/tes/ - The Elder Scrolls Discussion

Oh, only true riders from Rorikstead request that one.

I was just thinking about that one the other day. I had been assuming that it was an old, traditional song about events that had long faded into legend, but then I met the Rorik that founded Rorikstead, old but still alive.

The song refers to Rorikstead itself as old (and I've never found evidence of a previous Rorikstead), so the whole Ragnar the Red incident must have happened recently. This isn't a playful little song about made-up characters, it's a piece of current events in which different people take different sides on the accuracy of a murder accusation. Somebody might be in Cidhna Mine right now over the Rorikstead incident. Somebody might have been executed for it not long before they brought Roggvir to the block.

Bards are flexible on content. Win the civil war for the Stormcloaks and the bard in the Winking Skeever will switch, effortlessly, from a pro-Imperial version of Age of Aggression/Oppression to one that acknowledges Ulfric as the High King of Skyrim.

Never trust a bard. You are probably getting much more reliable information from books about past eras than from bards about past months.

>>5857
Bard's college supports that claim when you make up shit about Olaf One Eye.

>>5857
>Rorik that founded Rorikstead
That's bullshit. Rorikstead is a very old settlement, possibly from before the dragon war, as evident from a certain old document Farengar uses to translate dragon runes.

>>5857
I remember something written by MK talking about how Nords believe a good story is better than an accurate one, and how they often cannibalize legends from other cultures just because they like them.

>>5864
Reminder that Nords are the n'wahs of Nirn.

>>5862

This? http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Holdings_of_Jarl_Gjalund

So Rorik is full of shit (despite owning a lot of property in Rorikstead), or just re-settled the previous Rorikstead. Either way, this allows for Ragnar the Red's adventure to be myth or legend rather than recent history.

>>5875
You forgot option 3. He's the Rorik who founded Rorikstead way back when and the town is pulling some kind of time fuckery, which is why they not only have a shrine to Akatosh outside the town but why it has a dragon scale there even before Alduin starts raising dragons from the dead.

>>5882

Rorik says he fought for the Empire in the Great War against the Dominion, but maybe this is his coy way of indicating a different time period than most listeners would assume.

>>5884

I couldn't find a long-past war that made enough sense or a more recent one with enough connection to dragon times.

I also considered the possibility that the book is more recent than it appears. Maybe Gjalund's scribe had access to ancient tomb inscriptions or something, or someone was sent up to High Hrothgar to ask the Greybeards because Gjalund was a dragon weeb (the old gods in "the old gods and the new" might be dragons if Gjalund was a cultist).

However, the language seems to be archaic, and the discussion of taking part of the Reach from Reachmen is a much better fit for early Nord conquests than the recent Forsworn phenomenon. Also, if Gjalund was that recent, you'd expect people to mention him.

So the book is old and the stead is new. Rorikstead is built where Rorik's Steading was. "Old Rorikstead" specifies the previous town as opposed to the present one. The biggest hole in this is that Rorik never mentions that he was the town's namesake before it was named after him.

Or maybe by returning wounded from a war and buying land he mantled the original Rorik and blah blah blah patterns in history, craft spell, max damage, target self.

Lorefag bonus: my best candidate conflicts for an earlier Rorik were the Three Banners/Alliance War in the Second Era and – brace yourself – the Ayelids declaring imperial independence from Alinor at the start of the First Age. The term "Dominion" wouldn't have been used at the time, but is a reasonable way for a time capsule person to describe it to some rube wandering through Fourth Era Skyrim talking to everyone and picking woodcutters' pockets.

>>5882

The dragon scale doesn't prove much. The Atlas of Dragons establishes that some dragons may never have died. Mirmulnir bumps into a tree and sheds some scales, somebody finds them and takes them to the Akatosh shrine (because even an age without dragons has dragon iconography). We don't know what the shelf life of dragon scales is, probably a long time, and the influence of the Akatosh shrine might have preserved them as well.

>>5888
Better Lorefag Bonus:
Jarl Gjalund lists ancient nordic ruins as settlements so it definitely wasn't anything later than the first era.
The mentioning of "Old Gods and the New" implies this isn't much after the Nords gave up totem worship, or possibly slightly after.
The mentioning of Bromjunaar still being a settlement -but a dying one- heavily implies that the book was made a good amount of years before Shalidor created Labyrinthian (sometime around 1E 420)
Reachmen weren't discovered by the Nords till 1E 240, at the earliest. The line implying that the Reachmen, at this time, inhabited the Reach, implies this is after the Direnni Hegemony had removed Nordic influence from High Rock and began invading Nordic land (1E 401), as the Direnni then held the Western Reach, which was the actual native land of the Reachmen.
>inb4 bu…the Reachmen were in the Reach first tho

My educated guess would be that Holdings of Jarl Gjalund takes place around the year 1E 405.

>>5901
>or possibly slightly after……
Whoops, meant to write
or possibly slightly after Alessia created the Eight Divines

>>5901

Nice work. That rules out the 2E Three Banners War unless we want to go full time paradox.

Rorik's Steading isn't described as a new settlement as of 1E 405. At this point I'm thinking maybe it dates far back enough that the original Rorik was one of the original Companions.

>>5901
>Pocket Guide to the Empire
>not a tissue of lies

Septim plz go

>>5953
>dismissing everything in PGE1 as untrue.
>having any sympathy for the traditionalist reachmen whatsoever.
Take a long look at the Merethic Era Nordic ruins that the Forsworn use as strongholds, and then try to tell me the Reachmen were in the Reach first.
Even the University of Gwylim says that the Nords had not discovered Manmeri until the Skyrim Conquests.
http://www.imperial-library.info/content/frontier-conquest-and-accommodation

There's a simpler explanation. The song is about a strong independent shieldmaiden killing a man for bragging.

The person who wrote it doesn't know shit about the time scale or the lore, they're just an Thalmor shill who PCed and MUH DIVERSITYed their way forcefully into the design team and slapped this shit in gleefully.

>>6016
But the other explanations are less horrifying to contemplate.
>TES VI will be set in Hammerfell and will be about nothing but DA tier relationship fanfiction.