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Can someone explain the difference between the “old” Nord religion and the one seen in Skyrim?
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A common criticism I hear about The Elders Scrolls 5: Skyrim is how they changed the Nord pantheon to the Imperial one.

But doing a brief foray into the lore, it seems the only differences seem to be the names they call their gods by, and maybe their religious practices?

Like, the old pantheon seemed to still worship the Divines, they just called Talos “Ysmir” and Kynareth “Kyne”, stuff like that?

Is there other big differences I’m missing?

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The gods in TES can be a tricky topic to pin down, especially in TESV, but the basic version is the old Nordic pantheon is not just the divines with different names. This same sort of confusion comes up in real historical polytheistic cultures too. A lot of people today read that most of the Roman gods were the equivalent of a corresponding Greek god and interpret that as them being the same exact thing under a different name. In reality, they were often very different in terms of actual worship and what they were supposed to provide to their supplicants. They just had similar spheres of influence and mythologies. It gets even more complicated in TES because all of these gods, and at least most of their different manifestations, are all real forces in Mundus.

In TES they are different aspects or manifestations of (some) of the same, larger gods who also manifest differently to other cultures on Nirn. So for example, old Nordic Kyne and the Kynareth of the Divines are both part of the same overall "Kyn-" goddess, as is the Khajiiti version, Khenarthi. However, Kyne, Kynareth, and Khenarthi all do very different things according to each culture's beliefs. Most importantly between the 8 Divines were created as an intentional synthesis of the Ayleid's Aldmeric gods and the Nordic gods by Alessia in the 1st Era. Essentially, the divines took some of the gods from the elves and the Nords and stripped out the aspects of both that were most concerned with fighting one another.

  • Akatosh is the draconic king of the gods and protector of Nirn and the Empire in the divines. He governs the ongoing flow of time. However, he is a fusion Auriel and Alduin.
    • The Elven Auriel is still associated with time as the god who created it but not consistently related to dragons and is taken as a heroic Aldmeri ancestor who led their people in war against Lorkhan and mankind during the Dawn Age before eventually re-ascending to godhood.
    • The old Nordic Alduin is associated with the end of time and is seen as the ultimate enemy of their good gods. So Akatosh takes the Elven belief in a good Auriel and the Nordic belief in a draconic Alduin and mashes them together into a pro-human dragon protector.
  • Kynareth is the goddess of winds and travelers. She doesn't really have an Aldmeri equivalent but she is a heavily watered down version of Kyne.
    • Some aspects of Kynareth as associated with plants and nature spirits like Spriggans are reminiscent of the Elven Yffre, but that is not a connection directly stated in game.
    • The Nordic Kyne is the warrior widow of Shor and creator and protector of humanity. She is still associated with winds and storms but in the sense of a colder, harsher, and more punishing weather.
  • Julianos is the god of magic and learning.
    • Again, there's no explicit Elven connection but he has similarities with Elven worship of Magnus as a god of magic.
    • The Nordic Jhunal is probably the least fleshed out of the Nordic gods, but he was associated with magic and hermetic orders.
  • Arkay is the god of death, but in a good way where he's the protector of deceased souls.
    • Elven Xarxes is a god of ancestry and record keeping that connects the living to those who went before.
    • Nordic Orkey also has elements of Malacath as a god associated with Orcs (even though the Nords also recognized the Daedra as Moloch). He is also credited with cursing mankind with their comparatively short lifespans. Personally, I think Orkey probably had more to do with Trinimac originally, but since he and Xarxes both had to do with death, you get Arkay.
  • Zenithar is a god of trade, commerce, and labor primarily, which honestly makes him one of the weirder divines compared to his Nordic and "Elven" aspects.
    • Z'en/Xen is a god worshipped by the Bosmer and Altmer, but more the former. He is a god of agriculture but also connected to a desire for vengeance. He also may have originated with the human Kothringi in Black Marsh rather than the Aldmer gods.
    • Tsun is the guardian of Shor's Hall we meet in TESV and god of trials against adversity. He was the shield thane of Shor who died in the Dawn Era war against the Elven gods. So, like Shor, the old Nords thought of him as a "dead" god.
  • Stendarr is the god of mercy and justice and a patron of those who fight against Daedra and the undead.
    • Aldmeri Stendarr is seen is as the apologist of man, the legitimate god who tries to convince elves to abandon their ancestral hatred of the human races.
    • Nordic Stuhn is the the brother of Tsun and a god of compassion, righteous rule, and the practice of "mercifully" ransoming prisoners of war back to their own side.
  • Dibella is the goddess of beauty and attraction in all their various supernatural, mundane, and sexual forms.
    • She has no real Elven equivalent to speak of, but is almost universal among human races.
    • Old Nordic Dibella is pretty similar, but also the "bed-wife" of Shor.
  • Mara is the goddess of devoted love, marriage, fertility, child bearing, and family stuff in general. She is generally considered the most universal deity on Nirn and is worshipped as almost identical in almost every culture. That said,
    • Aldmeri tradition considers her the wife of Auriel
    • Old Nordic tradition considers her the concubine of Shor
  • Talos - we all know Talos I'm not explaining him
    • He obviously has no elven equivalent
    • Ysmir is a pretty loose comparison. It is one of the names/titles associated with Tiber/Talos/Hjalit/whatever but not him exclusively. Ysmir is a title associated with other semi-divine Nord heroes. Most importantly we have Ysmir Wulfarth who may or may not be one of the three souls that merged together to form Talos in the 3rd Era, but definitely appears in very old Nord tales as a somewhat immortal hero who died and was resurrected at their times of greatest need.
  • The bonus, secret/forgotten tenth totally-not-a-divine-we-promise is Shezarr, the creator of Mundus and hero-god of mankind who battled the Elven gods in the Dawn Age. He was explicitly left out of the Divines by Alessia because he was a godly warlord whose primary role was leading man against Elf. He's also a dead god whose heart was torn out in the Dawn Era and can thus be conveniently "missing." His mythology is pretty universal but exact relationship to him varies culture to culture.
    • The Aldmeri Lorkhan is a cruel trickster who conned his fellow spirits into becoming part of the mortal world, imprisoning their elven descendants in the weakened state of mortality.
    • The Nordic Shor was originally the chief deity of their pantheon, who despite being dead, would come back in some form to aid them in times of crisis. He was the cunning mastermind behind the creation of the mortal world who gave mortals the gift of a life filled with pleasures to indulge and challenges to surpass, a gift which was rejected by the elves.
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How much the average person of any stripe would be aware of the history behind the Divines and how Alessia recreated the pantheon is open for debate. On one hand, it's part of one of the most important and famous events in their history. On the other, nobody really seems to talk about it and it was thousands of years ago by the 4E.

That said, Froki in TESV seems pretty average in terms of social standing and he's positively livid about the Cyrodiilization of his Pantheon. So it does seem like A) a largely 4E phenomenon and B) Something that at least older conservative Nords are still familiar with.

The Altmer national loathing for human imperial rule is pretty well established and its not a huge leap from "Talos is a false god because he's a man" to "the Divines are false gods created by men" as propaganda tools go.

In both cases, the mythology and stories associated with the gods are still reasonably well known to the general public, even if they now tell the stories using the Alessian names. Some of the stuff about Shor for the Nords seems to have mostly been absorbed into ideas about Talos by the 4E, but that seems more like a question of focus than remembering it.

Basically all of this would be elementary to most well educated people. I wrote a highly abbreviated summary of the differences between pantheons and almost everything to do with Alessia would just be Imperial History 101.

The exception is probably the bit about all the different manifestations of the gods being their own semi-unique independent beings in the cosmos. That's more in the realm of a few characters with exceptional metaphysical knowledge like Vivec and just possibly implied by most of the in-game texts. We can be pretty certain that it's true because we meet several gods directly over the course of the series, but most player actions don't really seem to reach general scholarship in Tamriel.

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