#nedes

[elderscrollsconceptart]

Nedic Tapestry of Celestials

Concept art for The Elder Scrolls: Online

Are by Corey Loving

[tastesoftamriel]

Dear Esteemed Talviel,

Some Imperial nobles will be comeing to my camp soon to see if they should support my -RIGHTFUL!- claim to the empire and i am looking to inpress them. In particular i am looking for food that would be interesting to the palets of these "refined" humans, while also showing my knowledge of food from the days of Al-Esh.

Many Thanks, Morihaus VII, RIGHTFUL Emporer pf Cyrodiil.

Dear...*squints at the politically subversive time-traveling letter, wondering how this keeps happening* esteemed Morihaus,

Admittedly, I had to delve deep into the library at the College of Winterhold to discover anything about First Era Nedic Cyrodiilic cuisine. Not much survives in the way of culinary records from the time of Alessia, but what we do know can be compared against the food of their Ayleid masters as a point of reference.

As slaves under the Ayleids, the races of Men were granted little in the way of luxury. As such, their newfound freedom meant that a whole new world was opened to them; food was no longer based on scraps and the dregs of what the Ayleids did not want, and liberation from slavery meant a dizzying expanse of culinary possibilities never before enjoyed by the Men of Cyrodiil.

Nedic food in particular may be of interest in the recreation of early Cyrodiilic cuisine. Some speculate that it is the precursor to Nordic and north Nibenay cuisine as we know it today, and I refer to traditional Cyrodiilic gastronomy in particular to recreate the cuisine of the Cyrodiilic Nedes of the First Era. However, Alessia's rebellion spanned the the Province, and I also take into account Nibenese and Blackwood culinary traditions in this speculation. Tying them together creates an interesting, harmonious constellation of flavours that, when considered, is the birth of the Imperial cuisine we know today.

Unlike the Ayleids, the Men at the time ate what was readily available to them, and developed a culinary tradition based on what they could either forage or hunt for themselves, or ate the food that the Ayleids did not want. Animal byproducts and much meat in particular was of little interest to the Ayleids, and thus became a staple part of the diets of their slaves. Milk, eggs, and meat were thus initially favoured, though liberation meant that Men were granted access to the gastronomic delights enjoyed by their former masters. However, for fairly obvious reasons, beef was not preferred due to its ties to Morihaus. They also began the cultivation of grain in earnest for the first time, thus expanding the variety of starches in their diet to include bread and noodles, as a change from the simple potatoes and root vegetables they were used to.

Over time, palates refined to take into consideration the full breadth of what food the Province had to offer. Whilst still being primarily meat- and grain-based, fish and vegetable dishes that were once reserved for the Ayleids expanded into the diets of Men in the region, who developed their own preferred flavour profiles, which were rich and full-bodied in comparison to the light flavours enjoyed by the Ayleids. Furthermore, archaeological excavations have uncovered bottles used for wine and Cyrodiilic brandy, indicating that the Imperial love for these beverages stretches well back through history.

From what we have gathered, I have thus created a small banquet menu that reflects post-Alessian Cyrodiilic cuisine of the First Era befitting nobles of the time.

Starters

Honeyed cave-aged hard cheese, with millet crackers

Smoked Rumare slaughterfish pâté, with vegetable crudités

Garlic breadsticks, with black olive tapenade

South Nibenay oyster omelette, with hot peppers

Mains

Whole roast pig, with fruit and nut stuffing

Nibenese mudcrab gratin, with whipped goat cheese

Rare venison steak, with garlic and Jerall Mountains juniper gravy

Fried duck Blackwood style, with a selection of spiced sauces

Dessert

Coffee cake, with Blackwood coffee liqueur and mascarpone

Brandy raisin trifle, with brandy custard

Nibenese honey and ricotta slice, with chopped nuts

Caramel buns, with butterscotch creme patissiere

[bellonathedragonborn]

Morrigan again!

[drnightstone]

0 votes and 1 comment so far on Reddit

Who wants Nedic lore? You want Nedic lore! This is a five-part writing project I’ve been working on for a while, in hopes to expand Nedic culture via taking all of known lore and mixing it with personal and fandom ideas. I will be posting one part per day this week so enjoy the Week of the Nedes! A special thanks to @ladynerevar for giving me her precious time and aiding me in hammering out all the rough edges!

[delemis]

Early Merethic Tamriel: The finished product. Note the curious absence of recorded settlements in most of early Morrowind and Skyrim, perhaps due to their well-recorded hostility (the existence of dragons, perhaps?)

[alandrosul]

ok, breton time!

so at first glance, bretons seem pretty boring, yeah? pretty standard Boring White Fantasy Dudes, with Kings and Knights and Castles and Royal Squabbling, right? while they feature some of those aesthetic qualities, they are certainly much more interesting than that, even taking into consideration the little lore we actually have in canon. and, of course, i am feverishly willing to flip an entire aviary of birds towards the writers for the elder scrolls and make up some of my own shit, b/c sometimes there’s little gaps that need a little filling.

so let’s get down to basics by starting with square one: what are they and where’d they come from? i think it’s fairly well understood that they’re sort of the “half-elves” of the setting, despite looking nothing like elves, really. they’re the result of a bunch of nedes (a race of men probably from atmora who were especially populous in the deathlands, aka hammerfell) making their way into high rock and finding out some elves already lived there. 

those elves were altmers who’d found the adamantine tower (where convention took place, establishing linear time and also shooting lorkhan’s heart across tamriel) and kinda decided to settle around there, while basically the rest of the elves decided to go and make their own towers elsewhere. this clan of elves who stayed in high rock were known as clan direnni. it seems that with little conflict the nedes kinda just fell into a subservient role to the direnni in a strict feudal system, with the elves at the top and the nedes at the bottom.

part of this seemingly accidental arrangement (i’m not sure how i feel about the supposed “ease” with which the nedes were enslaved - ahem, “integrated”) was a particular privilege the direnni enjoyed: the “perquisite of coitus”. this kinda gross rule/law made it that any mer could at any time “engage in recreational intercourse” with any man (i’m using this term gender-neutrally) they wanted.

apparently the direnni didn’t know how protection worked or just didn’t care. see, in the tes universe, when two races can interbreed, the offspring always follows the race of the mother, with some traits from the father inherited. so we start seeing a bunch of biracial children result from this “perquisite”; those with elvish mothers seem to have all been integrated into the direnni society, whereas the ones with nedeish mothers are rejected by their elvish fathers. buuuuut these elvish-fathered nedes, due to having elvish blood, begin to be considered higher-classed than the rest of the nedes. they’re still rejected by the direnni, and at some point it seems the perquisite is canceled, but at that point there’s already a lot of nedes with elvish blood.

so over time, since they can’t mate with the elves anymore, the beratu, which is ehlnofex for “half,” begin to mate with the other, pure-blooded nedes. eventually, the nedes go extinct simply through this integration (as well as through war elsewhere, esp. in hammerfell w/ the ra gada), in a similar way to how we likely made neanderthals go extinct by interbreeding with them.

a more complicated feudal system then arose, where bloodlines and legacy become extremely important to high rock society. the direnni were at the top, then there was a spectrum of power from bretons (the eventual corruption of the ehlnofex beratu) with the most elvish blood being dukes and counts, to those with hardly any at all being serfs. eventually, the overzealous expansion of territory by the direnni overcame them, and they fell back to the isle of balfiera in the iliac bay. a bunch of nords flooded into the northern territories the direnni couldn’t hold anymore. 

but the bretons and their new feudal system went on just fine without them, and eventually they remained the dominant force in high rock, despite the nords from the north, the redguards from the south, and the orcs from orsinium. apparently, this wasn’t even done through war - it was done through trade, and also by further assimilating the nordic population.

okay, everything i’ve said so far is canon history stuff. you’re probably here for more interesting speculation, though. trust me, i just had to get this stuff out of the way for a bit of context.

so we know that the bretons are really magical b/c of their elvish heritage. we know they’re very sectarian, having had likely almost twenty (i couldn’t find an actual number, sorry) contesting kingdoms and city-states constantly squabbling over territory prior to the warp in the west, which brought us down to five. they’re also pretty big in the empire business, seeing as probably most of the emperors have been bretons, and high rock have always been avid supporters of the empire. (except maybe in the 4th era? i seem to remember them seceding, but i might’ve been thinking about hammerfell, b/c i can’t find anything about it.)

bretons worship basically the nine divines, but they also have a few other gods. they worship magnus, the guy who left mundus and didn’t bother to close the sun-shaped hole behind him; jephre, which is another name for y’ffre, which you can’t convince me isn’t pronounced “yiffer”; and phynaster, who uh, sounds important, but.....doesn’t seem important. (they also acknowledge sheor, aka “the bad man,” which was a way of the altmer demonizing the nords’ shor. there could possibly be breton cults devoted to him, but we just don’t know.)

magnus makes sense, seeing as he’s the god of magic and all. jephre though, he’s interesting. he/she was worshiped by the altmer and falmer as well, but he’s most notably worshiped by the bosmer. he’s the guy that started the green pact and all! BUT, even more notable than that: he’s not an aedra, or even just some ancestor spirit. he’s an earthbone! meaning that she completely sacrificed herself to create and stabilize nirn and the mundus.

but, you may ask, why’re the bretons so invested in him? they’re pretty distant from valenwood, and they were ruled by altmer, not bosmer! to which i say, well, the altmer worshiped him too! and you say oh. yeah, right. i forgot.

BUT that would be giving you the short answer. the better answer? they worship him b/c he’s right under their feet! the adamantine tower’s smack dab in the middle of high rock! that’s where convention happened, and the spirits who made nirn decided what to do about it! that’s where they got separated into aedra, daedra, magna-ge, ehlnofey, and earthbones. 

so, depending on how you interpret earthbones, or how they work or whatever, you could say y’ffre either became an earthbone in high rock, or is the earthbone of high rock. i’d argue against the latter, tho’, b/c he’s obviously the earthbone of valenwood, which i think most people will agree with. but....her influence definitely lingered in the place where she made that choice. especially considering that place was literally the first freakin’ tower, one of the pins holding up reality on nirn.

and this definitely has an influence on a lot of the things we know about high rock and the bretons. we know there’s a lot of magical creatures not found many other places in high rock, and we know that there are witches covens there, and we have a hint that there is some kind of group called the druids of galen.

okay, what? druids of galen? what’s that? oh, it’s fine if you don’t know, they’ve been mentioned literally only once in the entire series. when you pick to be a breton in the first game, arena, it mentions them. literally just name drops them and doesn’t elaborate. that’s not a lot to go off of, but that’s never stopped me before.

first, let’s get this out of the way: the whole “beratu” etymology is obviously just a retroactive excuse for the fact that they’re called bretons after the real-life bretons of northern france. the bretons were/are a celtic culture, in the same vein as the irish and scottish and welsh. and if you know anything about celtic cultures, you’ll know that they traditionally had people called druids, who were sort of like clerics or wizards (as in “wise-men,” not dumbledore), and are associated with the various stone circles in the british isles, like stonehenge. and, nowadays, thanks to a lot of fantasy stories of the past century or so, druids have come to be heavily associated with nature and magic associated with protecting nature and stuff.

so it’s fair to say that the “druids of galen” were probably modeled after that more contemporary concept of druids. then who the heck is galen? i reckon he was an elf or half-elf nede who somehow discovered or invented a kind of nature magic akin to that of the bosmer. the way i reckon it to have worked was that the trees they worshiped were somehow “connected” to the earthbones, probably through the roots. and then he started an order of druids to continue the practice.

what’s really interesting is the fact that this magic likely somehow manipulated or used the power of the earthbones. we have other canon examples of this kind of magic: the thuum of the nords, the tonal architecture of the dwemer, and i think also the spinners of the bosmer. this earthbone-magic is extremely potent, b/c the earthbones are a huge part of what lays down the laws of reality. if you can make them do what you want, either by yelling really hard, banging metal together, or telling weird stories, you possess REALLY great power. 

(and here’s something i just found out while writing this: apparently there’s another reference to the spinners in the eso crown store, which notes that “in high rock, [they’re called] the vicars of jephre”. which is just a really huge bonus for me!)

i think that the druids of galen were able to somehow tap into a similar power to the spinners through their nature worship. i once also suspected that this cult might’ve had political influence in getting rid of the direnni, but i’m not really sold on that anymore. it definitely seems, though, that by probably the 2nd era or so, the druids of galen were no more. (perhaps they or their remnants became the vicars of jephre, but i’m not sure if they hold the same power or recognition as they did as the druids. if they do, they likely are no longer able to tap into the power of the earth-bones, and are simply a religious cult to jephre.)

there’s also the witch wyrds, or covens, of high rock, which may also be descendants of galen’s traditions. there’s a few notable ones, such as the skeffington coven of phrygia (mentioned in the 2920 series), the beldama wyrd, who the book “the witch covens of northern high rock” outright claims to worship jephre as an ehlnofey and earthbone that established the laws of nature, and the glenmoril wyrd, most members of which having become hagravens. 

i’m very tired and have written a lot, so i’m going to stop here. i might talk more about bretons at a later time, most notably their culture, which i kinda seemed to skip here. an accident, but one which gives me a bit of more solid topic for next time.

[bellonathedragonborn]

Pretty sure this is the other way around but still... pretty good meme.

[bellonathedragonborn]

It’s Sam!