mountains a large mountain range that sits in between these two provinces importantly while all of our books say the dwarves inhabited this area or the dwarves were based out of here we're not really sure what dwemer society looked like as a political unit this early in history it's believed that they weren't just one giant dwarven kingdom all ruled by the same king but instead that the dwarven peoples were broken up into a number of divided tribes clans and city-states later on towards their disappearance we're definitely sure they were divided but from the beginning we're not even sure what it looked like nonetheless the first big event concerning the dwemer occurred towards the end of the marithic era when humans from the northern continent of atmora began sailing down to tamriel and specifically landing in skyrim normally the arrival of new neighbors wouldn't be much of an issue for the dwarves who lived thousands of feet below the earth and really had little reason to dispute with anybody however shortly after arriving in skyrim the humans started eradicating the population of snow elves who are already there and when i say eradicating i mean eradicating they were trying to kill every single snow elf or farmer they could find be it man woman or even child because of this horrifying extermination campaign the dwemer and snow elves struck a deal of sorts the deep folk agreed to let some snow elves hide in their cities where they would be protected in exchange for the elves agreeing to consume a strange fungus that would cause them to lose their eyesight now let's just pause the video right here because the dwarven bargain with the falmer is a pretty important topic of course as i'm sure you all know by the time the dwarves would eventually disappear thousands of years later the falmer would have devolved into the twisted goblin-like beings we know them as today and after the dwemer's eventual disappearance the former would still be down here still inhabiting their ruins many have long debated the reason why the dwemer agreed to this bargain why would they let the falmer take refuge in their cities and importantly why would they blind them it might be easy to assume that maybe the dwemer were just acting from a humanitarian standpoint they saw their elven friends getting slaughtered by the humans and just felt so bad so they wanted to help in any way they could however that's really not how the dwemer worked their entire society was defined on a lack of regard for their own emotions and complete commitment to progress they would not have accepted the folmer in just because it made them feel good there had to have been a deeper underlying reason maybe that reason was related to their disappearance and then why blind the snow elves why take away their eyesight one very popular theory suggests that what really happened was that the dwarves took in the folmer with the expectation that they would enslave them immediately thereafter the reason they blinded them was to make it more difficult for the farmer to ever rise up once they had been enslaved because you know being able to see is critical to fighting and indeed this is a pretty compelling narrative as there is a lot of evidence the dwarves did force the folmer to do a lot of labor but that said it's kind of weird right why would you blind the people you want to be working for you couldn't they have inhibited their abilities some other way maybe the dwarves were really trying to keep the snow elves from seeing something in particular or perhaps losing their eyesight was essential to an experiment the dwemer were doing on the falmer one possible clue can be found in calcelmo's laboratory in markarth calcelmo is a wizard living in the reach who serves the yarl by excavating a number of dwarven ruins and doing research on them in his personal laboratory calcelmo has an old dwarven tablet that has some sort of paragraph inscribed onto it in the dwemer language at first we didn't really know what this tablet said but thankfully some bethesda writers online translated it and turns out it's all about the dwemer accepting the falmer quote and so it was that your people were given passage to our steam gardens and the protections of our power many of your people had perished under the roaring snow-throated kings of mora and your wills were broken and we heard you and we sent our machines against your enemies to thereby take you under it almost seems that the author is suggesting the dwarves fought with the humans to help the snow elves out that's a little more than we initially believed it continues quote only by the grace of the dwemer did your culture survive and only by the 15 and 1 tones did your new lives begin we do not desire thanks for we do not believe in it we do not ask for gratitude for we do not believe in it we only ask you to accept the symbol of our bond the fruit of the stones around us and as your vision clouds as the darkness sets in fear not know only our mercy and the radiance of our affection which unbinds your bones to the earth before you and sets your final path to the music of your new eternity end quote okay whoa this was something else what were the 15 and one tones and what is this new eternity the paragraph seems to indicate the dwemer think they're sending the snow elves on it's almost as if the deep folk believed they were helping their brethren ascend to something enter a new plane of existence i'm just going to be honest and say at the end of the day we really don't know what was going on but if you want to put your tinfoil hats on for a second let me introduce you to a strange creature the wissmother i've talked about these fellows before they're ghost-like hovering female creatures that when approached will turn aggressive and summon a variety of wisps to attack you they'll also hurt the player using a number of frost-based spells whis mothers can be found across northern skyrim and in a few dwemer ruins take a good look at the wissmother character model many players believe that these creatures are really former snow wells maybe wiss mothers are a product of these dwemer experiments maybe these are an example of some successfully ascended folmer or something who knows nonetheless whatever was really going on within a few hundred years of the dwemer accepting the falmer into their cities the fulmer revolted and attempted to rise up against the dwarves this began a conflict known as the war of the crag and it would literally last over a thousand years up until the dwarves eventual disappearance yeah these people went hard at some point in time during this period of unrest the dwemer in modern day skyrim stumbled upon the great cave of blackreach and in it they discovered a new type of resource something called ethereum ethereum is a great blue glowing rock that evidently could be used to make a number of tools that could greatly assist the dwemer in tonal manipulation the difficulty with the ethereum they found in blackreach however was that none of the dwarves possessed furnaces hot enough for melting it down and forging it as a result numerous dwarven states all across skyrim joined forces into a small alliance of sorts and together they worked to build the largest hottest forge the world had ever seen so they could finally temper ethereum and eventually they succeeded sadly almost as quick as they developed the forge the alliance imploded in on itself as the varying dwarven tribes all tried to take control of the forge for themselves so they alone could control the ethereum supply this began another conflict called the ethereum wars and we don't really know how long it lasted or who the belligerents were but evidently it greatly weakened dwemer's society all over skyrim so much so that in the first era a nord king named geller was able to successfully conquer a few dwemer fortresses and cities in the region furthermore within the next couple hundred years the nords of skyrim formed what we call the first nordic empire and invaded and conquered the majority of high rock before beginning to invade modern day morrowind when they did this the various dwemer city-states and tribes that lived in morrowind united with their dark elven neighbors and formed a political entity known as the first council who together was able to repel the human invasion and take back some of the lost dwarven lands in skyrim or lost dwarven underground cities remember the dwarves weren't big on land now while this council did successfully fulfill some military objectives it's said that many dwemer tribes opposed uniting with the dark elves they thought themselves better and just couldn't overlook the cultural differences one of those fed up dwemer tribes was a clan known as the rorken whose leader decided it was finally time to leave the first council altogether he took his prized hammer and decided that he would throw it super high in the air and move his clan wherever it landed ultimately he threw his hammer and it landed in modern day hammerfell that's why we call that province hammerfell and he moved his tribe over there and the roarkin started living independently it's some time after the roar can split off that things start to get really really interesting and we can finally start talking about the events that led up to the dwarven disappearance now somewhere in the middle of the 700s of the first era the dwarves of the elder council discovered the heart of lorkhan buried beneath mount vardenfell for those of you who don't know the heart of lorcon is essentially one of if not the most powerful artifacts in the entire elder scrolls universe to this day we're not quite sure of everything it was capable of but when the dwarves found it they hid it and started experimenting with it keep in mind the first council was a coalition of both dark elves and deep elves so when the dark elves finally found out that the dwemer had the heart of lorcan and were working on it in secret they were obviously a little bit concerned and they were right to be afraid because it turns out one of the dwarven tonal architects a man named kagrenac was specifically intending to use the heart of lorkhan to allow him to create his own entire god that would serve the interests of the dwemer and the dwemer alone alas soon enough the dark elves learned of that too and the entire first council just collapsed in on itself in civil war as the dunmer desperately attempted to stop kagernak and the dwarves plans long story short after a few months of fighting the dwarves and dark elves finally geared up for one final battle at the red mountain both amassed all of their armies together and prepared to finish the thing in a single engagement and in the middle of that battle all of a sudden is when the dwarves just completely disappeared and vanished off the face of the planet they would never be seen again well alright that's dwarven history from you but what things can we pick up from all of this well for one it seems very likely that the heart of lorcon was in some way involved in the disappearance of the dwemer in fact many players believe that while the battle was going on above ground kakrenak may have done something to the heart of lorkhan that triggered the disappearance at the same time maybe he was hammering away or something like that furthermore it's very important to point out that even the rorken dwarves all the way out in hammerfell who weren't even a part of the first council anymore they disappeared too so that interaction didn't just affect one or two dwarven states it affected all of them well almost all of them you see in the elder scrolls 3 morrowind we can meet a character named yagram bagarn he is according to himself the last living dwarf on earth yagrim is old sickly and dying of a plague called the blight however he'll offer the player an incredible amount of insight on his own perspective from the dwarven disappearance you see he was able to avoid the fate of his peers because at the time everyone vanished yagram was on a different plane of reality meaning he was possibly somewhere in oblivion or aetherius alas when he came back he just saw all of his old friends gone apparently mr bagarn spent the next few thousand years searching for answers digging up old ruins and using all kinds of magical and tonal techniques to extend his own life sadly though he's found absolutely nothing when pressed jagram begorne will express his own theory that kagernak was also attempting to leverage the heart of lorkhan to grant the dwemer race infinite life bergaard suspects that kagrenac might have succeeded but with unforeseen consequences and perhaps caused all of his fellow people to be teleported somewhere in oblivion or somewhere else if this is true that would be huge it would mean that the dwarves aren't gone they've just been displaced somewhere we can't find them yet though jagram also admits it's entirely possible all of his people were killed as well he's just as clueless as we are unfortunately now beyond what i've just mentioned this dwarf doesn't have a whole lot to say regarding his people however the idea that the dwarves were teleported somewhere in oblivion is one that has even more substantiation than just his old testimony do you remember the story of the rorken clan who threw their hammer in the air and moved to hammerfell after that's where it landed well that hammer they threw was a specific tool named volundrung and it's a daedric artifact in the elder scrolls iv and the elder scrolls v daedric as in this great dwarven item belongs to the princes of oblivion now how did that happen and it's not actually just volandrong it's so many other old dwarven artifacts for example if we complete his quest in skyrim the daedric god of pestilence perryite will grant us the shield spellbreaker well as it turns out spellbreaker is actually first mentioned as being a shield the dwarves deployed during the battle of the red mountain how is it these gods are getting those artifacts furthermore during the events of the elder scrolls v skyrim in the town of morthal we can meet a man named failion who is an expert in all things conjurine and oblivion phthalian claims that he's been to oblivion before in some undescribed planes and while there he says he met and spoke with a dwarf i know many things i have studied things beyond the reach of most humans traveled the oblivion plains seen things one should not see i have met daedra and dwemer and everything in between and i know enough to see a vampire where others would see a man unfortunately the man doesn't elaborate much further on the encounter and were unsure if he was speaking just to some random one-off dwarf that might have survived the disappearance like yagarn or maybe that dwemer represented a much larger population oh and who can forget in skyrim and eso there are a number of conjuration spells the player can use that will allow them to summon a dwarven machine as a companion for a brief period of time this is very significant because in the elder scrolls universe conjuration magic isn't about just summoning and manifesting things out of thin air no the way conjuration works in the elder scrolls is you're really just plucking something from oblivion and popping it up back in the mortal realm so in order for you to have possibly been able to conjure up a dwarven sphere there must have been one in oblivion waiting for you now there's also another big theory this one coming from a former bethesda game studios writer named michael kirkbride whom left bethesda after the completion of the older scrolls 3 morrowind but continued to write fanfiction lore on his own blogs and other websites again as always with michael kirkbride or any former bethesda game studios employee anything they write after leaving the studio should technically be considered fan fiction but again their perspectives are always important because it gives us an idea on what the studio actually might have been thinking in some of kirk bride's own writings he's proposed that the dwarves didn't all die or anything like that that instead they became the quote-unquote skin of the new god kagernak was creating and after the disappearance they were really just slingshotted tens of thousands of years into the future to a time so far ahead none of their advanced technologies were necessarily advanced anymore and in the elder scrolls online we do learn that the dwemer were experimenting with manipulating the space-time continuum as we have to help disable a faulty tonal resonator that's causing items from all over space and history to teleport in black reach whatever the case it seems very very likely that the dwarves are still somewhere in reality just not on our dimension maybe the whole reason the dwemer took in the snow elves in the first place was so that they could have someone to test this teleportation technology on first maybe that's how westmothers specifically were created they're elves that got meshed between dimensions or something like that oh yeah and how could i not mention arnie l gaine arnel gaine is a professor at skyrim's college of winterhold who will offer the player a number of side quests related to an experiment he's conducting on the dwarven disappearance you see mr again is trying to replicate the event that led to the dwarven vanishing on a very very micro scale he believes that if he can succeed he'll figure out what really happened i apologize if i have not been clear about my work i didn't want to discuss it for fear this moment might never come everyone knows the dwarves disappeared no one knows why this little experiment is a first step in recreating the events of their disappearance in an effort to unravel that mystery lacking the heart of a dead god i'm substituting the crystal you helped craft in its place alas after we get him all the tools he needs and arniel attempts the experiment it goes horribly wrong and he just outright vanishes altogether presumably he vanished to the same place the other dwarves went however we can't be sure funnily enough after the completion of this quest we'll get a new conjuration spell that allows us to summon the shade of arniel gain and bring his shade into reality as a companion for 60 seconds strangely we're not too sure what shades actually are in the elder scrolls universe like if they're a piece of someone's soul or relevant to their identity in some way the only other shade we can summon like this is the spirit of lucien lachance who apparently is coming from the void perhaps that's where arniel is too or maybe he's somewhere else now here's the real kicker the arniel's shade spell costs zero magicka to cast instead it's time restricted meaning it doesn't seem like we're conjuring up arniel's shade with magic but instead some other energy perhaps tonal manipulation maybe arniel really did strike exactly what the dwemer did and maybe if we can use tones to summon arniel's shade we could do the same thing with the dwemer no matter despite this boatload of evidence at the end of the day it's unclear what actually did happen to the deep folk whether they were simply displaced somewhere else in time or space or if they really did actually just disintegrate into nothingness frankly while i think bethesda is definitely hinting towards the displacion theory i would bet we'll probably never get a definitive answer to this question the reason is todd howard's been on record saying before he kind of likes having mysteries in games just cause take a listen to this quote quote i think mysteries in a game are all good like i said people want to know truth but even my perspective is one version of the truth of what happened in the history of the elder scrolls and so forth i would tamper the fans desire to have old mysteries revealed because mysteries are good for a fantasy world to see what's beyond the ocean would you do a game in akavir these are things we have thought a lot about i could sit here and tell you lots about akavir actually one of the original skyrim designs had characters from that continent returning with an army of dragons but it was sort of like nah keep the mysterious lands mysterious there's enough to do in tamriel proper as time goes on i like to have those elements of mystery or really strange things that you can't wrap your head around end quote so there you go it seems even bethesda's head honchos are very well aware of the significance of this strange mystery and ultimately they don't seem very interested in ever giving us a firm answer well it is with such a depressing conclusion we are going to wrap up thanks so much for stopping by everybody what do you think happened to the deep folk do you think they were displaced in time space maybe do you think they all just died at once leave a comment down below as always like ratings are very much appreciated again thanks for watching and hope to catch you all in my next video peace out everyone

Channel: TheEpicNate315

Views: 2,268,547

Rating: 4.8586411 out of 5

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Id: 8XNlA888PCI

Length: 31min 36sec (1896 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Gundam_Ranch_Dip]

Ah I didn’t watch but i was thinking about the Dwemer being embodied in the crystals you usually find in their robots

[u/Kyloren1923]

I tried to watch this, but annoying YouTube voice syndrome strikes again.