oh hell yes you fell for my trap
So, little known fact! It's very likely that the Bosmer and the Khajiit are related, alluded to in Words of Clan Mother Ahnissi.
Now this isn't the only account of the origin of the Bosmer, there are at least two others. Their own is very vague, speaking of the Ooze- a primordial shape-shifting formless force they came prior to the Green Pact. The other is published by the Imperial Geographical Society (and was likely sourced from a scholar named Archivist Endaranande, from around the Second Era) that claims they are descendants of Aldmer settlers from "Old Ehlnofey" (another name for Aldmeris). Neither of these accounts discuss the Khajiit at all. So let's break it down.
I'll start with the "Aldmer settlers" theory first, since it's the one that's often repeated as the whole truth by fans (in my experience) and the one that bothers me the most. From what I can tell, the earliest record of this theory within lore was published circa 2E 582 by an Altmer named Archivist Endaranande in a very short essay titled Valenwood: A Study. This document is essentially a small propaganda piece that touts the necessity of the Bosmer's inclusion in the First Aldmeri Dominion while simultaneously referring to them as "unruly and naive", and "willing to bend to the will of others" compared to their more "dignified" Altmer cousins.
The Bosmer welcome those who come to Valenwood seeking refuge from other lands. In this regard, they are quite unlike their pure Altmer cousins. While we seek to retain our dignity, the Bosmer are quite willing to bend like saplings to the will of others.
Though they are unruly and naive, these Wood Elves are an integral part of the Dominion, and must be retained in order for our alliance to flourish.
Easy to dismiss, given the tone, but this theory is then also referenced in Pocket Guide to the Empire, 3rd Edition, both in The Wilds Remain: Valenwood and All the Eras of Man: A Comprehensive History of Our History, published circa 3E 432, over seven-hundred years later. Now to be fair, if we follow release order, Pocket Guide to the Empire came first, published as a physical book with the Collector's Edition of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Valenwood: A Study was published as a base game lore page in The Elder Scrolls Online, almost exactly eight years later. A textbook retcon, but an interesting one, as it creates an assumed narrative about how this idea came to be so widespread and turns it into a perfect example of unreliable narration. What had started off as a small piece of wartime propaganda eventually snowballed into something entire historical societies (initially in service of Tiber Septim, by the way) considered to be unadulterated truth and used in the education of the wider Imperial population.
So what do the Bosmer think? Well, truth be told, that's... complicated. People are never a monolith of culture, a reality often reflected in the Elder Scrolls, and such remains true for the Bosmer, who cannot agree on even the meaning of the tenets the Green Pact, never mind their origin. This is further complicated by the fact that they largely do not hold the same significance for written records that other Tamrielic cultures do (their histories being kept by Spinners, often mired in metaphor and fable-like storytelling) and that they at one point had assimilated a large majority of the Ayleid refugees fleeing the Alessian Slave Rebellion in the First Era, likely adapting aspects of their culture in the process. Their agreed-upon history tends to be this: Y'ffre first shaped the Ooze into the Green (Valenwood) and then shaped the Wood Elves, giving them the gift of story and the Green as their home, so long as they kept to the Green Pact (a good iteration of this story can be found here).
[Quick note: Aurbic Enigma 4: The Elden Tree gets an honorable mention here because it goes into the growing of Green-Sap and the nature of the Perchance Acorn, but I am not including it in the current discussion because that document's true focus is actually Anumeril and the Towers, the founding of Elden Root and the Bosmer serving more as a backdrop.]
Let's circle back to Clan Mother Ahnissi.
This is one of my favorite lore documents in the Elder Scrolls, mostly because I'm a sucker for a good creation myth and have a soft spot for the Khajiit, but also because according to this version of the Khajiiti creation myth, the Bosmer were shaped from the same group of Ehlnofey as the Khajiit, specifically in this paragraph:
But Y'ffer heard the First Secret and snuck in behind Azurah. And Y'ffer could not appreciate secrets, and he told Nirni of Azurah's trick. So Nirni made the deserts hot and the sands biting. And Nirni made the forests wet and filled with poisons. And Nirni thanked Y'ffer and let him change the forest people also. And Y'ffer did not have Azurah's subtle wisdom, so Y'ffer made the forest people Elves always and never beasts. And Y'ffer named them Bosmer. And from that moment they were no longer in the same litter as the Khajiit.
Now, I could get into this being reinforced by several details threaded in both Khajiit and Bosmer lore (such as one of the Khajiit furstocks so closely resembling Bosmer that they are often mistaken for them, or the Bosmer's inexplicable worship of Baan Dar- a Khajiiti trickster spirit), but I already sound like a conspiracy theorist nutcase.
I don't think Words of Clan Mother Ahnissi is the pure truth, either, but I do think it helps paint a broader picture of the histories of these two groups of people. The actual truth is probably somewhere in between, the likely scenario being that the Bosmer and Khajiit share a common ancestor in a specific group of Ehlnofey before being split off into the Khajiit and what I call the proto-Bosmer. These proto-Bosmer then mix with the Aldmer when they arrive on Tamriel in the early Merethic Era, and later with the Ayleids in the First Era, and their connection to the Khajiit is lost to the Wood Elves through time and colonization, while being preserved in Khajiiti oral tradition.
There's no grand revelation about TES in here, it's just a bit of world building that I find really interesting and wish people discussed more, so make of it what you will. If nothing else, I appreciate you taking the time to listen to me ramble!
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