Today on Written in Uncertainty, we’re discussing some things that have been central to the Elder Scrolls and also kind of on the edge, objects containing immense knowledge that can leave reads entirely clueless. Things that are potentially beyond the gods of Mundus themselves. Today we’re asking, what actually ARE the Elder Scrolls?
Note: There are a few bits in the podcast recording that I talk through that aren’t in this write-up, particularly about the Elder Scrolls and the Mnemoli. Maybe one is a form of the other? I’d recommend listening to that from the links above to get the full picture.
Elder Scrolls In Brief
The Elder Scrolls are basically scrolls that are made up of… something… that are used to tell the future by the Cult of the Ancestor Moth. They are entirely indeterminate, and show different things to different readers. They also gradually render the reader blind, although there are suggestions that this is dependent on the level of knowledge of the reader at the time, and if you’re particularly incautious it will strike you blind on a single reading.
Perhaps most interestingly, The Pension of the Ancestor Moth notes that “These writings exceed even the gods, both aedra and daedra,” although several other texts claim that the Aedra created them, calling them “the Aedric Prophecies”. The common consensus in the fandom is that they are things beyond the gods that created Mundus. However, the text says nothing about this in relation to the Magna Ge, and Magnus in particular.
Elder Scrolls IRL
The Elder Scrolls were, in this world, simply a tagline to make Arena sound more fantasy RPGish. I’m not sure the developers had anything particularly in mind when they put the tagline into Arena, but the first mention we have of the Scrolls as things that exist in the universe of the franchise is a brief mention in The Wolf Queen series of books. This then got changed from a special kind of document to ones that specifically were connected to prophecy in The Elder Scrolls III, and very heavily expanded on and connected to the Cult of the Ancestor Moth in The Elder Scrolls IV. So one thing to bear in mind, and we’ll come back to it a little later, is that the games’ use of the term predates their appearance in lore, so far as I can tell.
Elder Scrolls Origins
One popular theory that you’ll see is that the Elder Scrolls are “blueprints” of creation, created by Magnus. This is kind of backed up by Paarthurnax’s dialogue in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, where he calls them “fragments of creation”. The rest, from what I’ve seen, is pieced together from some of Michael Kirkbride’s forum posts, where he says this, initially in response to comments about what’s going on with lots of musical references in The Elder Scrolls. To quote:
There are repeats in it; plays on a tune. Variations. And most likely Magnus? (He’s the one that made the fucker, and now that’s why he looks back on it, every single day, that’s his promise.
“When you wake up, I will still listen. I’m sorry I left, but hey, I’m still right up here. And my mnemoli? They show up every now and then, and collect all the songs you’ve made since the last time around. The last real moment.”
The Mnemoli? They’re the keepers of the Elder Scrolls. They cannot be fixed until seen. And they cannot be seen until a moment. And you, your hero, makes that moment.
Going on that idea, Elder Scrolls are less blueprints and more recording devices, that hint at futures and then “resolve” or something, then uploading their contents of the Elder Scrolls to… somewhere, during a dragon break.
That might explain their behaviour during dragon breaks; that is, that the Scrolls cannot be read during dragon breaks, and do not record events that happen during them. The text Where Were You When the Dragon Broke? says that, to quote:
Even the Elder Scrolls do not mention [the Middle Dawn] — let me correct myself, the Elder Scrolls cannot mention it. When the Moth priests attune the Scrolls to the timeless time their glyphs always disappear.
So, if the Elder Scrolls are recording devices, they are “switched off”, so to speak, during dragon breaks. This passage also has some interesting implications that we’ll get to later.
I’ve also seen it suggested that the Scrolls are parts of previous kalpas, or of raw creation, which the Leaper Demon King stashed away from the Alduin in the Seven Fights of the Aldudagga. I like the way that feels, but there’s not an awful lot to suggest that it is the case, simply because the Aldudagga is such a self-contained text. Also, if the Scrolls were parts of a previous creation, why do they show the future?
Properties of the Elder Scrolls
Elder Scrolls and Prophecy
While in their unresolved state, the Scrolls can potentially provide prophecies, although in its modern usage that word is perhaps a little too certain. Speaking about the Elder Scrolls, Moth Sister Terran Arminus says this:
The Scrolls tell of our future because they are woven into that future—as well the present, and the past, and every other aspect of this reality we call the Mundus. It is a mistake to think that events prophesized in the Scrolls are fixed and unchangeable; again and again we in the Order of the Ancestor Moth have seen the prophecies alter as the future changes in response to the acts of mortals.
We have a transcription that is potentially taken from an Elder Scroll in The Book of the Dragonborn, which says this:
When misrule takes its place at the eight corners of the world
When the Brass Tower walks and Time is reshaped
When the thrice-blessed fail and the Red Tower trembles
When the Dragonborn Ruler loses his throne, and the White Tower falls
When the Snow Tower lies sundered, kingless, bleeding
The World-Eater wakes, and the Wheel turns upon the Last Dragonborn.
While we can’t know for sure that this is an Elder Scroll, because it could also be an Akaviri prophecy, I think it’s instructive. It says precisely nothing about what’s going to happen in terms of concrete events. It’s vague, and is essentially one big if-then statement, phrased as “when”. If all these events take place, then the World-Eater will wake, and something about the Last Dragonborn.
Elder Scrolls and Perspectives
Whatever they are, the Elder Scrolls are also some of the most enigmatic objects on Nirn in terms of their properties as well. To start with, we’re given this fantastic line from Urag gro-Shub:
“[An Elder Scroll is] a reflection of all possible futures and all possible pasts. Each reader sees different reflections through different lenses, and may come away with a different reading. But at the same time, all of it is true. Even the falsehoods. Especially the falsehoods.”
Which, apart from possibly being a sneaky reference to Star Trek, spells out what several other texts echo; that each reader will read something different from the Scrolls. This means that it’s not simply the if-then statements above, but whatever the reader can pull out of the milieu, which can rather squish people’s brains.
I also think Urag’s statement needs elaborating a bit. Reading the scrolls is variously described as “a glimpse of infinity”, and that they “offer a view of Time itself”. Essentially like a 2D being trying to comprehend a 3D reality. I kind of imagine it like Donnie Darko’s vision, where he starts to track people’s movement through time as well as space. Remember that both Where Were You When the Dragon Broke and Terran Arminus’ words suggest a connection to the fabric of time itself. The Scrolls do not necessarily make sense entirely within a bounded moment-by-moment context, because a large part of their existence happens throughout time.
The reason that Moth Priests can read the Scrolls so effectively is because the moths give them an inkling of that extra-dimensional perspective, by carrying the spirits of the ancestors, which exist throughout time and can see things the way the Scrolls tell them. We have this description from The Distributed Soul:
On release from life on Nirn, it is our belief that a kind of dissipation begins, and it is then that the moths learn the song of a soul’s fjyrons, which are shepherded under our care and protected generation after generation.
The fjyrons themselves must retain a connection to the grand fabric of creation, to the scattered soul-remnants in all their destinations. Through this link and with patient care, we receive guidance from beyond the present or past and the known world, where time is irrelevant. The moths do not capture or devour the souls of the ancestors, but only repeat to us what they’ve filtered, like a chorus repeating the verses of a grand song.
From listening to those different songs, the Moth Priests can start to understand, or try to understand, time from the perspective of the Scrolls.
Quite how the Scrolls get that perspective of time is unclear; it may be that it’s something to do with the way creation unfolded. MK notes that Ada-Mantia, which was formed to cement reality and mortality, is like a scroll-case. Possibly it was the thing that contained all the possible realities from the time before Mundus and Lorkhan’s punishment? I’m not sure…
The Elder Scrolls’ Contents
Exactly what they express and how they express it seems very weird to me. I’ll take a couple of passages from An Accounting of the Elder Scrolls, which is the story of one not-yet-Moth Priest trying to get to grips with what the Scrolls are. To quote from when he was trying to catalogue the Scrolls:
Day by day, we went through the tower halls, with them telling me the general nature of each Elder Scroll so that I might record its location.
From this, it seems clear that each Elder Scroll is “about” something, in fairly general terms. The names the Scrolls get given in The Elder Scrolls V seem to back this up: one is the Dragon Scroll, one is the Blood Scroll and so on. However, there is this little quote that throws a spanner in the works near the end. It’s this:
“Did I not tell you,” he coughed, “when you started this that all efforts would be futile? The Scrolls do not exist in countable form.”
They don’t exist in countable form, and yet scrolls about specific topics can be found reliably. I’m not entirely sure how to reconcile the idea of topicality with an actually infinite set of objects. To translate that; actual infinities are sets that, when some of their members are removed from them, remain infinite. This is different from a potentially infinite set, which is where a process (like, say, “add one to the previous number”) never ends.
If the Elder Scrolls are an actually infinite totality, then any Scroll could potentially represent any topic, because the entire set would remain the same when some of them are removed. Unless the “countable form” referenced above is different to a list of topics, and so if you took enough topic-based Scrolls away, then you would have an actually infinite number of objects that only represent a finite number of topics? I don’t know here. If anyone has any more insights on set theory and how it could resolve this dilemma, I’d love to hear it.
Another element that makes me think of the Scrolls as a potentially infinite set, rather than an actually infinite set, is that they eventually resolve. According to the text Lost Histories of Tamriel:
Once a prophesy [sic] contained in an Elder Scroll is enacted in Tamriel, the text of the parchment becomes fixed. All readers ingest the same divine message. It becomes an historical document declaring the unequivocal truth of a past event.
That ties individual scrolls somewhere to individual events, rather than simply having vague topics that they can give insight on. Backing this up, the Moth Priest Dexion Evictus’ dialogue mentions “the Elder Scroll that speaks of dragons”, which suggests that other Scrolls don’t speak of dragons. However, is that the Scroll that speaks of dragons, and none of all the other Scrolls mention them? If that’s the case, then how can it ever resolve to become the “unequivocal truth” the Lost Histories mentions, until nothing of Dragons remains?
There is a large part of me that thinks these paradoxes are possibly intentional on the part of Bethesda, or if not they are entirely appropriate to the nature of the Scrolls.
In addition to being maddeningly in flux all the time, the Scrolls may have a will of their own. Evictus mentions that part of the role of the Moth Priests in the Fourth Era is to find Elder Scrolls, which scattered from their usual home of the Imperial Library in 4E 175, when the Imperial City was sacked and the White-Gold Concordat was signed. It’s an off-the-cuff remark, and we don’t know who or what moved them, but there’s the possibility floated around the fandom that the Scrolls removed themselves for some reason. That would imply that they have some sort of collective will of their own. Quite why or how that is… we don’t know.
The Elder Scrolls & The Games
The Scrolls are typically seen as expressing the moment of a game, with Zurin Arctus’ quote framing it, being “Each Event is preceded by Prophecy. But without the Hero, there is no Event.” The Prophecy in this case being seen as the Elder Scrolls, although we don’t necessarily have a Scroll that we know of that addresses each game. The only one that we do have is The Elder Scrolls V. The other games don’t have prophecies tied to them explicitly, but the above quote can be taken to imply that they are somewhere. Morrowind and Oblivion do show up as books in the opening cinematic of The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard, but they’re not necessarily Elder Scrolls per se, although my memory there is a little foggy.
It’s also been taken as written by fans and developers that things are this way. Michael Kirkbride said this on the forums:
Until a prophecy is fulfilled, the true contents of an Elder Scoll [sic] are malleable, hazy, uncertain. Only by the Hero’s action does it become True. The Hero is literally the scribe of the next Elder Scroll, the one in which the prophecy has been fulfilled into a fixed point, negating its precursor.
The Hero is the scribe of the Scroll because they determine what it says, and what the final contents of the Scroll will be, through their actions.
We’ve also seen the Scrolls in the games since TES IV: Oblivion. And… they’ve really screwed with our understanding of the Scrolls, if I’m honest. In Oblivion, the Grey Fox uses an Elder Scroll to free himself from the curse of the Grey Cowl. and states that the Scroll still needs to be “translated”. The Scroll in question is a complete Scroll, but why we would need translation seems a little vague. It is also stated that history has been altered by the revelation of the truth using the Scroll, which implies that even inert scrolls have some form of power.
The Elder Scrolls V pulls some other stuff with the Scrolls, too. The main quest shows that the ancient Nord heroes use an Elder Scroll to send Alduin forward in time, which means that you can tap the power of the Scrolls to accomplish things, somehow. Maybe something related to the Scroll’s contents in this case. Maybe the resolution of part of the Scroll’s prophecy, as it relates to Alduin? I don’t know for sure, but it feels like, from a narrative or game design point of view, the Elder Scroll just gets used as a plot device without any real thought on how to integrate such important things into the overall narrative.
It also gets used in the Dawnguard storyline to provide insight into where to find Auriel’s Bow when read by the Last Dragonborn. It provides unequivocal information, despite the Scroll not being resolved at the time of the reading.
I’m not a fan of how these have been handled; the Scrolls are simply used to resolve storylines, without explaining precisely how they fit into what we understand the Scrolls to be able to do. They haven’t been shown to have power beyond explaining the future, but we have multiple instances here of the Scrolls being able to influence both the past and future, potentially while the Scrolls have been fulfilled.
In Dawnguard, we also have Vythur somehow creating a prophecy that is present in not one but three different Elder Scrolls. Again, we have no indication of how he was able to do this. We can only assume that it means the Elder Scrolls can be manipulated somehow into giving a particular result. And manipulated remotely at that.
I’ll be honest, I really don’t like this as a development of the Elder Scrolls as artefacts. They are apparently beyond the gods themselves, but can somehow be fiddled with by an elf in a hole somewhere, with little explanation as to how it was done. It’s the lack of explanation that is the thing; I would love to be able to reconcile the Scrolls’ use in the games with the rest of their lore at large, but I can’t do so. Their use in Oblivion is understandable, but the effects don’t make sense to me. Their use in Skyrim is just… strange. It makes them into self-fulfilling prophecies. Literally.
Apologies for that being more opinionated than usual for this section. I just… can’t reconcile it. I can’t explain why the Scrolls act the way they do in the games.
One other thing that I’ve seen is that the Scrolls are not only part of the games, but that they are the games themselves. I thought I first saw this at the Metaphysics of Morrowind series in the Falling Awkwardly blog, but on a re-read, they have a slightly different take to me. This is a fourth wall-breaking set of ideas, so bear with me.
I think the Scrolls may be the games themselves. Think about it; the Scrolls contain potential and unresolved events, that are made solid by the actions of a Hero. The actions of the Hero are determined by the player of the game, which makes the Scroll an unalterable record of the past events, the game. Not quite totally unchangeable, but you get the idea. Also, if you play computer games too much, they’ll probably make you blind, or at least damage your eyesight.
There’s a more on-the-nose interpretation that u/Ginger_Ninja has talked about on here. The base game files for Elder Scrolls games are .esm files, which are master files that the games run from. Each game and DLC has a .esm file. Ginger has called these Elder Scrolls Manuscript files, with plugin files that mods run off, .esp files, as Elder Scrolls Pages. This fits the nature of Elder Scrolls themselves quite neatly; the basis of programming languages is a series of if-thens, which is what the Elder Scrolls produce, in effect. So, if you look at it a particular way, the Scrolls can definitely be seen as the games themselves.
There’s also been some comment made by a Bethesda developer, not sure who, that Bethesda actually have an Elder Scroll in their basement, which is how they make the games. However, it’s not an entirely complete Elder Scroll, it’s a little broken in some way. That’s why we don’t have games that are totally representative of the lore, as well as being used as part of the “transcription error” reason for the jungles of Cyrodiil being forests in Oblivion. The transcription error wasn’t just an in-universe thing, it was Bethesda transcribing their Elder Scroll wrong.
And that little piece of ambiguity concludes our look at the Elder Scrolls. They are mysterious things that exist throughout the whole fabric of time, and are rendered into certainty by the acts of heroes making the future by their actions. They are also a hot mess of bizarre plot devices, and amusing nods to the nature of the games as games. They are a bunch of different things, but remain fascinating objects in the lore. I do hope you’ve enjoyed this ramble through them with me.
Next time, we’ll be looking at one of the most dangerous things you can do on Tamriel, asking, why worship the Daedra?
Until then, this podcast remains a letter written in uncertainty.
