What the Hell is a Dragon?
So dragons are basically my favorite fantasy creature ever, and The Elder Scrolls franchise has a pretty interesting take on them: fragments of time made into flesh and blood. In this post I will try to make sense of how "time" can be represented by a physical beast, the way in which dragons are created, the way their psyche works, and how their signature ability (shouts) relates to all of this.
The usual disclaimer: This is simply me making sense of what I've read in the lore, and thus is not necessarily the "canon" explanation.
The first thing we need to understand is how time works in the first place. In real life, time and space cannot be separated and so are often referred to as "spacetime." This is because "time" is simply a function of speed and gravity. If you imagine that all matter and light has a CPU, "time" is the rate at which this cpu ticks. In The Elder Scrolls, time is a completely independent force. The best way to understand TES time is like this: the Godhead dreams something, and Akatosh writes it down in a book
Dragons are said to be created by Akatosh, supposedly in his image. This leads us to the first problem in figuring out what dragons are: while Akatosh has always been presented as a benevolent god in these games, dragons are almost universally malevolent creatures. At various points, however, Paarthurnax offers us a glimpse into Alduin's backstory, describing him as once being the best of the dragons, the "crown jewel" of Akatosh's creation. That sounds an awful lot like the story of Lucifer's fall in Christian mythology, and leads me to believe that the designers intended for dragons to be "angels" of a sort.
The implication of dragons being analogous to angels leads us closer to figuring out what dragons really are, but it is not the full answer. Akatosh, after all, did not send any Jesus figure (Dragonborn) to intervene in the Dragon War, and in fact the only known Dragonborn of the time was one of Alduin's own priests: Miraak, who only rebelled as a bid for his own rise to power. Even our own Dragonborn in Skyrim has many options for playing on the proverbial Dark Side, with Akatosh/Auriel favoring us no matter what. In other words, even when creating brand new dragon souls, Akatosh makes no attempt to imbue any sort of innate benevolence into them. Dragons are, by and large, free to do as they please, despite their creator normally being a benevolent deity.
To recap, we have so far established the following:
So what are the dragons? An experiment by Akatosh to exert his will upon the mortal realm; an experiment he is now ending.
The usual disclaimer: This is simply me making sense of what I've read in the lore, and thus is not necessarily the "canon" explanation.
The first thing we need to understand is how time works in the first place. In real life, time and space cannot be separated and so are often referred to as "spacetime." This is because "time" is simply a function of speed and gravity. If you imagine that all matter and light has a CPU, "time" is the rate at which this cpu ticks. In The Elder Scrolls, time is a completely independent force. The best way to understand TES time is like this: the Godhead dreams something, and Akatosh writes it down in a book
Dragons are said to be created by Akatosh, supposedly in his image. This leads us to the first problem in figuring out what dragons are: while Akatosh has always been presented as a benevolent god in these games, dragons are almost universally malevolent creatures. At various points, however, Paarthurnax offers us a glimpse into Alduin's backstory, describing him as once being the best of the dragons, the "crown jewel" of Akatosh's creation. That sounds an awful lot like the story of Lucifer's fall in Christian mythology, and leads me to believe that the designers intended for dragons to be "angels" of a sort.
The implication of dragons being analogous to angels leads us closer to figuring out what dragons really are, but it is not the full answer. Akatosh, after all, did not send any Jesus figure (Dragonborn) to intervene in the Dragon War, and in fact the only known Dragonborn of the time was one of Alduin's own priests: Miraak, who only rebelled as a bid for his own rise to power. Even our own Dragonborn in Skyrim has many options for playing on the proverbial Dark Side, with Akatosh/Auriel favoring us no matter what. In other words, even when creating brand new dragon souls, Akatosh makes no attempt to imbue any sort of innate benevolence into them. Dragons are, by and large, free to do as they please, despite their creator normally being a benevolent deity.
To recap, we have so far established the following:
- Dragons are somewhat analogous to angels.
- Akatosh creates them intentionally.
- They are generally free to be dicks to each other and everyone else.
So what are the dragons? An experiment by Akatosh to exert his will upon the mortal realm; an experiment he is now ending.
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