I was in NifSkope looking at the Bethesda's new high res textures for the creatures, when I noticed some similarities between the Wispmothers and Falmer, particularly the teeth and ears. Between that and their icy blue skin, I was wondering-- are Wispmother undead Falmer, pre-corruption, or are they just a random elemental and the similarities are purely coincidental? If they are, it's cool to have a canonical representation of what they actually looked like.

http://i.imgur.com/Vocg7.jpg

Morphological similarities aren't quite enough to put any weight behind this, but I'd love it if this were true.

Woah, I didn't know wispmothers had elf ears.

I'm filing this under Frenchcanon

Well you may have just found the origin of the wisps. A thought to be extinct race of snow elves.

I doubt it, maybe just wispmothers can change their forms to please their own tastes seeing as how in some mythology wisps can change their form to whatever they want. Also a lot of ceatures in TES have elf ears due to nearly every form of life coming from the aldmers.

Falmer lich-queens?

There's a book in-game with suggests they might be liches of some lost civilisation, and they do seem to inhabit crypts. Perhaps they are the Falmer's ancestral guardians, like those that the Dunmer bind to their family shrines?

Or, maybe, the wisps are Falmer bound to the wispmother's service in the same way that draugr are bound to the dragon priests, drawing power from them and protecting their shrines? There are blue orbs that follow you around in Yngol's Barrow. Maybe they are draugr, without the body and
the wisps in Skyrim are just the elven form, given a misleading name by Imperial scholars who only had those of southern Cyrodiil to use a reference? That could explain their blue eyes.

EDIT: That head certainly has the same facial structure as the statue in Irkgnthand. There's also a wispmother guarding the 'Pale Blade,' which has the same appearance as the elven weaponry described in Fall of the Snow Prince.

I have a feeling they're connected to the Ayleid, since wisps hang around Ayleid ruins in Cyrodiil.

Falmer are also possibly connected to the Ayleid, so that would be your common connection.

The Ayleids had an olive complexion, not a white one. In-game books also state that the wispmothers date from the First Era, when the Ayleids had already lost much of their power.

So do minotaurs and land dreugh and spriggans and trolls and imps. The same things hang around caves equally as often.

But yeah, Falmer-liches sounds pretty reasonable for Wispmothers. And cool.

The ancient offspring between Snow Elves and the Cold, with all their hatred of mankind bound up in it?

Also, while we're on the wild speculation front: Wispmothers: the female, Wisps: the male?

They seem to have a hivemind in Skyrim. Their behaviour indicates that they're part of the same creature. I highly doubt they'd have need of gender.

That's not quite valid. Wisps hang around Welkynd stones and Ayleid ruins almost exclusively.

False. Will-o-the-Wisps are on the same leveled lists as all the other 'natural monsters' in Oblivion.

Well, before TES:V it was said that Falmer ghosts haunted Skyrim, so I think it's a good idea.

Falmer Lich Queens. I like.

I think Wisps and Willo O the Wisps are different creatures. Wisps appear to be either summonings/bindings or just extensions of the wispmother, while Will-O-the-Wisps are magic swamplights. I think there are Willowisps in black marsh too. Ass for the Wispmothers, maybe they're like Hagravens just more secretive and attached to a different Daedra (or none at all). I like the snow elf idea though.

The falmer/wispmother connection does seem appealing.

I'm hoping some of the DLC will flesh out more of the details about some of the monsters in Skyrim. It seems to me that there are hints of deeper connections among them than we've yet learned.

They might be. Interesting find, regardless.

A will-o'-the-wisp is a ghostly fire or bundle of lights which appear often in caves, forests, swamps and mountains which will lead a person away from a safe path, though they aren't explained in mythology much but pretty much its just like the orbs of ghosts you would often see in a paranormal show like Ghost Hunters, it is pretty much just a dead person who can't manifest their entire form. Though seeing how they is a game we can't make the same assumption we can still guess that these wisps are just dead people who are angry over their deaths or are evil in some way as for wispmother my theory is they are a combination of spirits that joined together to lure mortals to their deaths and feast upon their souls to make them apart of the wisp mother.

The ability to summon a collection of wisps or wisplike creatures (magic anomalies?) would be pretty badass though.