I've been mulling over some of these thoughts for a while as I've been playing Skyrim:

Is Ysgramor doing the will of the Dragon Cult when he drove the Falmer from Skyrim and Solstheim?

Clearly the rebellion of the Tongues against Alduin only happened post-Ysgramor, considering there were no Nords in Tamriel after the Saarthal incident, and they only returned with the return of Ysgramor and his Companions, I can only imagine that as Ysgramor was slaughtering the elves, he was setting up the Dragon Priests to rule in his wake, in Skyrim and Solstheim. So I'm wondering, is there any lore that points to this?

Please note that I am not as well-versed in the lore of Elder Scrolls and some here, so if this is somehow common knowledge without me realizing it, please be polite in saying so.

Ysgramor wasn't in the Dragon Cult I believe. But when he brought the 500 Companions with him from Atmora, they brought their animal gods with them. So one can say he gave way for the Dragon Cult to rise as it did in Skyrim.

I do have to wonder how power and control this Dragon Cult had seeing as its actually referred to as a cult. I figure that most Nordic settlements were sporadic and varied in faith, and the monuments erected by the cult are the only things left standing by virtue of being made to actually last. Places like the Labyrinthinan are probably among the few major cities that they may have had. Things only came to a head when the Dragon Priests actually started to slide down a slippery slope and began to exact their will on the rest of the populace, pissing them off in the process and forcing the dragons to intervene.

It's possible that the Dragon Cult only had limited power in the early years, possibly because they didn't have any or didn't have that much Dragon Priests to send around the local populace. I suppose the Cult probably started off as a 'supplier' of sacrifice offerings for the Dovah, and went around demanding food from the villages lest they be wiped off the face of the map. However, most Atmorans probably weren't as scared of the dragons as some probably believed and ignored the initial warnings.

However, the Dovah probably responded by creating and organizing the Dragon Priests, teaching them powerful shouts and having them terrorize the villagers for appropriate sacrifice until they gave it up.

In Morrowind, the Nine Divines was referred to as the "Imperial Cult", so I assume that the use of the word "cult" is irrelevant. Oh yeah, I forgot about the Nord's animal pantheon...Isn't there a dragon in that pantheon? I haven't gotten to Solstheim yet in either my Skyrim or Morrowind playthroughs

I assume that the Dragon cult had a huge presence in Skyrim, considering that they have these massive fortresses throughout Skyrim in the old Nordic ruins, and that Dragon Priests seem to have ruling positions (referencing Miraak's rule over Solstheim), perhaps given to them by their dragon overlords?

Not entirely, since the Dunmer (If I recall) were resistent to the relgion as a whole, hence why and Talos by extension are referred to as a sort of cult in Vvardenfell.

They're the only structures that would logically remain, as houses built out of wood and stone would either be torn down and re-purposed or simply rot, leaving little to no trace of any other settlement out there. Tombs generally hold up better since they're built to last. The only one that even vaguely resembles a city is the Labryinthian, and that seemed to serve as the cults own center of power, as opposed to what would one day become Windhelm. It seems like to me that the cult operated independently up until they hopped on the crazy train to [censored]sville.

To me, he was a Nordic warlord who led a successful campaign against the Falmer and eventually became the first High King of Skyrim.

He, like many other powerful individuals of note back then, was a high-ranking member of the Dragon Cult, though not a priest, and therefore was given a special dagger which is proudly displayed at the entrance of his tomb.

So yeah, his conquests helped pave the way for the dragons and their servants to expand into Skyrim.

I have no idea if people still subscribe to this (or if they ever gave it much thought outside of, "Huh. Okay"), but I recall MK saying that Ysgramor was a dragon. Whether we were supposed to take that literally or not, I don't know (and I don't think anyone else did, either; the thread in which he posted that immediately turned its attention to theories that Ysgramor was a dragon priest rather than a literal dragon), but nonetheless it does suggest that Ysgramor had a very close connection with the Dragon Cult. It's possible, and indeed probable, that Ysgramor worked on behalf of the Dragon Cult when he felt it necessary to do so.

However, I don't think the Dragon Cult (or the dragons themselves) were the ones pushing for the Falmer to be driven out of Skyrim, or for the Nords to conquer and slaughter their way into other Merrish territories such as Morrowind. Ysgramor was a representative of the Dragon Cult, but the genocide was not, in my opinion, a religious matter. It was a reaction to the destruction of Saarthal, as well as a backlash against a up-till-then dominant culture that was much different to the Nords' own (and thus, a possible threat to Nord survival, and a certain impediment to any Nordic ambitions to dominance in Tamriel).

http://www.imperial-library.info/content/five-hundred-mighty-companions-or-thereabouts-ysgramor-returned Comparison between the first and last paragraphs seems to imply some sort of relationship between Ysgramor and dragons.

He's closely linked to the Time-God through the fact that he's a convoluted and questionable figure and thus Dragonborn are called Ysmir after him. Because of their connections to these very confusing persons who may or may not be each other and/or Sheogorath.

At the time the political structure was the old animal-gods way which makes me think that Ysgramor was part of the Dragon Cult but in the same way that the Gray-Manes in Whiterun are part of the Skyrim political structure. Plus at the time of the Night of Tears I am not so sure that the Dragon Cult was strict yet so they didn't rule with an iron fist yet. A lot of the lore from this time is open for discussion, only a handful of the Five Hundred were even named so for all we know the Dragon Priests were involved. One of the Five Hundred even became a Dragon Priest later on (Ahzidal). It all comes down to how many years passed between Ysgramor's arrival and the Dragon War because it seems that Ysgramor and the Five Hundred were free to do just about anything, building Jorrvaskr, building Windhelm so it's really tough to say where he stood in the old Nordic political structure.

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:The_Dragon_War

I think Kuhlmannhttp://www.gamesas.com/topic/1357025-the-dragon-war-documented/?p=20460372 Ysgramor as a member of the dragon cult.