Turns Out This Skyrim Mystery Was Bigger Than We Thought

hey how's it going guys it's nate here and welcome back to another elder scrolls investigation so let me just start off by saying that the foamer are quite possibly one of the most well-written and fascinating characters in the franchise well they may seem like just generic evil fantasy monsters that happen to inhabit some caves the reality is that bethesda's riders gave these guys an insane amount of backstory and put them at the center of one of skyrim's biggest mysteries which we're going to try to solve today you see during the events of the elder scrolls 5 the falmer are a pretty terrible looking type of enemy that live beneath skyrim in various old dungeons and tunnels they're extremely primitive and hostile to non-folmer and they're even known to creep out to the surface world at night and kidnap random travelers whom they take back to their homes and often eat that's disgusting the thing is they weren't always this way the falmer used to be and i guess technically still are a race of elf indeed farmer translates to snow elf or iself depending on who you ask back in the day thousands of years ago the snow elves were an incredibly sophisticated people and they had an actual civilization with cities towns and forts spread across modern day skyrim the folmer had their own laws customs traditions a written language all of the things that would characterize an advanced society not only that they weren't nearly as ugly they used to be tall less slimy had eyes as well as full heads of hair everything changed though when the dwemer did something to them i'll provide a more detailed explanation later but basically there was an event that caused most of the early snow elves to die and the survivors of this event all ultimately got rounded up by the dwarves who took them to their underground cities down here the dwemer slowly over the course of around a thousand years fed the falmer a diet that partially caused them to devolve into what they are today though they were also doing some sort of experiment with their souls and there's good reason to believe some snow elves were even detached from their souls and turned into ghost-like wisps more on that later now the dwarves eventually just disappeared in the mid-first era and the snow elves finally gained their freedom again though no one in their right mind would call these things elves anymore no longer did they resemble the intelligent majestic folk of the past they had been so mutated and driven mad that they appear more animal than person fast forward to the present day and the fulmer have spread across skyrim's underground network of tunnels and they've become something of an urban legend to the locals so as you can imagine what exactly the dwarves did to these poor pointy eared myrrh that turned them this way and especially why they did it are two questions the community can't stop asking even today in 2020 more than 8 years after the elder scrolls 5 released players are still making new discoveries and bethesda has greatly expanded upon the mystery with the elder scrolls online in this video we're going to put all of the existing pieces of information we have together with the aim of once and for all finding out the truth i'll start off by providing an overview of what the snow elves were originally like and their history leading up to when they were changed this will ensure everyone's caught up on the mystery's premise as well as give me the opportunity to point out some key details it's also just a pretty cool story after we're all up to speed on the history we'll dive into certain clues that the developers left in skyrim and specific suggestions that seem to have been made we'll start to develop a few theories and ideas here and once we've dug through everything we can then move into exploring the elder scrolls online's clues and related revelations which are arguably more important than the elder scrolls fives but we'll get there eventually when all said and done we'll combine what we've learned from the history with the implications of these two games and notice how everything points to a specific conclusion anyway enough monologuing ladies and gentlemen without any further ado let's do further and try to figure out what the heck the dwarves did to the falmer alrighty so as promised we're starting with history because the snow elven people were virtually exterminated and their closest neighbors the dwarves have disappeared there's a lot of missing information here and most of what we do know about the early folmer comes from nordic folklore poems and songs which for obvious reasons probably contain some bias and should be taken lightly that all said the snow elves likely emerged as a distinct people sometime in the early marethic era the marethic era or elven era as it can be translated to was a period of time that began around seven to ten thousand years prior to the events of skyrim when the first alps left the summerset isles and began settling modern mainland tamriel well at first all of the elves belonged to the same race the aldmer as their people started spreading across the continent they began to develop distinct characteristics cultures and biological traits thus the elves who settled tamriel's southwestern forests became the wood elves or bosmer and the elves that set up in modern day cyrodiil became the heartland elves or the ayleids and the snow elves eventually asserted themselves in skyrim because again everything eventually got burned down we know very little about how the fulmer organized their society and were governed we are sure they worshipped a variant of the traditional elven pantheon considering ariel the elven god of time to be their chief deity and the snow elves definitely had large cities and sophisticated urban metropolises but the nords would do such a good job of destroying everything we're not sure where all of those cities exactly were old journals tell us that there was one in the rift where in modern day fort greenwall exists and another somewhere in fall grief but that's about all we know for sure notably at the same time the snow elves had established themselves all across skyrim's surface another elven race called the deep elves or dwemer had established themselves beneath skyrim the dwemer inhabited massive underground cities and forts all across northern tamriel and their people's biggest priority was to better their own understanding of the world and basically learn to this day no group has ever come even close to matching the deep elves technological achievements while everybody else was using bows and arrows and lighting fires with sticks they already had giant robots machines that would do their work and intricate power systems well not really power in the same way we think of it but look at the idea because the dwarves were living underground and very rarely left there really wasn't much interaction between them and the snow elves at all they probably barely paid attention to each other and each just did their own thing for a while this was the status quo and the falmer civilization thrived for centuries under period of peace and tranquility things started to change though when humans began arriving on skyrim shores towards the latter half of the marathik era these early men were sailing down from a landmass called atmora that was believed to be the birthplace of humanity sadly there are no surviving maps of what atmora looked like and nobody's been there in thousands of years apparently while it used to be habitable something changed that caused it to get so unimaginably cold that it's impossible to get close to without freezing to death no matter how many layers you're wearing it's implied that the reason men might have been leaving at mora and coming to skyrim during this time period all those years ago was cooling temperatures yet we're far from 100 confident in that explanation nonetheless nord folklore tells us that the human migration lasted hundreds of years and at first despite settling the same region as the snow elves here in skyrim relations were peaceful and even friendly at some point though the atmorans started overstaying their welcome and the farmer grew resentful their anger built up and up until one fateful night under the cover of darkness and snow a bitter snow elven army crept up upon a human settlement called sarthal and launched a surprise attack our sources agree that sarthal was apparently the quote-unquote capital of mankind and skyrim and their most populated city which is why it was targeted the inhabitants were caught totally off guard and had proven unable to mount any effective resistance thus what followed was less of a battle and more of a slaughter not a single human would survive this tragic evening well that's not entirely true one man named ysgramor and his two sons were able to somehow escape the chaos when it was happening and they fled back across the northern seas to amora where the family would plot their vengeance the elves didn't know it yet but by destroying sarthal they had initiated a chain of events that would lead to the collapse of their own civilization so after ysgramor fled sarthal and made it to amora he let all of his fellow humans know about the horrible things the elves did in tamriel and was able to assemble a large fleet as well as an army of 500 elite warriors that were supposedly the best of the best with this force at his back yisgramor and his sons set sail to return to skyrim and this time they would be the ones doing the attacking the exact details of the military campaign that followed have been lost to history but ysgramor and his men apparently landed right around where winterhold sits in the present day and they just started defeating folmer army after falmer army there was another battle in modern day east march that was also evidently pretty catastrophic for the murrah and presumably there were a bunch of other battles that have since been forgotten what we do know is that the elves eventually ran out of soldiers and at that point ysgramor's force then split up and just started burning the now defenseless cities legend has it that ye scrub more and his commanders all ended up swearing an oath to exterminate to the snow wells and they took that vow seriously every single snow wealth the atmorans found was killed man woman child elderly it didn't matter no one was innocent in the atmoran's eyes with all of their armies gone and their cities falling one by one the falmer were facing the very real possibility of extinction and likely really regretting that decision to attack sorthall by now it's at this moment against the backdrop of certain doom for the snow wells that the dwemer finally entered the equation all this time as the nords have been invading skyrim in sieging city after city the dwemer had just sort of stayed out of things and kept to themselves when you live thousands of feet underground i guess you can choose to stay out of surface dweller conflicts nonetheless the dwarves offered the desperate falmer a deal they couldn't refuse they'd allow the snow elves to take refuge in their subterranean cities where the nords wouldn't be able to hurt them and their safety could be guaranteed under the condition that the elves agreed to consume a strange fungus that would blind them and may or may not have had some other side effects the poor elves were essentially being offered the ability to continue living in exchange for their ability to see that's gotta be tough various historians tell us that eating the fungus wasn't a one-time thing either apparently the dwemer would end up feeding it to the snow elves they took in constantly and any still elven babies would also end up chowing down on the stuff this was obviously a rather creepy thing the falmer were being asked to do but they didn't have a choice this was the only alternative to their death and while some groups of elves took longer to come around than others most did sooner or later those who said no would almost all fall victim to the nord armies anyway over the next 1000 years the dwemer continued to devolve the falmer further and further as each new generation of elf babies came out more and more twisted and they were continuously fed the fungus they were also of course never allowed to leave now eventually after around a thousand years in 700 of the first era the entire dwarven race just mysteriously vanished all at once for an unknown reason and the falmer were essentially free once again though by now they were totally unrecognizable and were more animal than myrrh as time went on the creatures would slowly take control of many dwarven ruins and expand into other caves and tunnels across skyrim and well here we are that's the status quo to this day congratulations now we're all caught up with history so the big question remains why did the dwarves do this to the elves what were they trying to gain well the general consensus amongst historians is that the deep folk had enslaved the falmer and were using them to perform manual labor various authors speculate that perhaps the dwarves had blinded and devolved the creatures so as to make them less likely or able to revolt and fight against their masters now while this is definitely the most popular consensus amongst the elder scrolls as writers it doesn't hold up when you think about it i mean why would the dwarves need slaves they already have armies of robots at their disposal whenever they need labor performed and even if they did enslave the falmer blinding and deforming them would make them considerably less effective workers surely there were better ways to prevent an uprising like just i don't know keep them away from weapons well no matter now that we're finally done with the history portion of this video let's jump into the clues we can uncover in the elder scrolls 5 skyrim and see what explanation they point to spoiler alert slavery they weren't enslaved i'm just going to spoil that now okay there's a lot we're going to need to talk about in this game but i suppose we should definitely start with the big things we learned from the dawnguard dlc while dawnguard's quest line was mostly about a jockey for power between men and vampires a considerable portion of it sent us to a location called the forgotten vale deep in skyrim's far northwestern mountains it's here we in fact get our first chance ever to meet an actual genuine untransformed snow elf his name is knight paladin gullibor and he may very well be the last of his kind and thankfully he is very talkative he confirms a lot of the history i mentioned earlier but apparently this place the forgotten vale was once home to a great snow elven monastery dedicated to ariel and thanks to its very strategic concealed location in said mountains it was actually never discovered by the nords and the few hundred or so snow elves who lived here were able to secretly survive unchanged while all of their brethren were being taken by the dwemer the night paladin says the veil was able to survive over 2 000 years after the nord conquest wow ironically though when the dwarves did finally disappear and the twisted falmer they had manufactured were finally free the creatures attacked and overran the forgotten veil destroying what may have been the last bastion of the original civilization yeah the change to falmer came here and attacked what might have been the last of their pure brethren geleborg doesn't tell us why but apparently he was able to survive thanks to arielle's blessings and he's remained here protecting the chapel for centuries and plans to continue to do so until his death interestingly we can ask him for more information on what happened to his people and the paladin will state that he's a bit skeptical the fungus the dwemer supposedly fed the folmer was enough to induce such a radical transformation and he suspects something more may have been at play i've often asked myself that very same question the blinding of my race was supposedly accomplished with a toxin certainly not enough to devolve them into the sad and twisted beings they've become now believe it or not despite dawnguard spending a good bit of time in the forgotten veil there's not much more elven history here i could mention that would reveal anything new so we should move on to the rest of skyrim but before we do that there's one more thing i want to point out paladin gullibora the last of his kind has a black soul why does that matter well in the elder scrolls 5 every single living creature we encounter will have one of six soul sizes as a general rule of thumb which you should take with a grain of salt the less intelligent a creature is the smaller soul size you can expect them to have importantly and i can't stress it enough that's just a rule of thumb nonetheless black souls are again the biggest of the six possible souls and they're carried by all humans elves khajiits and argonians basically all characters that belong to the six playable races have black souls or at least they should okay so why do i care if paladin gellibora has a black soul he's an intelligent snow elf shouldn't he have one well yes but the thing is none of the transformed folimer have black souls themselves their soul sizes tend to be lesser souls which are the second smallest in the game and usually found on animals like wolves or really stupid cows this seems to suggest that whatever it was the dwemer were doing to these guys was more than just biological it shrunk their very souls perhaps with all of that fungus and over the thousand years of time as the falmer went madder and madder and devolved and evolved their souls just shrunk with them or perhaps the dwarves were doing something more than just using the fungus as paladin gelibor implied just keep all of that information in mind for now let's move on and see what other clues skyrim has to offer the next thing i'd like to turn your attention to are wismothers so if you're a fan of the channel and have been watching for a while you may have been waiting for me to say this as i've brought up the wissmother falmer connection in previous videos wismothers or a spectral ghost-like bean that can be found in skyrim's northern regions and i'll just spoil things right now they are definitely linked to the snow elves like without a doubt not only does skyrim have an abundance of evidence to suggest this that i'm about to go over but when we talk about the elder scrolls online later you'll see it's all but confirmed immediately their appearance is a dead giveaway they look distinctly elf like with pointy ears and sharp eyelids though don't get too close as they are very hostile and use a variety of frost-based spells if you're not convinced by their appearances though then take a trip to some of the places where they're guaranteed to spawn in as mothers can be found in a number of dwarven ruins right alongside the changed volmer blackreach archatham's ingothemd just to name a couple frankly this is all the proof i need to consider the connection solid but just in case you're still on the fence bethesda threw in a smoking gun it's inside frostmere crypt an ancient nord ruin in the pale here at the end of the dungeon you'll find its final boss a unique named wissmother called the pale lady at first this woman might seem like just another generic final dungeon boss she offers no unique dialogue or anything like that she's just like all the other wisp mothers however there's a book in the elder scrolls 5 called lost legends that we can purchase at various merchants or just find in various homes across the world lost legends essentially is a compilation of various myths and urban legends the people of skyrim have told each other throughout history one of the legends it mentions is about the pale lady i'll just read the entire entry to you quote for generations the people of morthol have told whispered tales of the pale lady a ghostly woman who wanders the northern marshes forever seeking her lost daughter some say she steals children who wander astray others that are sobbing whale strikes dead all those who hear it but behind these tales may lie a kernel of truth for ancient records speak of umriel a mysterious figure yeastgrimore's heirs battled for decades and finally sealed away end quote according to lost legends the pale lady's name may have been umriel which is distinctly alvin and just like all the snow elves did she even got into conflicts with yeast grimoire and his heirs yeah these wisp mothers definitely have snow elephant origins oh and you know what there's actually another thing i know i said the pale lady was the smoking gun but um i just found this one writing the video wisp wrappings are something wiss mothers will drop upon being defeated in battle they're an alchemical ingredient that can be applied to potions and they can help restore stamina fortify destruction fortify carry weight and resist magic interestingly very high level falmer like the changed goblin falmer guys can have a two percent chance of dropping wisp wrappings when they've been defeated alright so there you go i think we can safely say beyond any reasonable doubt whis mothers have snow elven origins but what exactly are wissmothers well i think it's best we hold off on trying to answer this question at the moment as once we start investigating eso we'll find more wisp mother related lore that will be very very enlightening for now there's one last thing i'd like to show you in skyrim cal selmo's stone rubbing this too is something i brought up before on the channel but essentially in the city of markarth which itself is made out of the remnants of an old dwarven ruin we can meet a man named calcelmo this elderly altmer man is a professional dwarven researcher he's paid by the yarl to locate various dwemer related artifacts and learn as much as he can about the civilization which honestly sounds like a pretty cool job we can ask him all kinds of questions about the early dwarven society and he'll happily talk on and on though much like night pellet and gelavora not much of what he says is especially new information and it's stuff we could have learned somewhere else the big thing about him though is what we can find in his room as in calcelmo's personal quarters players can discover a gigantic tablet with all sorts of strange writing on it what it all says is supposed to be a bit of a mystery not even calcelmo himself knows and there are no quests in the game that reveal the answers to us thankfully a bethesda game studios writer actually translated everything for us and posted it online turns out the script was written in a combination of both dwarven and ancient fulmery languages some of which were lost which is why nobody was able to understand it no matter i'll just read the translation for you quote and so it was that your people were given passage to our steam gardens and the protections of our power and mathematics 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 ok so this seems to be the dwarves describing how they save the snow elves and it seems the intended audience is also snow elves 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 request you partake in the symbol of our bond the fruit of the stones around us we only want you to accept them 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 and sets your final path to the music of your new eternity end quote all right full stop before we start analyzing this can i just say what a power move it was by the dwarves to blind the snow elves and then write them a bunch of paragraphs like come on that's hilarious i guess you could say the dwemer threw all kinds of shade at their guests huh get it because they also made them blood i'm sorry now for the most part while the stone rubbing is clearly describing the dwemer's transformation of the folmer it's a little too vague to give us any new or enlightening information at least it's too vague on its own let's take a look at a certain phrase in the final stanza which reads quote know only our mercy and the radiance of our affection which unbinds your bones to the earth before and sets your final path to the music of your new eternity the idea of the dwemer unbinding bones to the earth before is a concept we've seen somewhere else let's finally enter the elder scrolls online because this game featured a certain book titled the hanging gardens of wastin cordial this book was apparently written by a dwarf thousands of years ago before their disappearance it's incredibly old and because it was originally written in dwarven the translation is very jumbled furthermore over the thousands of years apparently pages of this book have been lost so really all that remains are just a bunch of misplaced random paragraphs that don't seem to make much sense with the context we're missing nonetheless the dwarf who wrote this was apparently making a travel guide to a place called wastin cordial because the text is so short just thanks to all the missing pieces i'll be able to read the entire thing to you and tell me if you notice any familiar themes the first paragraph starts with the word guide altmer estreal led with foot flames for the town center where lay dead the quadrangular gardens the next paragraph reads asked the foundations and chains and vessels their naming places the next paragraph reads why they did not use sound to teach escape from the earth bones nor nourished them with frozen flames what earth bones the last paragraph just says the word i shall once written of this art our lesser cousins speak of when their admirable ignorance end quote that's it that's the entire text for you and you can tell how jumbled and mixed up it is so much of the original work is lost that it's impossible to make full sense of but that middle paragraph that says why they did not use solid sound to teach escape from the earth bones sounds very very similar to the unbinding of the falmer's bones from the earth that the dwemer tablet referenced in skyrim okay what the heck is going on what are these bones the dwarves talk about so much and why are they trying to escape slash unbind themselves from them well to answer that question you need to understand how the dwarves believe the earth and mortal universe was created you see the dwemer believed before there was anything before there were planets or people any of that stuff millions of years ago all there really was was a plane of existence called aetherius that was inhabited by thousands and thousands of gods one of those gods was particularly powerful and charismatic his name was lorkhan lorkhan rallied a bunch of the gods together and convinced them to build a new plane of existence that would become the mortal realm thus this is how our universe or mundus was created over time they were able to create the planets and specifically our world of nirn eventually though many of the gods realized that their own power was being drained as they were working on this project they realized that by creating the mortal realm they were becoming weaker and weaker once they figured this out many of the gods just got up and fled right back to aetherius in a rush this is how the stars were created they ripped holes in space and time to do so not all of the gods were strong enough to return home however some had become so weak they were trapped in the mortal realm some of these trapped gods would go on to create and be the ancestors of all life in the world including the elves others however gave themselves up and became the earth bones the earth bones are the mortal realm's natural limitations and rules that keep everything together and hold reality in check they're the reason why two plus two can't equal fish or why gravity doesn't work backwards do bear in mind that little history lesson i just provided was very very much not all encompassing i left a lot of things out like auriel or what the gods did to lorkhan when they found out they were getting weaker that was definitely supposed to be taken with a grain of salt all i wanted to do was illustrate what the earth bones are but no matter what this means is that in the present era when the dwemer are talking about escaping from the earth bones or unbinding the falmer from them they mean escaping the limitations of the mortal realm created by the ancient gods that must have been what they wanted for the elves but how would they escape these limitations and why would they want to do so well the hanging gardens of wasting cardial explicitly mentions using solid sound to teach escape from the earth bones this makes perfect sense because the dwemer were experts at something called tonal manipulation or using sound and tones to manipulate the very fabric of reality and indeed total manipulation is how the dwarves did essentially everything they were known for it's how they powered their great machines built their massive tunnels it's what made their society so advanced they were the best at it and the deep folks seemed convinced they could have leveraged this power of theirs to escape the earth bones and their limitations additionally as i already suggested eso gives us a bit more information about wissmothers as the creatures appear in a number of dwarven ruins and even in black reach but they're not called wissmothers instead they're called lost souls oh and in both eso and skyrim west mothers have a distinct chime to them that you can hear when they're nearby you a tone if you will here's what i believe i believe the reason the dwemer took in the falmer wasn't to enslave them but to take them to a new dimension to give them the powers to escape the limitations of the mortal realm the dwemer had always wanted to escape the world themselves though the plan they had was too dangerous to test on their own population so they got the falmer instead they didn't feed them a fungus or anything that was just a myth it never happened what they really did was played them the song and along the way something went horribly horribly wrong the souls of the snow elves were broken in some capacity some were shrunken and some were apparently lost and became wismothers the dwemer had failed in their experiment and one thousand years later when they disappeared perhaps they failed again on their own population or maybe they got it right that time thus the transformation of the snow elves wasn't done by sinister intent just a terrible terrible accident and the deep folk ultimately had good intentions nonetheless 35 minutes into this video and with my hypothesis finally fully delivered we are going to wrap up thanks so much for stopping by everybody what do you think happened to the folmer do you think they were victims of an experiment gone wrong or do you think it was something else 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: 753,697

Rating: 4.9144955 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: C110FrdV_Z8

Length: 35min 51sec (2151 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 07 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Michael_mahan]

Didn't the Falmer stay indoors for to long.

[u/gmacka03]

Are you Nate or are you just sharing one of his videos?.

I haven’t watched this one but have probably watched over 100 of them

[u/ijarkkoh]

dwemer turned them blind then when they stayd underground for too long they de evolved

[u/Skoorim]

TL;DW?