On the Division of History

The history of Nirn, insofar as it can be reckoned at all, is divided into four great eras. The divisions are not arbitrary, but they are also not as clean as later scholarship has sometimes pretended. Each era is defined by the kind of beings who held power within it, and each ends when that power passes, by war or by withdrawal, to the hands that will shape the age to come.

The reader should bear in mind that dates before the Founding of Eglarest are approximate at best, and that the earliest figures are gestures toward a great span rather than measured counts. Time itself was unstable in the oldest ages, and was kept differently by every people that kept it at all.

The Dawn Era

Roughly sixty thousand to thirty thousand years before present.

The Dawn Era is the age of the gods and of the making of the world. It opens before time itself, with the Birth of the et'Ada from the interplay of Anu and Padomay, and it closes with the War of the First World and the Convention that ended it.

It is in this era that the Aedra pour themselves into the making of Mundus, that Lorkhan is judged and his heart torn from his body, and that the first Tower is raised at Ada-Mantia to fix the laws of creation into their permanent shape. By the close of the Dawn, the Aedra have withdrawn from Nirn, the Ehlnofey have scattered into the lineages from which all mortal life will descend, and the world has been given over to its inheritors.

The Daedric Era

Roughly thirty thousand to ten thousand years before present.

With the Aedra withdrawn from Mundus, the Daedra took their turn at playing gods. The Aldmer of Aldmeris evolved into the Altmer, the high elves, and from the Altmer in turn descended every other mer race that walked the surface of Nirn. Each of these peoples, save one, came to venerate a particular Daedric Prince as the patron of their line.

The Dwemer, the deep elves, took Mehrunes Dagon for their patron, drawn to his aspects of ambition and the unmaking of the old order. The Altmer kept Azura as theirs, in whom they saw the beauty and the fated order of dusk and dawn. The Bosmer, the wood elves, turned to Mephala, spinner of lies and secrets. The followers of Trinimac, Auri-El's old champion from the War of the First World, suffered a stranger fate: Trinimac himself was transformed into Malacath, and his people, changed with him, became the Orsimer, the orcs.

These three Princes, Dagon, Azura and Mephala, formed an alliance called the First Tribunal or Old Tribunal, and it is under the banner of this Tribunal that the first great civilisations of the Daedric Era were raised.

One people stood apart. The Chimer, who would later become the Dunmer, refused to bind themselves to any single Prince. Instead they followed three mortal sorcerer-kings: Sotha Sil, Almalexia, and Vivec, who called their own alliance the Triumvirate, or the New Tribunal, and in later ages simply the Tribunal without qualification.

The two alliances coexisted, uneasily, for a very long span. In the closing centuries of the era, that coexistence broke, and the Elven Wars began. The wars were long and terrible, and they ended at the summit of Mount Ator, also called Mount Ador in some sources, where the Old Tribunal of Dagon, Azura and Mephala died at the hand of Nerevar, war-chief of the Chimer. Azura, before her death, worked one last transformation: she changed the Chimer into the Dunmer, the dark elves, and marked them as her final legacy.

The Merethic Era

Roughly ten thousand years before present to the founding of Eglarest.

The Merethic Era opens in the aftermath of the Elven Wars and the death of the Old Tribunal. With the Daedric patrons of three most influential mer peoples slain, the political architecture of Auridon reorganised itself quickly and strangely.

The Dwemer, now without Dagon and pressed by the victorious Chimer, withdrew from the surface entirely. They went underground, into deep halls of their own making, and were never again seen above ground on the island until the very end of this Era. The Bosmer retreated into the forests and effectively vanished from the political life of Auridon, becoming a people of rumour more than of record. The Dunmer took the north of the island, and the remaining Aldmer the south. The Aldmer, however, did not long remain: over the course of the era they departed the island aboard flying ships of their own making, and with their departure the last living memory of the Dawn left Auridon as well.

It was in the early centuries of this era that the Lich-King arose, the single greatest threat to mortal life on the island for several centuries running. He was at last defeated by the Nerevarine at the War of the Black Moon. The war takes its name from the moon created as a result of it: the moon's original name is lost to history, and what remains of it is now called Umbriel.

The War of the Black Moon had one further consequence. The destruction wrought by the conflict triggered a long ice age, and it was under the cover of that ice that the Five Hundred Companions of Isildur were at last able to cross the Abecean Sea and make landfall on Auridon. Their arrival is the first coming of men to the island. Most of the Companions did not survive the crossing or the first generations after it: they died of the cold, or were taken as slaves by the Dwemer, who had by then made deep and terrible places of their own beneath the northern half of the island.

It was during this same period that the Dwemer, in their endless tunnelling, discovered Agartha, the great hollow at the heart of the world. In Agartha they built the Etherium Forge, and from the forge came the weapons and the animunculi that fuelled the Etherium Wars, sometimes called the War of the Droids because it was fought almost entirely by constructs rather than by living soldiers.

The era closed in catastrophe. A war whose causes remain obscure broke out between the Dwemer and the Dunmer, and it culminated in the First Impact, a cataclysm that brought the elves of Auridon to the brink of extinction and that ended, in a single stroke, with the total disappearance of the Dwemer from the face of Nirn. In the chaos that followed, the men who had been enslaved in the deep cities of their former masters escaped to the surface for the first time in generations. With their escape, the Age of Men began.

The Age of Men

From the founding of Eglarest to the present day.

The Age of Men begins with the Foundation of Eglarest and the rise of the first empire of men on Auridon. It is the era in which men, for the first time, are the chief shapers of history rather than its inheritors or its victims.

The history of this age is long and densely recorded compared to everything that came before it, and it is treated in the many entries that follow this one. For the purposes of this overview, it is enough to note that the age has been shaped by a few great threads: the rise and fracture of the Empire of Men, the long shadow of the Crimson King and the Nameless Hero, the recurring wars with the Akaviri and the Argonians, and the slow unfolding of a series of divine interventions, the Epiphanies, by which mortal history has been visibly turned by powers not wholly of this world.

The reader who has followed the chronicle this far is invited to proceed to the entries of this era in sequence, beginning with the Foundation of Eglarest.