Dunmerofskyrim - Blog Posts

Any of the three options would serve for me, personally: the replay retcon,  a "choose your own" timeline, or just kinda understanding the real-world reasons behind the whole thing on a meta-level outside of the narrative. All of those work. And honestly, the second option (leaving it to the reader to mentally redistribute the story episodes across whatever constitutes a more believable expanse of time for them) has been my way of keeping the sequence of events and the flow of time in line with the tone of the rest of the thing all along. You know what I mean? Damn near everything else about the world depicted in Simra's journal feels so credible, despite the fantastical setting, that the idea of, say, getting from hold to hold in a matter of a few days or nights stood out in all the wrong ways.

Not that I'm criticizing! *nervous shuffling*

Anyway, as for early volume headcanons, how about this one:

Simra's first journal was canonically lost, along with his father's sword, when he was captured and stripped of all his possessions by the Stormcloak patrol that took him at the Dunmeth pass. If Simra really has been purposefully writing for an audience all this time, and his writings are, at least in part, a calculated bid for posthumous control of his legacy and the chance to eulogize himself... then I imagine he'd regard the loss as a great one. Given how uncomfortable he is with anything that threatens his agency, even symbolically, my bet is that he'd move to retake his position as arbiter of his own legend as soon as possible. After all, the absence of that journal would leave a significant void in the story at a pivotal juncture—the beginning, his beginning—and I doubt he'd be content to allow anyone else to fill it. Regardless of whether the gap was bridged with truth, lies, or conjectures, they wouldn't be his.

So he'd rewrite it. And that could account for both the comparatively grand, mythologizing style of and the dating inconsistencies in the journal we've come to know as the first. Even ordinary people have a tendency to dramatize their lives in the retelling of them, let alone the re-retelling, agendas notwithstanding. Distance from the times in question could conceivably muddle his recollection of the exact dates involved as well. Either that, or it's obfuscation—all caught up with Simra's own peculiar blend of vanity and self-deprecation.

That's it! That's my theory.

http://dunmerofskyrim.tumblr.com/post/85829308915/dunmerofskyrim-dunmerofskyrim

carletoncolton replied to your post “OOC: Timeframe”

Well … it seems like something to ret-con to me. I’d work on changing the dates; the other explanations for the inconsistencies feel a little forced. Really, why would Simra...

Thank you for answering this so thoroughly! Your response was fascinating. Little Simra poring over charcoal glyphs scratched over the hearth is one of my favorite bits of imagery so far. But most of all I relished the chance to learn more about Simra’s mother. As with Soraya, her presence is felt more immediately through her impact on Simra and his father than through the rare glimpses we get of who she was otherwise - for me, the effect is reminiscent of the feeling you get craning your neck to see something through a barred window or the slats of a fence. What details you do manage to pick out are all the more vivid for the strain of searching. For instance, I remember returning again and again in my mind for days after I’d read it to the image of a soft leather jacket left behind with Verru (unfinished?) after her death, that she’d intended as a wedding gift for Soraya.

I have to confess, though, about an hour after I sent my question off I suddenly remembered that I already knew that Simra’s parents were literate - he writes them both at least once, doesn’t he? And the letters for his father are couched in a rather touchingly careful Dunmeris, even. So I felt like a huge dork all morning. (⌒_⌒;) Guess I should have slept on it instead of rolling out of bed in the middle of the night to ask, huh?

If I remember correctly, most Ashlanders are illiterate, forgoing a written tradition in favor of an oral one. Assuming that Simra's parents follow convention in this, then how did Simra come by his letters? And what does Simra's mother in particular, as a former wisewoman-in-training, think of his unorthodox affinity for the written word?

[This is a very good question. Mostly because it does something my favourite questions do. It asks something for which I don’t already have an answer. But it asks something that needed to be asked. It’s something useful to me. So already, thanks for that.Simra’s parents were travellers of Ashlander extraction. They didn’t spend all their time with the Zainab. So yes, while they were raised within and each participated within an oral tradition - particularly on the part of Ishar, his mother - they were literate to one degree or another.It was actually Ishar, rather than Simra’s father, who was the better linguist, reader, and writer. His father never learnt more than a few things outside of Dunmeris. Her background gave her more of a respect for knowledge, however the knowers store it and keep it known, orally or literarily.Bringing up her children in Skyrim, it was she that educated them in mixed Tamrielic and Dunmeris: reading, writing, arithmetic, bits and pieces of history, theology. She would not have her children go without the skills that they’d need to live as something other than Ashlanders.Admittedly, young Simra paid more attention than Soraya. This learning did not come from reading, however, but through listening. Even Simra’s literacy comes from watching his mother scratch letters and words in charcoal above their fireplace. And the oral nature of these lessons is perhaps part of the reason Simra has such a good verbal memory.In short, Simra’s no Zainab. He’s Dunmer, and part of Morrowind’s diaspora. He’s of Zainab blood, raised by parents who were raised Zainab. He himself admits that he’s a Dunmer of Skyrim, however — inheritor of some Ashlander traditions, but barred off from others, and proud of both.So he’s an unorthodox Dunmer in one sense. But he was raised by an unorthodox womer, after all — why d’you think she didn’t ever become a full-fledged wisewoman? For the most part it was Ishar who refused to acclimatise to this new place and new culture, his heart living with his wife and children, but belonging back in the Grazelands.]

So I saw settlingspace's magical girl!Simra a few days ago, and knew that that was a bandwagon I had to jump on.

Simra Hishkari (dunmerofskyrim) belongs to sunderlorn.