On the Arrrant Lies of The Septims' Most Deplorable Toady, My Former Employer, Bertrand Rielle, Duke of Camlorn
Apocrypha/Microfic written for r/teslore. Read it here or on AO3.
This angry pamphlet was published in the early years of the Septim Empire, during the reign of Emperor Pelagius I. Our one copy of this text comes from the Archives of the Adamantium Tower, and bears the simple notation "This is most diverting" in the hand of a Direnni scribe. The fate of the author is unknown.
I, Bazile Guimard, am a historian of the First Era, a role which means I am constantly thwarted in my researches by the imaginative genealogical efforts of the Breton aristocracy. Nowhere in Tamriel will you find such a mendacious crew as the nobles of this land. Pedigree means everything to them.
Don’t mistake my meaning here, certainly all nobles boast of their pedigrees. If you’re ever invited to a Summerset country estate for the weekend, I advise you to decline the invitation lest you succumb to the boredom of hearing an enthusiastic Altmer host monologue about his ancestors back to the Dawn. Breton stories of ancestral glory are much more palatable; largely because everyone is aware that most of them are hogswash. There is a tacit agreement among us Bretons not to look too closely into the actual facts of other people’s ancestors. Our friends and neighbours repay us the favour by not looking into our own.
Yes, pedigree means everything to Breton nobles. This does not entail respect for their ancestors. Instead, it means that they make up their pedigrees out of whole-cloth to suit their situation. The frustrated historian is left to sift through the nonsense of centuries to get at the truth.
And still, I’ve never met such an arrant liar as Bertrand Rielle, Duke of Camlorn.
The man doesn’t lack a grand ancestry. There’s been a remarkable consistency in the Rielle rule of Camlorn over generations. Even if they’re thrown out on their ears, eventually they turn up again. I can trace Duke Bertrand’s lineage back to the hero of Glenumbra Moors, Prince Aiden Direnni himself. That, however, does not please Bertrand. Of late years, he has cozied up to the Septim family and with that, reinvented his ancestry to be more palatable to the current fashion. The last time I visited the Duke, he was boasting about his heroic Nord ancestress, Inge Blood-Swan. Bertrand knows damn well that Inge was the husband of the first Duke of Camlorn, Robert Rielle, and that he is descended from that Duke’s younger sister, Yselle. At least Bertrand knew it as late as last year before he met a so-called antiquarian who informed him that Inge could be a woman’s name as well and introduced to Bertrand the lure of a new more Nordic descent. The Septims will surely be impressed by this one!
In this new version of Rielle family history, Inge Blood-Swan, descendant of Ysgramor, (and as Bertrand tells it, most of the other five hundred Companions), inspired her Breton husband Robert Rielle to throw off the hated scourge of elven oppression. How utterly ridiculous, and what an insult to the memory of the First Duke of Camlorn, the wily opportunistic manmer who carved out his own chunk of the Direnni Hegemony.
Bertrand has revoked my access to his archives and disrupted my work of two decades chronicling the rise of the manmer polity of Camlorn. But In an instance of what I can only see as Divine Justice, he has also lost the boot-licking hobbyist who started him down this path. Scarcely a week into his new job, this idiot reportedly borrowed a late-Hegemony Levies Scroll for a bit of light bedtime reading. The servants report they had to scrape his viscera off the ceiling.
Duke Bertrand is in search of a new lorekeeper. Since no reputable Breton scholar will now associate with him, perhaps he can install a travelling Nord street magician next, as is the Septim-approved fashion.
Notes:
Inspired by finding out Inge: a woman's name in Skyrim is more often male in Sweden/Norway. And by sorting through all sorts of dreadful amateur genealogy done by folks with big dreams of glorious ancestry and no skepticism or discernment.
The Pocket Guide to the Empire, First Edition, and the complaints of texts such as Frontier, Conquest, paint a picture of a period of Nord Fatherland nonsense in the early Septim Empire. If the Septims have loudly-declared roots in Atmora, would the Breton aristocracy pass up on acquiring some for themselves? The Breton aristocracy has a high turn-over and a strong self-aggrandizing streak. From the PGE1
Today, the social structure of the Bretons has divided itself into a poor middle class and destitute peasantry, a magical elite separate from their squalor, and an often incoherent jumble of nobility and ruling families above them all. It is beyond the small ambition of this pamphlet to address the latter in any better terms, for even the natives have difficulty distinguishing their leaders from one another. Indeed, it is an old joke among the Bretons: "find a new hill, become a king," and many have taken it to heart. Youths of all professions and trades in High Rock spend their free time in knightly pursuits, real and imagined, performing good deeds and the like for all and sundry, in oft-vain efforts to achieve, one day, a noble status.
Once you've found that new hill, you need a pedigree, I figure.
There are two more references to the PGE1 here: Altmer commenter YR's allegation that Tiber Septim hired a fake street magician to run his Thu'um college, and the dangers of trying to read Direnni Hegemony official documents without the proper ciphers.
