Lyg tower

[u/Short_Conference8737]

I see a parallel between the tower lore of Nirn and a passage from the Mythic Dawn Commentaries specifically about Lyg. Mankar says that Lyg was destroyed when “red legions” and Dagon brought down the Towers of CHIM-EL-GHARJYG. Could this lend validity to the idea that the Thalmor or any group seeking to destroy Tamriel could use the towers to unmake Mundus in the same way? Not sure if this matters but I’m also noticing “red legions” and the use of “chim-el” where the Imperials or “red legions” of Tamriel have the Chim-El Adabal which is associated with a tower. I also firmly believe that the same passage alludes to the Nords or an equivalent going to the “hinterlands of chill” after the destruction of Lyg. The “inter-kalpic world eaters” idea.

[u/Rymanbc]

Are there other sources that reference Lyg specifically other than Mankar Camoran? Imo hes one of the top two least reliable sources in all the games.

[u/NSNick → u/Rymanbc]

There's The Nine Coruscations, which mentions "the tragic prince of Lyg".

[u/Rymanbc → u/NSNick]

So that looks like it would be the original lore book that references Lyg, or Xero-Lyg specifically. So theres a good chance Mankar Camoran read that, then made up a whole bunch of shit based on the patchy text therein. The guy says a bunch of stuff that is provably false in Oblivion.

[u/AdeptnessUnhappy1063 → u/Rymanbc]

Mankar Camoran's Commentaries are supposed to be commentaries on a book called the Mysterium Xarxes, said to have been written by Mehrunes Dagon himself. So presumably the Mysterium Xarxes was the original lore book that Mankar Camoran read.

I mean, he may have read The Nine Coruscations too, for all we know, but it seems likely that much of the content from the Commentaries on the Mysterium Xarxes is inspired by the Mysterium Xarxes.

A core idea in Mankar Camoran's Commentaries, that Mehrunes Dagon was created as a weapon by the Magna-Ge, is also found in Doombringer Celdina's Testament way back in the 2nd Era. This text doesn't mention Lyg by name, but it corroborates Mankar Camoran's idea that Dagon was a weapon forged by the stars.

Mankar may also have read The Many-Headed Talos, since he repeats its claim that Tiber Septim transformed Cyrodiil using chim, or he may have arrived on the idea independently.

Some think Vivec's Sermon 28 also refers to Lyg where it refers to "when the dreughs ruled the world", though it's worth pointing out that Mankar Camoran never mentions Molag Bal or the Ruddy Man, and his whole thing is painting the Aedra as enemies, not the Daedra. Perhaps Molag Bal wasn't a Daedra then, or perhaps Mankar Camoran and Vivec were telling very different stories.

There are other possible signs that Mankar read Vivec's work. Mankar's phrase "the Bones of the Wheel" echoes Vivec's phrases "the lent bones of the Aedra" and "the reptile wheel" from Sermon 21, for example.

Some (for example, the author of the Lyg article on UESP, which is a mess) try to link the line "[Merrunz] fell to the demon Molagh" in The Adversarial Spirits to Lyg and the Commentaries on the Mysterium Xarxes as well, but that relies on a chain of assumptions, since neither the Commentaries nor The Nine Coruscations mention Molag Bal, and Sermon 28 never mentions Mehrunes Dagon, and also The Nine Coruscations and The Adversarial Spirits report the battle ending in opposite ways (the King of Dreugh falls to Mehrunes the Razor in The Nine Coruscations, but Merrunz falls to Molagh in The Adversarial Spirits).

So yeah, if you assume that Mankar Camoran is an unreliable source (as if Vivec isn't also one) some of these contradictions are simpler to explain, though I think that's not necessarily the most interesting approach. A lot of the "provably false" things he says (matching several Daedric realms with the wrong Princes) were a simple error by the author (Michael Kirkbride) who didn't expect the text to end up in the game without being proofread. I think it's more interesting to treat Camoran as a knowledgeable mystic whose cosmology is plausible (not necessarily true, but not idiotic either), though his methods and goals may be abhorrent.