The Elder Scrolls: Dwarves

 Where did they come from, where did they go?

The Elder Scrolls online was a perfect opportunity to expand the world and lore of Elder Scrolls further than it has done ever before, and in many ways that's exactly what they achieved with that game. By the very virtue of being an MMO set earlier than any other piece of media in the franchise, ESO has served as a perfect breeding ground for all sorts of lore snippets forever injected into it's healthy ecosystem. (as it is a rather good MMO nowadays as well.) There's only ever been a few little slip-ups here and there such as how 'The Lusty Argonian Maid' exists within the games files despite the fact you literally meet the author of that play in Morrowind. And he's a normal human, so there's no "Maybe he was alive for hundreds of years" to fall back on. Maybe he totally ripped off the play from some ancient unknown source, but the protagonist is still an obvious crude self-insert of him trying to bone his maid, so I think that's a weak argument. (I guess we'll chalk that up to temporal displacement, I don't know.) But there's one aspect of lore that, as was recent discussed, ESO will never get a chance to touch on, and that's because they've been forbidden. No, it's not the ever interesting eastern land of Akavir, which I would love Elder Scrolls 6 to be secretly based in, but instead the 'mystery' surrounding The Elder Scrolls' Dwarves, and it got me thinking about them myself.

Of course, Dwarves are a fantasy staple present in just about any fantasy setting you can imagine. (I'd joke about how that's a prevailing symptom of systemic ableism, but knowing this industry there's bound to be someone who'll take that too seriously.) Dragon Age, The Witcher, The Forgotten Realms, insert any fantasy franchise you want and no matter how grounded they are there's a good chance the game has dwarves. They all tend to be the same in concept as well, subterranean isolationists who specialise in all things related to minerals and the earth: mining, smithing, general metallurgy; that's always their thing. And yet despite the Elder Scrolls sharing that cliché, I must admit that their take on it is actually one of the most original I've seen across the various quite distinct franchises that I've mentioned. It's surprising to me because as much as I love the Elder Scrolls it does tend to be very clearly influence driven in a lot of manners; but not in the Dwarves.

Known in the lore as Dwemer (Deep Elves), leading off of the naming convention for Elfin races wherein they are some sort of descriptor followed by their species of 'mer', the Dwarves are still subterranean masters of their craft, only these guys fill the role of the mandatory long-missing civilisation for this universe. Every series has their own, the Engwithans, Aen Elle, those of the Elvhenan; traditionally this spot is held by the native-American allegory race, telling of a long lost culture of nature lovers who would live forever, be more moral, and just all round be better than all the scrub cultures who live nowadays. The Dwemer go a different direction, with the Dwarves being merely technologically superior, (and also not actually short in any fashion) but conceptually just as corrupt and backstabby as their modern day counterparts, with the added bonus that their tended to be a civilisations most predisposed towards blatant sacrilege. (They literally made artificial life to be their slave protectors, these guys were hardcore 'playing at god'.)

Where the mystery comes into it, is in the way that the Dwemer actually disappeared from the world, because this isn't your stereotypical story about a society that slowly collapsed after generations of withering fortunes, no the Dwemer's disappearance is much more abrupt than that. It was a disappearance in every sense of the word, in that one day they were there and the next they were not, with no clue left as to how an entire species vanished, where they went or if they can ever return. These are the sorts of mysteries hanging over the Elder Scrolls world ever since after Arena where the team decided that the mentioned-but-not-implemented Dwarves should be more interesting. Diving into this would be unravelling one of the great mysteries of the Elder Scrolls universe, but as Todd Howard himself apparently decreed; such is not the duty of the ESO team to cover.

Except, we do actually know how the Dwarves disappeared. Is this- am I being stupid here? This was covered pretty extensively in Morrowind, but we've just sort of continued like we didn't get a pretty open and shut story told to us. For the sake of those who missed it, the story goes like this. Indoril Nerevar, the Chimer (Dunmer Predecessors) war hero who's life and times are of central importance to the story of Morrowind, really had an issue with Dwarves. Their people were traditionally enemies, but he'd managed to secure a truce through his friendship with their leader King Dumac Dwarf-Orc. The two of them were the best of friends with a relationship so tight it bought warring nations to peace. That was, of course, until the world's bigger Narc, Dagoth Ur, ran to his master Nerevar to report about how his spies had watched the Dwarves chief scientist, Kagrenac, experimenting on the heart of Lorkhan.

Woah, back up a second; okay, so Lorkhan was an Aedric god who created the mortal plane and, in true promethean fashion, was punished for his transgression by having his heart thrown to Nirn. (The impact of which would form the volcano known as 'Red Mountain'.) So this was a sacred and holy artefact that some Dwarf dude, in all the hubris of mortals, had dug up and now was experimenting on. Something about creating a big artificial god with the heart of the Dragon of time or some such nonsense, it's a whole thing. (basically he's responsible for the events of Elder Scrolls 2 indirectly) Messing with such a holy relic tied to creationism is sacrilege, and Nerevar turns to Dumac to have this forcibly stopped. Dumac doesn't believe Nerevar, and the two nations end up at war again. Nerevar and Dagoth Ur manage to storm Red Mountain and Kagrenac's lair, but he has other ideas and tries to tap directly into the Heart of Lorkhan with his tools for some unknown cause. (Perhaps he hoped to be imbued with the power of a god to wipe out their Chimer foes.) In that moment something inexplicable happened, the entire Dwarven race was wiped from the face of existence in the blink of an eye. Where they went, nobody knows, and touching on that mystery is the only real direction this story could go on.

Although, and I loathe to try and interpret Mr Howard's own intentions here, but perhaps the idea is not to delve any deeper into the Dwarves at all, ever. Maybe, just maybe, the plan over at Bethesda is to keep the location of the Dwemer a secret for now and forever, only ever hinted at or teased upon, but never fully explored. I say this because of the commonly held theory that a mystery is often best left unanswered, because the conclusions of the mind will always trump anything the creators could come up with. It's a simple and inelegant solution to one of Elder Scrolls' largest running mysteries, but as this point what other choice does the team have? The Dwemer, in their absence, has been built up to being an entire race of genius-level intellects capable of creating fully autonomous robots that function perfectly generations without maintenance. The only reason to bring them back into the lore at this point would be if The Elder Scrolls were seriously considering a hard jump into the industrial age with factories, powered automobiles and firearms. And whilst that would be cool, I don't know if that would make the best fit for a fantasy world like Nirn.

Ultimately, however, the final decision falls to the creative team for how they want to handle this one. Personally I think it's a tale worth exploring, and there's certainly a way to 'bring back' the Dwemer people as a new race for players to toy around without defying the mystique and grandeur of the disappearance. What about a small colony of exiles getting discovered on some remote realm outside of the traditional purview of the Daedric princes, letting the species join the roster as some super rare special race? (I just want there to be more official Elder Scrolls races, it's pretty dry in that regard so far.) Let me know what your ideas are for the future of the Dwemer in The Elder Scrolls down in the comments: let's self-therapy in a group.