Dwarves in the Elder Scrolls

[JErastus]

I don't usually dip into the lore of games, but TES really is enjoyable, and after I have been doing the Oblivion Quiz for a bit now, I decided to voice a question that had been bugging me. In Oblivion, about level 8-10, the player can find Dwarven Armour and Weapons. Now, Elvish is one thing - we already know that there are elves - the Bosmer, the Altmer, the Alyeids etc but Dwarves? Where are there Dwarvish forts, or ruins, or anything even remotely referencing Dwaves? For that matter, Dwarves are supposed to be short. So how come a full grown man can put on a Dwarvish Cuirass and it fits?

[desilva]

Dwarves aren't short; The Dwemer was a race related to the mer (elves) who lived in Morrowind and Hammerfell in ancient history. According to legend, they were named "Dwarves" by giants that lived near them. There were a lot of Dwemer ruins and references to them in the game Morrowind, and that province is where their armor and artifacts come from. You can find many dwarvish ruins in TES III as Vvardenfell was their major population center. "Dwarves" were actually a race of elves and are also known as "Dwemer."

[Apalachee]

They were given more attention in Morrowind than the Ayleid were in Oblivion, as well. I just meant that both filled the role of "ancient, long-gone race with ruins to loot and mysteries to discover". The Ayleids were kind of Dwemer light. I kept waiting for them to actually be important in the game but they just ended up being a disappointment. Especially after I read that Last Year of the First Era series, I was expecting a shape-shifting elf disguised as a deer or something. Way to miss the chance, Bethesda.

[Tionontati]

Come on isn't that really just semantics? Umaril in my Opinion is the embodiment of the Ayleid mythos.
Forgive if it seems arrogant to say, but I don't think you can really make a convincing argument otherwise. What’s the view on Umarils father by the way? I've heard rumblings of Magnus, but I don’t really see how that could be possible, Hellmouth? I heard that it was some spirit from a previous kalpa, I think. I wish I knew more about Magnus to say whether that could be possible.

[MacIntel]

It's not semantics; the Ayleid ball was dropped badly. With the amount of ruins scattered around, all they amounted to was places to be plundered. The dwemer ruins in the previous games looked like places people lived and worked in, with researchers in plenty of the known ruins, the machines still protecting the place from intruders, or places vampires hang. The only thing Ayleid that we got in OB was, they were [censored] and ruled the nedes in the early portions of the 1st era. The ruins pretty much amounted to crypts and loot holes. Umahril, along with the Knights of the Nine, were a great addition, but the damage was already done. Not to mention they are still around, genetically anyway.

[Wappinger]

First of all, Umaril can't have been the embodiment of the Ayleid Mythos because there is no Ayleid Mythos. We know none of their lore, no beliefs, and no stories. The only thing is that they might have at one point worshiped Meridia. That's it. The Dwemer, on the other hand, had folk tales, machines, lives that we actually knew about. I can look up at least five books of Dwemer lore and four written in Dwemeri right now. On the Ayleids there are six fragmented, half-translated sentences. Second of all, the Dwemer figured almost directly into the main quest of Morrowind.

[Susquehannock]

The Dwemer hadn't really been established yet in Daggerfall, but lore-wise they did live in Hammerfell. Some of their ruins in that province are seen in the game Redguard. In fact, the province got its name from the dwarves. It was first settled by a group of Dwemer who didn't want to live in Resdayn with the Chimer, so their leader threw his hammer Volendrung into the sky and they followed its path to live where it fell. So it was called "Volenfell", and then when the Dwemer were gone, "Hammerfell".