Hey, whatever dude.
If you want to disregard all that wonderful lore then do so.
Im just saying that this is the lore.
No, I'm by no means saying "ignore the lore". What I
am saying is that you can't just point to some book and say "It says so here, so it's an established fact." You know that these books contradict themselves, and that the only thing that can distinguish them is in-game
events.
After all:
Spoiler We have at least one book that says that Akatosh and Alduin are the same being, and one book that says they are not. Both these books are in Skyrim alone. They both can't be correct, yet both points of view are part of the lore. Until we see an in-game event to tell us which is correct, we can't know.
Ditto with Lorkhan. Did he trick the Aedra into creating Mundus, as the Elves seem to believe? Did he create Mundus for more creditable reasons, and make the necessary sacrifice for mortals and specifically Man to come to be, as the human races think? Or is the truth some combination of the two, or something else altogether?
Im just saying that if you have that kind of attitude youll doubt if the ancient Romans even existed, cause, you know, its just books.
Not at all. Many, many, many books refer to the Romans. Occam's Razor tells us that all things being equal, the simplest explanation is the likeliest. The simplest explanation for all the historical references to "the Romans" through the past twenty-some centuries is that the Romans did indeed exist. But I certainly don't take the attitude of "I read this about the Romans in a book; therefore it must be the case."
The gods you meet in the games?
They say so.
Do they talk like Vivec? Because Vivec was a god as well, and if the gods always talk in circles like he does in your quote, then you can't take everything as a literal diagram of the cosmos.
The mythologicians, historians and astronomers of Tamriel say so.
Great. The mythologicians, historians and astronomers of Earth used to say that Earth was at the center of the universe - did that make it fact?
Ill leave you to ponder over something what Vivec said, as he is the best one of them all.
"
What created the Tower?
The Wheel created it. The Wheel is the structure of this universe, and it is easiest to see it that way: rim, spokes, hub, and all the spaces within and without. I shall take each in turn.
What created the Wheel?
Anu and Padhome, stasis and change, both vast realms sitting in the void, they created it. Not vast, infinite, as the void was infinite. Imagine an infinity enclosed by another; you come away with a bubble. Now watch as the two bubbles touch. Their intersection is a perfect circle of pattern and possibility that we shall call the Aurbis. The Aurbis is the foundation of the Wheel.
What are the spaces within and without of the Wheel?
Outside the wheel is the void, bereft of anything. It cannot be named. If it has more aspects than stasis and change, they are outside of true language. Inside of the Wheel is the Aurbis, as I have explained.
What is the rim of the Wheel?
As the process of subcreation continued, both Anu and Padhome awakened. For to see your antithesis is to finally awaken. Each gave birth to their souls, Auriel and Sithis, and these souls regarded the Aurbis each in their own part, and from this came the etada, the original patterns. These etada eventually congealed.
Anu’s firstborn, for he mostly desired order, was time, anon Akatosh. Padhome’s firstborn went wandering from the start, changing as he went, and wanted no name but was branded with Lorkhan. As time allowed more and more patterns to individualize, Lorkhan watched the Aurbis shape itself and grew equally delighted and tired with each new shaping. As the gods and demons of the Aurbis erupted, the get of Padhome tried to leave it all behind for he wanted all of it and none of it all at once. It was then that he came to the border of the Aurbis.
He saw the Tower, for a circle turned sideways is an “I”. This was the first word of Lorkhan and he would never, ever forget it.
What are the spokes of the Wheel?
For ages the etada grew and shaped and destroyed each other and destroyed each other’s creations. Some were like Lorkhan and discovered the void outside of the Aurbis, though if some saw the Tower I do not know, but I know that, if they did, none held it in such high esteem. In any case, some of those that did see the void created its like inside the Aurbis, but each of these smaller voids sought each other out. Void shall follow void; the etada called it Oblivion. What was left of the Aurbis was solid change, otherwise known as magic. The etada called this Aetherius.
Now Lorkhan had by at this point seen everything there was to see, and could accept none of it. Here were the etada with their magic and their voids and everything in between and he yearned for the return to flux but at the same time he could not bear to lose his identity. He did not know what he wanted, but he knew how to build it. Through trickery (“We have made the Aurbis unstable with the voids”) and wisdom (“We are of two minds and so should make a perfect gem of compromise”) and force (“Do what I say, rude spirit”), he bound some of the strongest etada to create the World.
The spokes of the Wheel are the eight gifts of the Aedra, sons and daughters of Aetherius. The voids between each spoke number sixteen, and their masters are the sons and daughters of Oblivion. The center of the Wheel was another circle, the hub, which held everything together. The etada called this Mundus.
What is the hub of the Wheel?
We are the hub, the Mundus that goes by many names. We are the heart of all creation. What does this mean? Why should we care? Lorkhan created it so that we could find what he did. In fact, and here is the secret: the hub is the reflection of its creators, the circle within the circle, only the border to ours is so much easier to see. Stand in its flux and remain whole of mind. Look at it sideways and see the “I”.
This is the Tower."
Source: Vehk's teachings, Imperial Library.
As I said, he's speaking in such a mystical fashion that you can't just take this as being utterly literal. Are you saying Aetherius is literally shaped like a disk, a circle, with Mundus literally being another circle or disk inside it? Again, this is not plainly enough spoken to take it so literally. He's giving you a metaphysical description of the cosmos, not a physical one.
Also, you'll note that Vivec himself contradicts whatever bit of lore it is that says that Anuiel is the soul of Anu, not Auri-El; Auri-El is described as the soul of Anuiel, which is the soul of Anu. So again, we can't just assume that this statement is simple fact when it contradicts another piece of the lore that also claims to be simple fact.
Now, if you want to disregard all lore and pretend its Earth really, thats fine.
Not Earth, but Earth-like. Gravity pulls things down, apply heat to water and it will boil if you get it hot enough, water freezes when it gets cold, if I see a bear I'll avoid it unless I know I'm tougher than it, and so forth. There's no reason to assume, for example, that just because some piece of lore says that the Sun is a hole in Mundus torn by Magnus when he left, that this means that it is not a glowing ball of gas.
Im just saying that a mythical, mystical universe like the one described above is infinitely more fascinating to me than the hum-drum boring ole real one.
Well, that right there is a problem. Anybody that thinks this universe is boring doesn't know much about it. I don't appreciate fantasy as an escape from this "boring" universe, I appreciate it as a work of creation - and it works best if common things are based on our own world. People living in mushroom houses and the like just makes me think there were a lot of hallucinogenic drugs involved in the writing.
Lastly, if you think legend and myth has nothing alien, you have probably never learned more about legend and myth than disney and hollywood have to teach.
Study some of what India has to offer in that regard, or China.
Read about Gilgamesh.
Certainly creation myths involve outlandish things, as they should; they're about the very beginnings of the cosmos, after all. But legend is different. Read some of the Grimm legends, and note that many of the protagonists start in very ordinary circumstances. They aren't living in mushroom houses and herding their domesticated giant beetles, they're living in a shack, or a house in town, or a castle of stone, depending upon who they are in society, and they get up and open the cobbler's shop, or they hold court, or they go and milk the cows, again depending upon who they are in society. Now, fantastic things do
come into these legends, but they happen to ordinary people in fairly ordinary circumstances.
Take
The Hobbit as an example. In the beginning Bilbo is simply sitting around in front of his house after breakfast smoking a pipe, enjoying the day and watching the clouds. He isn't living in some weird mushroom-house or anything so utterly removed from normal life. Yes, his house is built into the side of a hill and he's a hobbit, but the hobbits are utterly domestic and very human people, and having a house built into the side of a hill is hardly fantastical. Then along comes a Wizard, to talk Bilbo into going along with a pack of Dwarves to be their thief on a quest to go and liberate their ancestral home from a dragon. Normal circumstances, in a very familiar place, and unusual events intrude.
That is fantasy.
» Fri Jun 08, 2012 4:07 pm 
