I Must Inquire My Dearest Friend, Who Is This Talos You Speak Of?

I must inquire my dearest friend, who is this Talos you speak of?

Right okay. Nerding out alert.

The Elder Scrolls is a beloved video game franchise produced by Bethesda Studios. It is renowned for its intricate and plentiful lore and history, and for the care and thoughts put in creating a believable world.

One of the tenets of the Elder Scrolls is that everything has its mundane -scientific- explanation and often multiple different divine explanations, for each religions and cultural beliefs in the games.

Of course, nothing is left to chance, so the elder scrolls has a universe creation theory —a interpretation of how the world was created— for each of those religious traditions.

Often they overlap, contradict each other, and with the added bonus that magic, and fantasy races are an integral part of the story, it creates a believable and, most importantly interesting background for the story.

In one of these traditions —the imperial pantheon— there are nine gods, or divines as they are called. They are, Akatosh, Dibella, Zenithar, Stendarr, Arkay, Mara, Kynareth, Julianos and finally Talos. The first eight are gods dating from before the universe’s creation, at least according to the imperials priests. The last, Talos, was formerly a human, the Emperor of Tamriel, Unificator, Tiber Septim.

Now all of this is very much subject to interpretation, because even the games offers contradictory lore, indeed, in the fifth edition —The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim— there is a great deal of religious tension between adherents to the imperial pantheon and to the elvish pantheon, which acknowledges the eight divines but not Talos. Surely has nothing to do with the atrocities our favourite man turned god committed of elvish kind.

All this to say, that in game, you will often find the previous quote; “By Talos this can’t be happening” be uttered by denizens of the world.

Since the last game’s release, this quote has become a staple of the meme genre. Plenty of funny memes, interesting internet jokes and Tumblr shitposts rely on this joke for a punchline.

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