Necromantic Panoply: Rambling ideas on the Undead and their Nature

Edit: So, did I mention this is really, really rambling? Apologies, I'll get my ideas in better order next time.

Alright, so I was rubber duck theorizing some of this stuff, and was told by my duck to write it up; apologies if I am replicating previous work, and please feel free to point out all the ways I'll inevitably get it wrong; preferably with sources, so I can make proper deals with Herma-Mora get better at this stuff.

There is a huge array of undead in TES, and all of them are weird in some way when compared to our more common "zombies" and such; I started all of this off on the question of "Why can I use a Raise Dead spell on an undead target?" It seems to me that it depends on what we mean by "undead" and "raise dead" here. The only time that we get to use this specific power is in Skyrim, and there seems to be a lot of differences between the kind of raising that that PC is able to do and what NPCs can do. The PC raising power is restricted to whole bodies, and there must be an actual body; Ghost remains, dismembered bodies, and Animunculi are immune. Any and/or all of this could be put under Gameplay Is Not Lore^tm .

It seems to me that there must be one of two kind of reanimation available to the PC. Either:

• you call back and bind the soul of the dead into their old body, and command their obedience for a time, or
• you inhabit the dead body with your own energy and a fragment of your own will, and there is no soul-manipulation involved.

This can be explored via the interaction of the spell with the various types of undead also seen.

We've got the Bonewalkers and Skeletons, who despite being described as constructs of magicka and mechanism, but also can be summoned in some instances; Is there some kind of receptacle of undead, some Plane of Oblivion or minor pocket dimension where there exist either by matter of course or the action of an intelligence? Is there a Guild of Most Honorable and Studious Necromangineers building and storing these servitors, to be summoned at a Mage's whim or at the call of an Adventurer's Emergency Scroll? Or is this a case of Gameplay Is Not Lore^tm and should be ignored as such?Regardless, Skeletons seem to have no real mind of their own, and are so physically fragile that there is little chance of having all of the pieces together to cast a quick "Raise Dead" spell and get it together. It is also possible that due to being so far removed from their souls to begin with, Skeletons are simply unable to be inhabited by a bound spirit at some point.

Bonewalkers are weird, because they generally seem to behave in a mindless manner, and their construction is both anathema in Morrowind (as all necromancy is, but not invoking of ancestors), and doesn't seem to regard the usage of a soul specifically (although this might just be an oversight in the writing); yet, Vivec speaks to one as the mouth of an Ancestor, and it speaks as an individual, indicating the inhabitance of that specific soul. I really don't think trusting Vivec to gives us good, useful information on the nature of a throwaway creature is smart here, though, so I'm treating that as either the influence of Divinity or Vivec's lies. We never get a chance to see the effect of Raising on them either way, so not a lot of data to be had from Bonewalkers.

Ghosts seem to be able to be bound via necromancy, and forced to serve in various ways. They also can apparently be called in less-violent ways to serve as well (Lucien Lechance's continued service to the Brotherhood is one possible example, Tsun's service via the shout of Valor is definitely one). Ghosts don't seem to able to be reanimated though, probably due to not having to body. This lends a bit of evidence to the idea of the reanimation being an extension of the caster's will, although it is not inconceivably that it is a soul-binding and that there needs to be something to bind the soul to.

Lichs are mortals who become undead willingly to escape mortality; they can be destroyed, but we don't get to see the effects of our specific type of raise dead spell on them, so we are forced to speculate; I propose that we can look at the Dragon Priests, who are essentially Lichs that use donated energy instead of using whatever rituals are traditionally used (which I believe make use of multiple souls of the living as power); Dragon Priests cannot be raised as a normal body, but they leave almost no body behind; either they are too physically destroyed by the combination of the Lichification and then being killed off, or because of the far-reaching consequences of sacrificing your mortality for immortality, there is some kind of barrier to reanimation, that their souls are either:

• destroyed by the process
• bargained into servitude to some power that will not allow it to return, or
• imbued with such power to influence their own body and the world after their death (having been dead and influencing already) that they resist the binding.

It's also possible that there simply is not enough will and mental fortitude for someone to successfully control a Lich's body without giving up control of their own; This would also indicate that the mind (or the access to the knowledge and power of the mind) is seperate from the soul. Ultimately, I think this is another case of gameplay preventing us from getting good data (and I'm sure I'm not educated enough to really talk about what Lichs are doing with souls in general).

Draugr are undead servants of Dragon Priests, and there is a theory (that I personally really like) that they mainly serve to provide energy for the preservation of the Dragon Priests. They clearly are not fully sentient, having little language beyond the shouts they sometimes use, and taking little notice of things like traps. They also experience no fear except by the expenditure of great power, fighting until their destruction. They are able to be reanimated by the PC, and behave identically to the way they do before.

Contrast with mortal bodies that are freshly made dead, and then reanimated: they behave as they did in life, with warriors fighting and civilians fleeing. They also have a small grasp on language, although it seems to be restricted to either moaning "must...kill..." when fighting, and the occassional "finally...free..." on their final destruction. This seems to indicate to me that there is a mind in there, one that remembers something of what they were before, AND one that knows that they should be elsewhere. This lends itself more to the idea of re-binding the previous soul to the old body, and preventing it from going on to the Soul Cairn (because to me it seems more reasonable for the soul to wish to be free from the binding than for a mind to wish its own destruction for the freedom of obliteration). However, this is problematic in the instances of reanimating a long-dead draugr, whose soul is either long-removed and harder to recall, or well degraded (as evidenced by their White soul status). This idea also does not deal well with how one can reanimate a body that has had its soul captured into a soulgem. It is possible that the soul that is bound does not have to be one and the same as the original inhabitant, but merely a compatible one; that one is merely reaching into the "pot" of the Soul Cairn and grabbing the nearest spirit that will serve and placing it in the vessel.

So, give me your thoughts. How do you think about this kind of thing? How do you justify it? What texts do I need to read to actually get it? You think vampires should sparkle and here's why! etc, etc...

Edited for a bit of clarity and fleshing out some points (bet you can't tell that I did, though...)