Of the Aldmer: the Elder Folk and the First Inheritance

Depictions of the Aldmer are now extremely rare. This representation of Orgnum, the Undying God-King of the Maormer, one of the oldest descending lineages, is considered to be close to their appearance.

'Some et'Ada had to marry and make children just to last. Each generation was weaker than the last, and soon there were Aldmer.' — Heart of the World, author unknown

Table of Contents

On the Name

Aldmer is an Aldmeris word meaning, with deceptive simplicity, "elder folk" or "first folk". The name is the work of the Aldmer themselves, which is fitting, since every surviving record of the race comes to us through their descendants and their descendants' scribes. No rival tradition has been preserved long enough to offer an alternative.

The name serves three purposes at once, and the reader should hold all three in mind. First, it is genealogical: the Aldmer are the elders of every mer race that walks Nirn today, and the word marks that priority. Second, it is theological: the Aldmer are the closest in lineage to the et'Ada who bound themselves to flesh at the end of the Dawn, and "elder" gestures toward that divine inheritance. Third, it is elegiac: by the time the word Aldmer came into common use, the Aldmer were already a people whose greatness lay behind them, and the name carries, for those who speak it carefully, the note of something that has been lost.

Origins

The Aldmer descend from the Ehlnofey, the diminished spirits who endured the closing of the Dawn by binding themselves to flesh and continuing their existence through lineage. Of the several Ehlnofey lineages that arose in the earliest ages of Nirn, the Aldmer are those who followed Auri-El, the soul of the soul of Anu and the first among the Aedra, through the sacrifices of creation and into the long war that followed.

The full account of their origin belongs to two earlier entries in this chronicle: the Shaping of Nirn, which treats the division of the Ehlnofey into their several kindreds, and the War of the First World, which treats their first conflict and the settlement that closed it. What follows here summarises only what is needed to place the Aldmer in their own story.

In the oldest usage, Aldmer named the entire following of Auri-El: a people whose divinity was much diminished from that of their et'Ada ancestors, but who retained a clearer memory of their origin than any other Ehlnofex lineage. They built their first kingdom at Altmora, also called the Elder Wood, in the north of the mythical Isle of Aldmeris. It was at Altmora that the first full flowering of Aldmeri culture took place, and it is of Altmora that the oldest elven laments sing.

Altmora did not last. In the course of the War of the First World, it fell to the armies of Lorkhan, and the Aldmer were driven south and east to the borders of Old Ehlnofey, where they at last made common cause with the Old Ehlnofey within the walls and held the line until the Convention ended the war.

The Aldmer as a People

Of what the Aldmer were like as a people, the sources are both copious and frustrating. Copious, because every mer race descended from them has preserved some memory, genuine or imagined, of Aldmeri virtue. Frustrating, because each of these descendant peoples has shaped its memory to flatter itself, and no two accounts agree on more than the broadest points.

What can be said with some confidence is this. The Aldmer were long-lived, even by the standards of the elves who came after them, and their sense of time reflected that long life: they built as though every work of their hands would last forever, and they planned as though every decision would bear its consequences a thousand years hence. This is not a flattering description in every context. A people that plans in millennia can be patient and wise, but it can also be pitiless, and the Aldmer were remembered as both.

They were a people of inheritance. Every Aldmer took their place in a lineage that reached back, without a single break, to the spirits of the Dawn. Ancestor worship, in the strict sense, was not a feature of Aldmeri religion: it was the substrate on which every other feature of their religion rested. To speak to one's ancestors was not, for an Aldmer, a figure of speech. It was the ordinary conduct of a conversation with the nearer end of a chain whose farther end was divine.

They were a people of craft. The Aldmer did not make a sharp distinction between magic and the other arts. A loom and a summoning-circle were, to their way of thinking, two instances of the same activity: the careful arrangement of materials and intentions such that the result would be more than the sum of its parts. It is from this cast of mind that the disciplines later ages would call alchemy, conjuration, enchantment, and mysticism descend. None of these were separate disciplines in Aldmeri hands. They were all one art, and the art had no name, because the Aldmer had no reason to distinguish it from simply doing things carefully.

They were, finally, a people of stoicism. The Aldmer understood themselves as the survivors of a catastrophe: not the War of the First World, which came later, but the original closing of the Dawn, in which their ancestors had been forced to trade divinity for endurance. Every Aldmer knew that they were less than the spirits they had descended from, and the knowledge did not leave them. It shaped their bearing, their ceremonies, and above all their melancholy. The joy of an Aldmer was a joy taken in full awareness of what had been lost to make the joy possible. Their descendants would inherit this temper in varying degrees, but none would ever quite lose it.

Aldmeri Civilisations

The civilisation of the Aldmer took shape in two distinct kingdoms, both raised on the continent of Aldmeris. The two were largely contemporaries, not successors, and they did not always know much of one another.

Altmora, the Elder Wood

Altmora was the kingdom of the Aldmer proper: those Auri-Ehlnofey who had followed Auri-El through the closing of the Dawn and inherited his leadership afterwards. It stood in the north of Aldmeris, and it was raised in the first full flowering of the race's power.

The sources describe Altmora as a wooded land, vast and bright, where the Aldmer built cities that rose in terraces along the flanks of ancient trees. The name Elder Wood is literal: Altmora was named for its forests, which were said to be older than the shape of the world around them, and to remember, in the set of their roots, the time that preceded the Dawn Era. The laments speak of "the shining trees" and "the high towers where the dead were interred", but these are phrases whose specific referents are long lost.

Altmora was an outward-facing kingdom in a way the other was not. Its clans traded, travelled, and built relations with the scattered Ehlnofey beyond Aldmeris's borders, and its arts (chief among them the work of the Direnni Clan in reagents and calling) required a steady commerce of materials from abroad. It is this outward orientation, more than any specific policy, that explains why Altmora was the first of the two kingdoms to fall when the war came.

After Altmora's fall and the long aftermath of the Convention, the continent of Aldmeris passed out of elven hands and into the memory of men. The men who later inhabited it knew only the name of the kingdom they had destroyed, not the name of the continent that had held it, and in time they came to call the whole land Altmora after the ruin at its northern end. Further corruption produced the form Atmora, by which the continent is known in every human source, and under which it enters the later history of men. The reader should keep in mind that Atmora and Altmora are, strictly speaking, not the same thing: Altmora was a kingdom, Atmora is what later peoples made of the continent that once held it.

The Kingdom of Old Ehlnofey

The second kingdom was raised by the Old Ehlnofey: a people who had not followed Auri-El and who regarded themselves, with some justice, as the purest and oldest of the Ehlnofex lineages. The name of their kingdom has not survived. It was presumably well known at the time of its founding, but no Aldmeri source preserves it, and the people who built it have themselves been called by the name of their state for so long that their original self-designation is irrecoverable. Both the people and their kingdom are now known simply as Old Ehlnofey, a usage that, while untidy, has the weight of several thousand years of scholarship behind it.

The Old Ehlnofey chose isolation where the Aldmer chose engagement. Their kingdom was walled, fortified, and inward-turned, and for the whole of its existence before the war it held itself apart from the affairs of the world beyond its borders. This was not indolence. It was, by the lights of its builders, a programme: the Old Ehlnofey believed that the Ehlnofex inheritance could only be preserved by being kept still, and that any engagement with the outside world would inevitably dilute what their ancestors had paid so much to leave them. The strongest memory of the Dawn, within Aldmeris, was kept behind those walls.

Little else can be said of the kingdom's interior. The Old Ehlnofey did not write for outside readers, and the few accounts that survive come from the Aldmer who entered the walls during the closing years of the war and found a civilisation that struck them as both familiar and strange: familiar in the forms of its rituals, strange in the rigidity with which those forms had been preserved. The merger of the two peoples in the aftermath of the Convention produced the single elven population from which the Altmer and every subsequent mer race would descend, and by the opening of the Daedric Era the distinction between Aldmer and Old Ehlnofey had ceased to be a living one.

The Clans of the Aldmer

The Aldmer were not a single undifferentiated people. From the earliest generations they were organised into clans, each tracing its lineage to a particular spirit of the Dawn and each cultivating a particular set of arts. The clan system was not rigid, intermarriage was common, and a mer could belong to more than one clan by the accident of birth, but it was the basic unit of Aldmeri society, and it outlived the Aldmer themselves.

Most of the clans of the Dawn have passed out of memory. A handful are still named in the sources. Of these the most important, for the purposes of this chronicle, is the Direnni Clan, who began as merchants and ended as the chief lieutenants of Auri-El in the War of the First World. After the Convention, the Direnni took up the keeping of Ada-Mantia, which their banner gave a second name: the Direnni Tower, by which it is still known.

Other clans are mentioned in passing in the Aldmeri laments and the Crystal Tower tapestries, but little is known of them beyond their names. The reader should bear in mind that the clan structure described here is the structure of a people whose greatness lay behind them even at the time it is recorded: the clans of the full Aldmeri civilisation, at its height in Altmora and Aldmeris, were almost certainly more numerous and more various than anything the surviving sources preserve.

Religion

The religion of the Aldmer is the ancestor of almost every organised religion in the elven world, and many beyond it. Its central and unifying feature is the distinction between Aedra and Daedra, a distinction the Aldmer themselves introduced and which has never been surpassed as a framework for thinking about the et'Ada. The terms are Aldmeris words, and their meanings, "our ancestors" and "not our ancestors" respectively, encode the whole of Aldmeri theology in two phrases.

To worship, for an Aldmer, was to remember. The Aedra were ancestors in the strictest genealogical sense: to offer veneration to Auri-El or to Y'ffre was to offer it to the nearer end of a chain of descent whose farther end was oneself. The Daedra were not ancestors, and the Aldmer did not worship them, though they acknowledged their existence and, at need, negotiated with them. This distinction between worship and negotiation would later be lost by many of the Aldmer's descendants, who came to venerate Daedric Princes as patrons. The Aldmer themselves would have regarded such veneration as a category error.

The chief of the Aldmeri Aedra was Auri-El, the soul of the soul of Anu and the dragon god of time. He was not merely the first god; he was the god who had bound time itself around the world, and every measurable thing within Aldmeri civilisation: the turning of seasons, the keeping of calendars, the succession of generations were understood as a gift, or a consequence, of his sacrifice. To honour Auri-El was to honour the very possibility of a story having a beginning and an end.

Alongside Auri-El the Aldmer honoured a great many other Aedra, of whom the most important were Y'ffre, the Earthbone who became the laws of nature; Magnus, the architect of Mundus whose flight tore the sun; Mara, the mother-goddess of love and compact; Xen, the god of honest labour; and Trinimac, Auri-El's greatest champion, whose later transformation into Malacath would shatter one lineage of Aldmeri descendants into a wholly new people.

Descent

The Aldmer are, directly or indirectly, the ancestors of every mer race that walks Nirn. The principal lines of descent are as follows. Each receives its own entry in this chronicle, and only the genealogical facts are given here.

The Altmer, the High Elves, are the direct and most conservative descendants of the Aldmer. They regard themselves as the continuation of the Aldmeri line in its purest form, and their culture preserves more of the old forms than any of the other descendant races. It is from the Altmer that every other surviving line of mer diverges: each branch is, so to speak, an Altmeri line that has departed from its ancestral form at some point in its history.

The Dwemer, the Deep Elves, departed from the ancestral form earliest and most radically. They took Mehrunes Dagon as their patron in an act that their Aldmeri ancestors would have regarded as theologically incoherent, and turned their arts toward the mastery of matter rather than the memory of spirit.

The Bosmer, the Wood Elves, withdrew into the forests and took Mephala as their patron. The Aldmer regarded them, with some justice, as having abandoned the ancestral project rather than continued it.

The Chimer departed from the ancestral form later and for reasons more principled than most. Under the leadership of the Triumvirate, they rejected both the Aedra and the Daedra as objects of worship, and built their civilisation around three mortal sorcerer-kings instead. The transformation of the Chimer into the Dunmer, treated in the entry on the Elven Wars, is a separate matter.

The followers of Trinimac suffered the strangest fate of all. When Trinimac was transformed into Malacath, his people were transformed with him, and became the Orsimer, the orcs. Their relationship to their Aldmeri origin is disputed even among themselves.

A number of lesser mer lines like the Maormer of the distant seas, the Falmer of the far north, the lost clans whose names appear only in the Crystal Tower tapestries, also descend from the Aldmer, but their histories are not essential to the narrative of this chronicle.

Auridon: the Cerulean Pilgrimage