Cyrodiil (De-)Jungle: What, How, and Why
OKAY so this was originally meant to be a reply to @theropoda's post about Cyrodiil's jungle retcon but I wanted to be thorough and it took me like an hour to write everything up, and by the time I was done I realized that this is WAY too fucking big to be a reasonably-sized reblog so I figured I might as well make my own post.
Warning: LONG post.
First things first: something about TES worldbuilding that it has borrowed from Arthurian mythos is the Fisher King, or the king-as-land principle. The land, its people, and its ruler are directly linked and the well-being of any one component is reflected in the others. This has been present in the lore since Redguard at the earliest, so not something Oblivion invented, which is worth keeping in mind.
(This is most clearly seen with the Silvenar in A Dance In Fire, wherein they're described as the spiritual representative of the Bosmer and Valenwood itself, and their appearance, gender, and age will change dynamically to represent the current dominant demographic of the Bosmer. ESO has later changed this a lot but the overall principle still stands)
This connection is considered to be one of the proofs of godhood, as one who is a genuine "ruling king" (another term for a god on Nirn) is able to change the land by enacting their will, including the manipulation of weather.
Ordeals you should face unimpeded by the world of restriction. The splendor of stars is Ayem's domain. The selfishness of the sea is Seht's. I rule the middle air. All else is earth and under your temporal command. There is no bone that cannot be broken, except for the heart bone. You will see it twice in your lifetimes. Take what you can the first time and let us do the rest. - Sermon 11
'I told you,' Vivec said, 'I am meant to be the teacher of the king of the earth. AE ALTADOON GHARTOK PADHOME.' - Sermon 12
There, Nerevar was greeted by the Parliament of Craters, who knew him by title and resented his presence, for he was to be a ruling king of earth and this was the lunar realm. They shifted around him in a pattern of entrapment. - Sermon 16
This power that a god holds is mythically exemplified by the symbol of the Tower, which represents existence beyond duplexity, and elven cultures have built their own "idol" Towers to imitate such power even without being gods themselves. The first of these were the towers of Ada-Mantia and the Red Mountain, erected by the powers of the Time God and Space God respectively.
Look at the majesty sideways and all you see is the Tower, which our ancestors made idols from. - Sermon 21
As they were the most powerful of lesser spirits in the ages after the Convention and eager to emulate what they saw, the Aldmer began construction of their own towers. That they built more than one shows you that they were not of one mind. The Aldmer began to split along cultural lines, on how best to spread creation and their parts in it. Each Tower that was built exemplified a separate accordance. [...] The Stones are magical and physical echoes of the Zero Stone, by which a Tower might focus its energy to mold creation. Oftentimes, the Stones borrowed surplus creation from Oblivion, grafting it to the terrestrial domain of its anointed Tower. [...] The Daedric Realms were formed on much the same principle: padomaic powers using aetherial refuse to build their void-territories. The Towers built on the Mundus, since the lands around them congealed in the absence of the gods, were unable to match the capriciousness of the Lords of Misrule. - Nu-Mantia Intercept
For much the same reason, the divine domains of the gods - their planes/planets/realms in Oblivion - are also their physical bodies, and the material manifestations of their own concepts and ideologies that directly reflect their nature as divinities. In essence, the god of any given realm themselves acts as the "Tower" of their domain, being the stabilizing influence that defines the nature of the land as the Fisher King.
The planets are the gods and the planes of the gods, which is the same thing. That they appear as spherical heavenly bodies is a visual phenomena caused by mortal mental stress. Since each plane(t) is an infinite mass of infinite size, as yet surrounded by the Void of Oblivion, the mortal eye registers them as bubbles within a space. Planets are magical and impossible. The eight planets correspond to the Eight Divines. They are all present on the Dwarven Orrery, along with the mortal planet, Nirn. - Cosmology
In common with the greater Princes, my realm of Maelstrom and myself are indistinguishable—my pocket reality is a projection of my mind, nature, and will. Indeed, reality as personal manifestation is the norm in all the highly-organized realms I have visited. - Lord Fa-Nuit-Hen and Tutor Riparius Answer Your Questions
This is a lot of preamble, now we can get to Cyrodiil.
Cyrodiil as it was established in PGE1 (which came out with TES Redguard), as you said, was an equatorial-subequatorial jungle. This is the same description we stick with in Morrowind, where we have NPC dialogue that also describes it as such:
Cyrodiil is the cradle of Human Imperial high culture on Tamriel. It is the largest region of the continent, and most is endless jungle. The Imperial City is in the heartland, the fertile Nibenay Valley. The densely populated central valley is surrounded by wild rain forests drained by great rivers into the swamps of Argonia and Topal Bay. The land rises gradually to the west and sharply to the north. Between its western coast and its central valley are deciduous forests and mangrove swamps. - Generic NPC dialogue, "Cyrodiil"
Then, the Lord of the Rings movies came out.
Cyrodiil was going to be as described in the first PGE, which the book you’re talking about took its quotes from. The heart of the province being what you think of when you think of a traditional jungle, tumbling down to the fields of large rice paddies that fed the Empire, guarded by Romanesque troops and dragons everywhere. The Imperial City was to be vast, rolling across wetlands and swamps, with large sections lost and overgrown, full of too many cults to count, the oldest temples having obviously been around since the Merethic. Then Todd watched The Fellowship of the Ring and mistakes were made. - Michael Kirkbride on reddit, 2022
Cyrodiil's design was initially a fully doylist change, likely intended to capitalize on the popularity of the LOTR movies. This inspiration came directly off the coattails of LOTR books already being strong influences on the older TES games, with Emil Pagliarulo later saying that "we'd sometimes describe Oblivion as the Lord of the Rings movies, whereas Morrowind was the Lord of the Rings books". This influence persists even into Skyrim, where apparently Whiterun was directly inspired by Edoras, Rohan's main city from LOTR.
Importantly, this meant that the retcon had no actual explanation. The design choice was already made and development was moving forward with that. Kurt Kuhlmann and Michael Kirkbride, the two devs that wrote PGE1, were brought on later into development when the decision had already been fixed.
As such, MK proposed an in-universe explanation via Mythic Dawn Commentaries, directly riffing off his previous god-lore writing:
That is your ward against the Mnemoli. They run blue, through noise, and shine only when the earth trembles with the eruption of the newly-mantled. Tell them "Go! GHARTOK AL MNEM! God is come! NUMI MORA! NUM DALAE MNEM!" Once you walk in the Mythic it surrenders its power to you. Myth is nothing more than first wants. Unutterable truth. Ponder this while searching for the fourth key. [...] CHIM. Those who know it can reshape the land. Witness the home of the Red King Once Jungled. - Mythic Dawn Commentaries, Book 3
So now the idea here is that, as Tiber Septim ascended to godhood, essentially all of Cyrodiil - if not all of Tamriel - had become his "divine domain", analogous to how the divine cities of Vivec, Almalexia, Sotha Sil and Dagoth Ur were their own, and how the city of Silvenar is to the Silvenar, or the Paradise is to Mankar Camoran.
The proposed retcon, then, is that the reason why Cyrodiil got de-jungled is because Tiber did that as part of his ascension to godhood, as a continuation of the Fisher King principle. As Tiber became a god of the land, so did the land change to accommodate his whims and desires, which in this case meant removing the jungle.
Due to the retroactive nature of divinity (which you can learn more about on the Apotheosis page that I helped write, nudge nudge), this alteration of the landscape technically occurred not within linear time, but in the Dawn - the nonlinear Untimes that predate linearity and run concurrently with the mortal timelines. This means that Cyrodiil was functionally changed "at the dawn of history", and in function has never been a jungle.
This take was backed by another small out-of-game excerpt that MK wrote a month after Oblivion's release:
From The Many-Headed Talos: "And after the throne of Alinor did finally break at the feet of Men, and news of it came to the Dragon Emperor in Cyrodiil, he gathered his captains and spoke to them, saying: "'You have suffered for me to win this throne, and I see how you hate jungle. Let me show you the power of Talos Stormcrown, born of the North, where my breath is long winter. I breathe now, in royalty, and reshape this land which is mine. I do this for you, Red Legions, for I love you.'" *** And that's a fact. Er, wait, that's a snippet from a potentially (more-than-likely) unreliable source that explains everything. cough divine retcon cough - Michael Kirkbide, "From The Many-Headed Talos"
(This is the text that would later get partially quoted by Heimskr in Skyrim, although the quote is cut down to avoid mentioning the jungle itself for whatever reason)
But then the question arises: if Tiber Septim de-jungled Cyrodiil all the way back in the Second Era, when he ascended to godhood, then how come there were mentions of jungled Cyrodiil in Morrowind, which takes place several centuries after?
This is another thing that's covered by the apoth page, but tl;dr - whenever an untime event occurs and linearity collapses, the previous timelines are impossible to fully restore; rather, they are "revised" to accommodate the now-atemporal changes imposed upon them. So for example, in the endings of Daggerfall we have timelines X, Y, and Z that independently result in a Dragon Break, the Warp in the West - after the break concludes, the resulting timeline is XYZ, which incorporates elements of all the previous while doing its best to accommodate for the newly-imposed narrative.
In essence, the idea there is that while Tiber changed the land of Cyrodiil across all time, a change of this scale was impossible to fully hide - first-hand accounts AND records alike still persist in the rewritten timeline, creating a dissonance that people can subconsciously feel but not explain, but which gods and experienced mystics understand to be the product of the break's mending:
The tower split into eight pieces and Time broke. The non-linearity of the Dawn Era had returned. Tamriel slept through the disaster, which 'lasted one thousand and eight years', until the pieces of the tower came to rest on the mortal plane. Every culture on Tamriel remembers the Dragon Break in some fashion; to most it is a spiritual anguish that they cannot account for. - Where Were You When The Dragon Broke? (full version)
This idea of pieces of the previous timeline making it into the current was similarly MK's proposal for the Battle of Red Mountain and the death of Nerevar - the idea there being that, in the old timeline, the Tribunal did murder Nerevar and steal their godhood, but then their ascension revised the timeline so that they never killed him, yet first-hand eyewitnesses like Alandro-Sul and the account he passed down to the Ashlanders still survive the break's mending, and the Tribunal (being gods themselves) still remember the now-nonexistent timeline as though it happened.
Fan: I don't believe vivec did it, pure and simple. Alma might have, sotha might have, the guar with rabies might have, I don't care, but if vivec did it I think he would want you to cut his head off at the end or something. MK: Nope, I'm pretty sure he doesn't want that at all. He's been pretty clear on what he wants. Fan: It was a terrible, terrible thing. And none of them ever forgot it. MK: Not even after it never happened.
This idea was actually picked up on by Lawrence Schick, the loremaster for ESO from base game until 2019 (up to and including ESO Elsweyr). Schick was known to have written a number of texts referencing MK's more esoteric lore - some definitely better than others (cough Song of Pelinal Vol. 10 cough) - and two of these texts are directly addressing the subject of Cyrodiil's retconned climate, since as you may be aware Cyrodiil in ESO appears as it does in Oblivion, that is, fully dejungled.
These texts are The Heartland of Cyrodiil by Phrastus of Elinhir and Subtropical Cyrodiil: A Speculation by Lady Cinnabar of Taneth, two scholar NPCs found in the game who have an established intellectual rivalry, and together form a more cohesive whole.
Phrastus' story gives us the skeptic's account: the idea here is that Cyrodiil has never been a jungle, and indeed that any mention of such is the product of mistaken translation, mistranscription, or clerical error in the historical records. Note: Phrastus still acknowledges that the historical accounts of Cyrodiil being a jungle do exist in-universe, but disputes their veracity because they don't align with what he sees.
Much has been made of the classical author Heimskr's characterization of Cyrodiil as a jungle or rainforest [From The Many-Headed Talos]. My studies indicate that the use of the phrase "endless jungle" to describe Cyrodiil appears to be an error in transcription. Close study of the original, badly faded manuscript reveals that the phrase was miscopied, and should be more accurately rendered as "extensive uplands." The adjectives "an equatorial rain" [PGE1] as applied to the Nibenese forest do not appear in the original manuscript at all, and I would posit were added by the scribe in support of his previous erroneous use of "jungle." Lady Cinnabar of Taneth, of course, takes issue with this exegesis, but the flaws in her methods of scholarship have been well-documented elsewhere. - The Heartland of Cyrodiil
Then, when we turn to Lady Cinnabar's account, we get a much more esoteric proposal: that the climate of Cyrodiil did actually change, specifically under the influence of the White-Gold Tower - the very same tower that Tiber Septim would have become the master of upon his ascension. However, lacking the context on this future god-emperor, she instead suggests that the tower's effects may have been the product of collective will of the inhabitant peoples, and happened cyclically as the powers that be changed:
In doing this, what did the Ur-Elves hope to achieve? I would posit that, through their collective "possession" of such Towers in their realms, over time the Elves actually amended their local reality to conform to their desires. Thus the Summerset archipelago, in the sphere of the Crystal Tower, is a warm and paradisiacal domain perfectly adapted to the Altmer. And Cyrodiil, in the sphere of the even-more-powerful White-Gold Tower, became a warm and subtropical jungle—which suited the ease-loving Ayleids. But then the slaves of the Heartland High Elves rose up against their masters, conquered the valley of the Nibenay, and the Ayleids ruled no more. Thereafter, White-Gold Tower was the center of a human empire, peopled by Nedes and Cyro-Nords who originated in cooler, northern climes. And so the Tower of Cyrodiil responded to the desires of its new masters. And that, I believe, is the answer to how the Heartland changed from subtropical to temperate: because once Men ruled in Cyrodiil, the local reality changed to meet their needs and wishes. Changed slowly, perhaps, almost imperceptibly, but inexorably—until Cyrodiil became the realm of temperate forests and fields we now know. - Subtropical Cyrodiil: A Speculation
(this book, btw, is what informed the popular headcanon that Cyrodiil was terraformed by mortal hands - mostly as an attempt to further minimize the presence of MK's esoteric lore due to the climate in the lore community at the time, as the year was 2014 and the C0DA bullshittery was in its heyday)
This idea that the transformation of Cyrodiil from a jungle into its temperate climate hinges on the influence of the White-Gold Tower is further supported by the Sanctum Ophidia dungeon, where a vision of "Tamriel untainted by mortal influence" shows us a landscape of Cyrodiil covered in endless jungle, with the ruined White-Gold Tower looming on the horizon.
So what the fuck actually happened to Cyrodiil in-universe? Putting all the sources together, it seems that Tiber Septim's ascension to godhood and subsequent reshaping of the land echoed backwards in time, transforming Cyrodiil across all of Nirn's history to be a temperate climate - not due to its inherent superiority so much as due to the whims of its god-emperor who supposedly did it for the wishes of his people.
This resulted in minor confusions in the timeline going forward, as there now exist contradicting accounts of Cyrodiil's landscape from contemporary eyewitnesses, but has caused even more trouble in the past, where Cyrodiil remains reshaped even before Tiber Septim's mortal birth, leaving the perplexed mortals to speculate why their own accounts and observations are so irreconcilably different from the ones that predate them.
Out-of-universe? Cyrodiil's change was mostly aesthetic and done to capitalize on the rise of the LOTR franchise, and would not have been explained at all were it not for some of the writers who created jungle Cyrodiil wanting to preserve it by creating a watsonian explanation to match the doylist lack thereof.
So... yeah!
I think there's definitely a conversation to be had about the way the reshaping of Cyrodiil can be construed as a commentary on imperialism and exploitation of the land, or even the way that Fisher King as a trope is informed by the way a ruler's power and choice of policy directly and indirectly influences the well-being of their people, but ultimately it is worth noting that the landscape change was never conceptualized as a strict positive: rather, it was always first and foremost a display of power by Tiber, who had just cemented him as the god-king of all Tamriel after stomping the fuck out of Alinor.
Such cosmologically-authoritarian actions are nothing new for his specific character, and there are many sources and analyses that I could talk about here about the way TES interweaves historical and metaphysical imperialism both critically and uncritically, but this post is already a fucking behemoth so perhaps that's a topic for another time.
