This question has been floating around in my mind for a while, so I've decided to just ask: what is an Elder Scroll? I know that it is significant, I can gather it from the title, but I've not the faintest clue what their function is. What do they detail? and who writes them? I know that at the end of Oblivion it says you (the character) will write the next scroll but I've also heard that the God's write them.

http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=15282&st=0&p=2972575&#entry2972575

They foretell the future.

Not only the future but the past as well.

Just read the FAQs.

I never understood that, I mean how can you foretell the past?

You dont foretell it, it's written?

I'm not an expert in this area but that's as I have thought about it.
It could also be that the Moth Priests during their lets call it "trances" see the past.

Some things have happened so long ago, that all records of it happening have disappeared, or they simply weren't recorded. The Gray Fox is the point-in-case here. He had to recover his identity, so he used an Elder Scroll to read off who he was (in the past) before he became the Gray Fox (in the present).

Which really pissed me off, too, because it's like now-a-days, any shmuck of a count can read Elder Scrolls. It's like...taking the name OF THE SERIES, and making a cardboard cut-out of Oblivion riposte that we're already drowning on the moment we escape the Imperial City Prison.

The name originally had a bit more significance, because the intros in earlier games like Arena/Daggerfall/Redguard essentially imply that you are reading the story of the respective game from an Elder Scroll.

Someone in an older thread even said that an Elder Scroll essentially represented the CD for one of the games.

Thats my favorite theory.