The Trinity of Elder Scrolls

So Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was remastered and lo, did the fans rejoice. All the hype and buzz and memes have apparently done some numbers, because now I have been bitten once more by the Elder Scrolls bug. This is not to say I jumped feet first into making dropping a Ted Cruz clone into a timely dungeon encounter with Emperor Patrick Stewart shortly before Picard’s untimely demise. Because I have not (though my buddies have). Rather, I have jumped feet first into yet another nostalgia-trip: the weird and wonderful world of Morrowind. With a whole bunch of mods, of course. I am not an animal.

That’s not the reason for this post (though I promise it’s connected, and promise it is elf game relevant). I was texting a friend on my way home from work about Trench Crusade when, apropo of nothing:

“Is there ever any reasoning why there’s dwarf armor/dwarves ruins in the elder scrolls games but no dwarfs”

BrÖther.

You think I wouldn’t call and spend half an hour explaining the disappearance of the dwemer, and another 20 or so on how Pelinal Whitestrake is a cyborg from the future and also god? Because that, dear reader, is precisely what I did. Which, coming off the new restart in Morrowind, got me thinking about the Tribunal.

Which got me thinking about the Trinity in Christianity, and down the rabbit hole I went. It’s sort of an odd experience, to learn details of a thing you heard and repeated growing up without much thought about what that thing truly means. I was raised vaguely Protestant in a very loosey-goosey non-denominational church in which I was never confirmed. It is more than fair to say I have glaring gaps in my religious education. Maybe breaking down what is meant by Father, Son, and Holy Ghost and learning about the interrelationship between the three is reserved for confirmation classes? Because I certainly do not remember that class in children’s Sunday school and we were too busy playing Halo:CE CTF on Blood Gulch at the youth group overnighters to notice any of the divine metaphysics lessons.

I, until pretty damn recently, thought that this line – and what was meant by the “trinity” – was just three names for God, or that “The Holy Spirit” is just a fancy title/honorific for God. The relationship between God and Jesus was always only explained to me in a father-son relationship in the literal sense, or that Jesus had a divine spark or whatever. It had never before occurred to me that those are all three separate aspects/personages.

I have always been an enormous fan of the OG lore in Morrowind, how the world is made to feel that much more real by the books in it, with all the symbolism and conflicting, unreliable author-narrators. What is going on in the Main Quest feels like it could be it’s own iceberg meme with how deep and obscure the cosmological significance of who you are/what you are doing. I know that Michael Kirkbride, one of the game’s writers, was a big Runequest fan, so it must have been quite the trip to work on the game with Ken Rolston, Avalon Hill editor of Runequest in the 90’s. I also know that Kirkbride (as the more esoteric contributor, though not the biggest on the team) was influenced by elements of Hinduism and other IRL religions.

Where is this going, you wonder? Good question!

Tiber Septim/Talos, the “9^th Divine,” forms a trinity himself – Hjalti Early-Beard, Zurin Arctus, and Ysmir Kingmaker. All three are variously individually described as having their own histories, sort of, but come together as one oversoul, or maybe because they did so, it has always been so, and so on. The entire concept of “mantling” – to “walk like them until they walk like you” – is basically just the Christian doctrine of Adoptionism. It is foolish of me to think that only interesting details, usable/gamable details, were only to be found in imagined videogame religions or faith systems from the parts of the world with which I am not familiar. Because it turns out there’s plenty of usable, weird shit in Christianity if you look hard enough!

A good ~700 or so words in, now we get to the elf games part of the blog post:

D&D gods are boring, overplayed, and having a big not-Catholic Church for a Classical Greek/Norse style pantheon doesn’t make much sense. I know, shockingly mundane opinion. But lets not throw the baby (Jesus) out with the bathwater, here – take the interesting parts of Christianity and toss the rest. Spoiler alert, the hierarchy/structure of the church is not the interesting part.

Rather than a bunch of individual gods with their own cringe little divine domains, make several of them into one god with a bunch of aspects (that hate each other?) or different interpretations of the one deity – Is the Reaper a god of harvests or a god of death? What if your pantheon is the same for several religions, but assigning different roles/relationships/domains in each denomination? Better yet, what if your pantheon is one god, with a bunch of different natures/aspects/avatars/etc?

But most of all, if you got this far and you take away one thing: make it messy. Think of all the blood and ink spilled over minor theological points, how much space in the margins of even a simple statement or description of divinity there is for whole branches of offshoots or heresies to develop. Make every culture see or interpret a god in a different light. Make them all correct, but also a little bit wrong. It creates room for interpretation, it creates tension, and it creates a more interesting world.