Thoughts on the Sundering of Snow Tower

So this all started with a complaint about certain bits of speculation in the UESP and carries it to a bit of a tinfoil-hat conclusion. Please do let me know if I have missed something important.

"When the Snow Tower lies sundered, kingless, bleeding"

UESP claims: "The Prophecy's reference to the Snow Tower has been widely construed as referring to the plight of Skyrim during the Stormcloak Rebellion, wherein High King Torygg was killed and the province was launched into a bitter civil war. Thus, the Prophecy helps illustrate that a Tower is far more than the physical echo associated with it. For it was not the Throat of the World which was left sundered, kingless, and bleeding. That was the Nordic people."

Except the Nordic people are younger than the snow tower! Even if we ignore that, this can't possibly be the first civil war in Skyrim's history, indeed, Serana asks who the current high king is and if you say it is up for debate, she says something like "Oh, great, another war of succession", indicating that such things were not unheard of in her time. And finally, we know how towers get destroyed, and the civil war just doesn't fit. Towers get destroyed when the stone of the tower is destroyed. Brass tower is destroyed when the mantella is destroyed, Red tower is destroyed when the heart is set free, and White gold falls when the Amulet of Kings is consumed.

We have far more convincing parallels if we look instead to dragons. The mountain itself is sundered by the "wound in time" as Paarthunax calls it, where Alduin, whom it is certainly not unreasonable to claim as a king of dragons, has been chilling for the last few eras. And what happens right before LDB gets caught crossing the border? Alduin pops out of the tower, leaves the mountain and starts his rampage.

"Snow tower lies sundered": This must be the wound in time into which Alduin is banished. The sundering begins at the end of the dragon war during the initial banishing, continues through the eras of history, and then finally completes when Alduin pops back out in 4E201. In this vision, Alduin is analogous to an arrow which initially pierces a body, then continues passing through the body, and finally once it comes out the other end we can say it has passed through the body. "Lies sundered" then is past tense because the wound atop the mountain has finally completed it's burrowing through time.

"Snow tower lies kingless": This I like less than the sundered part, but we can say that snow tower is for the first time without it's king since the merethic era, since the only dragon sitting atop the "throne" is Paarthunax the lieutenant, traitor, and advisor, Alduin the king having first gone to ground at Helgen and then flown off to Sovengard of all places, leaving the mountain, leaving Skyrim, and leaving Nirn altogether only occasionally poking his head in to get some resurrecting done. The king may have been in some kind of wonky time prison, but spacially speaking he doesn't seem to have moved an inch from the banishment until he return.

"Snow tower lies bleeding": This I like the least of all. Perhaps if we return to the earlier metaphor of Alduin as arrow being shot through time, only once he comes out is the wound properly open. The spot where it happened ripples when LDB walks through it, which strikes me more as scarring than bleeding, but whatever. Alternatively, lies bleeding could refer to the wounds Alduin suffers as a result of being hit by the first dragonrend shout. Alternatively, lies bleeding could refer to the fact that LDB starts to properly kill dragons for the first time in damn near forever, giving these never-dying beasts wounds that actually mean something.

What are the Towers and what do they do?

The towers, and the stones they house, are support beams, the scaffolding that holds up existance. The zero, adamantine, tower, is the foundation for the mere concept of existance. The Red tower is the foundation for the existance of Nirn. The towers of the merethic era provide support for more varied and limited existances, being both post-dawn era and not the direct products of the Aedra. I will keep speculation as to what manner of existance or creatia the various other towers support to some other post and skip right on to Nu-Mantia and deep tinfoil-hat territory.

"Aldmeris bore witness and built the remaining towers during the Merethic: White-Gold, Crystal-like-Law, Orichalc, Green-Sap, Walk-Brass, Snow Throat..". The first time I read that I read that Aldmeris, being the community of ancient elves, built all the towers. Reading it a second time, I wonder if perhaps that "and" was not meant to be inclusive, but instead linking two seperate verbs together. For sure, they built the White-Gold tower and most of the others, but for instance if the stone of the (rarely mentioned) Khajit tower is in fact the khajit themselves or the Mane, then this would be a tower that the Aldmeris only bore witness to.

Skipping any further dramatic buildup, I contend that Snow Throat Tower was not built by Mer, but by Men. Specifically three men, Felldir, Gomlaith, and Hakon. The mountain named the Throat of the World existed long before that, but it was not a tower, merely a mountain. When the three used the Elder Scroll, a fragment of creation, upon an aspect of the god Akatosh, himself bound fundamentally to creation, we witness a confluence of energies sufficient to be worthy of being called a Stone, and the location it is housed in a Tower. Let us get it out of the way now that what the three Nords created on that day was a cave, not a cave within space but a cave within time in which Alduin was sealed. Spacially, it existed on that very point within the tower, Temporally it existed both outside of time and through the entire span of time from the day three Nords shouted at a god until the day the LDB witnessed that god's renewed fury. After all, during the third era, Nu-Mantia mentions that "the apex of snow tower is only half there". And, of course, Kirkbride tells us that the "stone" of snow tower is a cave.

The conclusion here is not that the stone of snow tower is Alduin. It is specifically Alduin in his time cave. Adamantium tower allows reality itself to congeal. Red tower acts as the fundament of Nirn. Snow Tower, built by men, becomes a tower because it keeps the already established realities from being destroyed.

OF COURSE, this has implications to explore at a later date. First being that this is the first game when a tower was destroyed at the start of the game instead of the PC destroying the tower. Second being this tower wasn't so much destroyed as collapses, possibly due to the inherently unstable nature of having the stone for the tower that staves off destruction being the very instrument of destruction, and possibly due to the fact that it was built by inferior men, and possibly due to the fact that it wasn't created with the sort of power and permenance usually attested to the other towers but more by accident by three nords trying to avoid getting eaten. Thirdly, that even thought the tower is destroyed, the effect of not getting eaten, of keeping the world invulnerable against the destructive ravages of time, still gets accomplished, similar to how the White-Gold tower which protected Nirn from the destructive forces of the other planes is destroyed and yet Nirn finds itself better sealed off from Oblivion.