(Potential Spoilers) Having beaten the Skyrim mainquest and killed Alduin, I find myself thinking of Alduin as a big nasty black evil nemesis indeed, but not the time-restarting, super-important, world/time-eating near god described of old. And so I'm confused.

All the previous implications before skyrim that we were handed suggested an Akatosh/Alduin duality with Alduin quite literally eating the world somehow and thus restarting into a new kalpa. The duality thing seems to be cleared up in-game with at least Parthunax seeming to directly to refer to Alduin as a child of Akatosh rather than Aka himself. Ok, that's good with me. But Parthunax also seems to uphold Alduin's status as the world-eater (by talking about the new kalpa having to fend for itself for instance).

The thing is, Alduin really just seems too... weak? to do this. Furthermore, it just doesn't seem like something on his mind (disregarding the lack of character development we had for him). Rather than getting going on the whole-world eating thing, we see Alduin starting his tyrannical run by amassing dead dragons like an army (does a world-eater really need an army?). Also, I haven't stumbled into an in-game book or discussion that really talks about Alduin doing the whole world-eating thing the last time he was here. In fact, it really just sounds like he was into the whole dominion-over-mankind thing.

Did anyone else get this feeling as well? Is it possible that maybe Alduin really doesn't "eat worlds," but this is just an embellishment/fear of his terrible personality/power?

:glare:

Disappointed? meee too. I don't get the feeling he was just embellished, I get the feeling Beth just doesn't care.

Alduin still ends the world, and ends the kalpa. Then the next one starts.

That's a very this is so because it is so statement. That is what we were originally told, yes, but some of the skyrim background just doesn't seem to adequately match up to this. And we all know that one of the glorious (and albeit frustrating) facts of bethesda lore is that in-game character interpretations can be wrong.

I got the feeling that we cut Alduin off before he could really get things rolling, where what we see is just his initial wake-up phase.

Talk to Agneir and Paarhurnax,. Shortly before you meet Paarhurnaax for the first time Agneir says the world being destroyed in not necessarily bad, because it allows it to be remade. I believe that dialogue stays for the rest of the game. Paarhurnaax asks you if you'd doom the next kalpa by preserving this one, but this dialogue happens if you choose certain answers/responses when you first meet him.

If we can't trust the Old Dragon, we might as well throw everything else he says out. Then the only source on Alduin is Alduin himself.

Argenir also hypothesizes, after the end of the MQ, that Alduin might be unleashed at the end of time to carry out his kalpa-eating duties when you tell him that you never absorbed Alduin's soul.

Even if he doesn't eat the world (which, I personally agree with the wiser sources in-game in the belief that he does), he does have a reputation for eating souls.

Which is just as bad, in my opinion. The only thing that eats souls is me, and then only if they're dragons or I need one to fill a gem so I can sell a necklace for 8 times its original value.

The 'World-Eating' was a sideshow. Postponing him from waking, or killing him in his sleep, would have made a better plot.

You can't stop the dragon stop, once he's awake. It would be like trying to stop Dagoth Ur, once he's woken the Brass God.

Game Over, man!

Alduin's goal is simply:

1. Raise dragons to slaughter everyone on nirn
2. Eat the souls of those slaughtered in the dreamsleeve/sauvrngarde
3. ????
4. Everyone is dead physically and metaphysically; i.e. profit.

Just because he doesn't physically eat the world doesn't mean he doesn't metaphysically eat it. Which, if this theory is true (and I personally hope it's not), changes the way we think about kalpas.

Also I do still believe that alduin is akatosh is ruptaga is auriel is Tosh Raka. Him claiming to be the first born doesn't really mean that much imo.

It was clarified that Alduin really does physically eat the world by MK if I remember right.

I think I remember that too. But I didn't see any evidence of him physically doing so, either in this time or when he was defeated in the past. We did see that he was eating the souls of the fallen in Sovngarde.

And considering 'varieties of faith' was specifically left out of skyrim, its hard to say how much of MK's vision of alduin was used.

I'm thinking that others speculation on him is correct. Alduin starts out like you see him in Skyrim and eventually becomes Alduin proper.

But that brings up the question of what the deal with him in the Dragon War was...

MK was wrong about how Alduin eats the world. Aldudagga is either non-canon or metaphorical. He devours Mundus like he devours souls, or Dovahkiin for that matter.

1. "Devour" stuff.
2. ???
3. Next kalpa

Agneir (or/and Paarhurnaax) say that Alduin's destruction of the world was delayed. He was not simply dethroned. He may not be Akatosh, but neither is he just a big dragon king.

It seems like Beth just ignored/chose not to use his work in the case of Alduin. It doesn't make him wrong given we had no previous notion of how exactly Alduin operated, it just makes his version victim of (poor) selection. However it does make us who took MKs work to heart wrong.

I think that the whole point was that originally, Akatosh was supposed to be Alduin. The end of the world, and the birth of the next was not supposed to be a bad thing.

In fact, it's supposed to be a good thing, it's like a cosmic evolutionary process - Lorkhan created Mundus using the powers of the existing gods for the purpose of giving mortals the chance to ascend into godhood themselves, and create more and better gods, which would create the next world, which would create more mortals that would ascend into godhood to create an even better world. Unlike the Thalmor or the Dwemer that wanted to stay snug in their pre-creation point in the cosmos, Lorkhan wanted for creation to advance, not just on a mortal scale, but on an immortal scale.

The stopping of Alduin also may be a "nice job breaking it, hero", moment, because it gives the Thalmor more time to try to destroy time, and hence, stop the kalpa from working properly. I guess that means TES VI is going to involve the player having to stop the Thalmor from annihilating creation completely now that you've gone and given them to chance to do it by completing the game in Skyrim.

I believe Akatosh was meant to devour the world because Akatosh is time, and Akatosh "devouring the world" means the end of time. As in, "time ends all things". It may not have ever even been meant as a literal "giant snake eats the world" type of thing (although there are plenty of symbols of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros in this mythology), but rather, that cosmic entropy in such a radically unstable world would force the end of this world, and the coming of the next.

In fact, since Nirn's physical form is made of gods forced into becoming "earth bones", a de-construction of the laws of reality through the breaking of the towers would potentially also turn the gods back into an easier-to-swallow form, so that "eating the world" would become much closer to being literally possible.

This isn't evil, it's just the way in which the world was built - it has been decaying from a mythic to a more mundane world as time has worn on. It needs to be reset at some point before the whole thing collapses. The souls of all beings reincarnate, at that (that's what Sovngarde is for - keeping some mythic heroes around as the first human colonists of the new world when it is still mythic, and great heroes are needed just to survive), so saying that it "kills everyone" is not quite correct, either. It just forces a reincarnation of their beings.

At least, if the Thalmor can be stopped from destroying all existence and mortality, that is.

Of course, that's IF Bethesda's writers can stop writing all over each other's work, and stick with the mythos that they inherited, instead of trying to write the story into some new trajectory that completely ignores established lore.



Cthulhu - devours 1d6 investigators per round.

I was very disappointed too. Skyrim initially gave me that mythic/grey/shadows-of-the-past kind of feeling Morrowind's MQ has, but I found it less and less absorbing as it progressed. It needed a whole bunch more Kirkbride-ism.

I don't think that it necessarily makes MK's work wrong. It's a matter of interpretation, I think. I don't claim to understand all the lore that has been thus far established or all of MK's writings (they can be confusing in a very fun way), but what if (in our make-believe TES universe) the Seven Fights of the Aldudagga was written after and the skalds and lore masters through the ages embellished the story to make it scarier. Although, a dragon that kills Nords first and eats their souls in Sovngarde is still pretty scary as that takes away one's happy afterlife. One of the things I am wondering now is this: If only Nords go to Sovngarde, how does Alduin get at the souls of all the non-Nords when they die?

Maybe Alduin starts rauaging the Daedric realms as he powers up?

wow , wraith magus, this is a great interpretation !!!

Well, I do believe Aldiun is the dragon that appears at Helgern, and so it is as if Aldiun wanted to fight the Dovahkiin in the first place, or else he would have let him/her get executed (you cant say that it may have been bad timing as if he arrived a second later he would have been dead). I guess a dragonborn does have to power to severely weaken Aldiun as is what happens in the main quest, so it almost seems like the plan was for Aldiun to fight the Dragonborn and thus retreat to Sovngarde.

About the world-eating thing, I do wonder if what Aldiun does is eat Aethurius/Dreamsleeve (I know their not the same thing but I'm too much of a lore noob to fully understand it) so once he devours Nirn the souls have nowhere to go?

Well, I did wonder where Aldiun flies off too during the main quest intervals before he goes to Sovngarde. Maybe he was too busy eating another province?

Except that MK's view is still supported by ingame dialogue, even if we never see it play out. The inconsistency (if it can even be called that) is not one between Skyrim and MK, but Skyrim and itself. Personally I can interpret these events in enough consistent ways that I don't see it as an issue.

I alsoget the feeling that Chimere's rants about 'scale not beong of importance in the mythic' might be meant to point out that Alduin's size as we see him doesn't weigh against his role. In the mythic scale we're on equal footing with him, which is why he comes off as underpowered.

My problem with that is that Alduin necessarily "gets smaller" to match the Prisoner, when the Prisoner could rather get bigger - in another branch of metaphor, where power to influence events and overcome foes isn't determined by physical size. Our Prisoner gets Thu'um only, so that's all Alduin really gets. [Gimmie some immortality!] It would explain a lot, though, if I understand fully.

Still disappointed with how it all played out.

I wasn't here for the post-Oblivion scrambling to make sense of the prior lore with the advent of that gigantic mess but I can assume it was probably much worse and more painful than Skyrim for the members of this board.

I think Morrowind handled the rising of a nobody to mythic proportions a lot better. By the end of your adventures and fulfilling the prophecies and gathering all those items and leveling up until you were godlike in your abilities you felt as if you had really made a heroic journey and were worthy and perfectly capable of giving Vivec a Volendrung to the face if you wanted.