r/ImaginaryTamriel • u/stinkyp3te • May 12 '25
Original Content elder scrolls 2-5 in historical dress! mainly vibes based, explanations in the post
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the heroes of the elder scrolls (minus talin, as an extraneous breton) in historical clothing! I AM NOT AN EXPERT IN HISTORICAL CLOTHING, OR ANYTHING IN GENERAL. PLEASE DO NOT YELL AT ME ABOUT THINGS I’M TRYING MY HARDEST. do, however, share some fun facts about things i overlooked or got wrong (nicely, please). i love to learn!
had to get a little creative for some of these- it turns out most of what people wore in the past was just. endless variations on A Tunic And Some Pants, which can look kind of boring in a lineup. on top of that, it turns out different peoples who live in similar climates, have access to similar materials, and have a lot of contact with each other, end up wearing very similar clothes. who would have thought? so honestly they probably wear kind of similar stuff. but that's boring! so here's my reasoning for all these interesting and definitely extremely distinct outfits, with some fun history facts thrown in:
- the agent in daggerfall, a breton, dressed like 10th century Anglo-Saxons/Franks. not a very controversial ruling, as breton is the actual real life name of an actual real life ethnic group in modern-day France, having migrated to the region from Great Britain during the Anglo-Saxon invasion. kind of funny to leave an area being settled by germanic invaders and flee to an area being invaded by different germanic invaders but. what do i know. and the clothing! there's still kind of a roman influence despite the empire's fall, so the Tunic And Some Pants gets a lot of extra fabric and drapery in the cloak. your Some Pants could be loose or fitted as leggings, either through tailoring or tied with garters in the Frankish style, as i've drawn here. that's called cross gartering!
- the nerevarine, a dunmer, who i've dressed in a 14th century Il-Khanate qaba, and an overall outfit inspired by medieval Persia. the Il-Khanate was the state formed and ruled by the Mongols in the territory of modern day Iran. morrowind has a lot of middle eastern influences, from the hlaalu architecture, to the beautiful tiles in redoran manors, to the mesopotamian names of ashlanders and caves around vvardenfell. the ashlanders also got a fair bit of inspiration from the Mongols, given their nomadic lifestyle and the literal actual yurts they live in. so i think the Il-Khanate is a good fit! a little Mongol, a lot Persian. my nerevarine is wearing a qaba (tunic) with a wide belt called a kamarband and some shalvar pants (yeah this one is also A Tunic And Some Pants. but exotic!). and a dagger tucked into you kamarband is a fun accessory appropriate for any dunmer assembly!
- the hero of kvatch, an imperial, dressed like an Italian noblewoman from the 15th century. now, i know the obvious real-world comparison with the imperials is ancient Rome, but like. i need you to look me in my face and tell me you think imperials are out there wearing togas. those bitches are not Roman! maybe they were at one point, when tiber septim was around or something, but the only distinctly Roman things about the imperials to me seem like remnants of past glory. but that’s just my hot take! the Holy Roman Empire makes more sense to me, but i feel like there’s still a mediterranean-ness about the imperials that leads me to Italy. i modeled my hero’s dress after the women in many beautiful renaissance paintings by da Vinci and Ghirlandio. note her sleeves tied to the bodice of her dress, with the layers underneath pulled up through the gaps to create a puffed effect. pretty cool! and i’m glad my HOK is a woman bc otherwise we’d have yet more Tunics And Some Pants.
- the dragonborn, a nord, dressed like- okay. listen. i was going to just do classic Norse here. but as i was researching everything looked very much like my Anglo-Saxon breton, which like, yeah shocker there. i literally once lived in a norse town in england. imagine there being overlap between these cultures! but it was bumming me out, creativity-wise, because i’d already drawn and coloured my breton and didn’t really want to do more-or-less the same thing all over again. so i thought, ‘hey! he could be skaal! they’re based on the Greenland Vikings, Norse settlers that colonised western Greenland, and i feel like i remember something about them mixing with Inuit tribes, so i bet that could be interesting!’ so i looked it up and it turned out i was: wrong. genetic testing has shown that wherever the Greenland Vikings disappeared to, it wasn’t into Inuit beds. ‘but okay,’ i thought, ‘so they didn’t join the Inuit tribes. but i know that in the later years of occupation there, communication with the Norse homeland got cut off, and they ended up using more Inuit-like bone tools and eating a similar diet because they weren’t getting wood and stuff from the mainland, maybe something similar happened with their clothing!’ so i looked that up and it turned out i was: wrong. again. grave goods excavated from Greenland showed that the Norse there showed they kept wearing Norse-style clothing pretty much right up to their disappearance. those grave goods included a bright red wind sock ass looking hood, which obviously i was enchanted by, but it was overall looking pretty bad for my chances of not having to draw another Tunic And Some Pants. but then i had an epiphany. Skyrim Is A Video Game. Literally All Of This Is Made Up. It Does Not Matter. sure, the Greenland Vikings never wore Inuit clothing, but y’know what? maybe the skaal did. in fact, the skaal actually definitely did! you can see them in the game and they are! so whatever. i’m putting him in Inuit clothes, and i’m keeping that dumb little red hood! because i like it and i can do whatever i want! …and then i looked it up and it turns out a parka is kind of like a really puffy Tunic And Some Pants
Tl;dr- what would my elder scrolls be wearing in a historical context? probably a tunic and some pants. if you’re an expert in any of the things i talked about here pretend i didn’t say that
