Ulfric, Behind the Mask: The (First) Great War

Preface and Index/Link hub to all of the chapters

THE (FIRST) GREAT WAR

After indulging in years of monotonous Nordiness (why not make new words?) on the slopes of the Throat of the World, Ulfric received the news that would make him immediately pack up and drop back to good earth. A courier, employed by the Bear of Eastmarch, carried a letter – the first and last letter delivered to Ulfric in all his time at High Hrothgar, and it was about the happenings on the 30th of Frostfall.

Of course, the year was already coming to a close when the letter arrived. Months of war had already passed while the Greybeards remained oblivious. Supposedly their Nord magic could not sense a conflict that had to do with the Imperial Cities and the Dominion. I can imagine the realisation hitting Ulfric like a giant’s club – there were things happening in Tamriel without him! I don’t think there is anything else he could have done in that situation but join up with the Legion. What was he supposed to do, shout the letter into the breeze and bid the courier goodbye? Naturally he slung himself from High Hrothgar with the speed of a Colovian arrow (not literally).

Meanwhile a couple of the other Colovians from school, including I, had been in the war since nearly the start. It was the time when Naarifin’s troops were just starting to spill into Cyrodiil, and we were stationed among Nibenese and heartland Imperials. Then, what a coincidence, the Ulfric arrow flew into the thick of things. More like he flew in, struck a wall and broke in two. That would be skipping ahead a bit though.

Anyway, Ulfric was stationed in the Heartlands with the rest of us. To his great dismay. From our perspective, we were dragged south to aid strangers in defending foreign territory. The north-Colovian attitude had always implied a strong, fundamental separation from the rest of Cyrodiil. We never sympathised with the Nibenese or the Heartlanders. We made different jokes, said different prayers before battle and sang different songs by the fire. You could say disunity was a problem in Cyrodiil, and still is, but we didn’t discuss the ‘big picture’ in such a way at the time. Bitterness was taken for granted as the typical Colovian Nord attitude and that was that.

But this attitude was ten times as potent in Ulfric, who had spent his adult life not only isolated from Cyrodiil, but from the entire continent. Those on bad terms with Ulfric would make wisecracks about him ‘returning from the mountain retreat’ or that ‘his head was (literally) in the clouds.’ I think these jokes cut deeper than expected – he was used to being taken more seriously. Ulfric decided that he (and later, all of Skyrim) had been roped into a distant conflict that in no way obliged the Nords to act. Ulfric started to begrudge the Cyrodiilic Empire long before the armistice – even before Skyrim was particularly involved in the war. Again, we were all bitter, but Ulfric turned it into an obsession.

You may be wondering why he lacked fervor in a supposed struggle for Talos worship. At this point I should mention Ulfric’s religious habits, and believe me, what I write on this subject (especially in the later chapters) will upset even the most skeptical Nord. It’s still true.

Ulfric never worshipped Talos. Like the Thalmor, he considered Talos an upstart and a sham. He did worship Ysmir (in a sort of way that he almost fancied himself to be Ysmir), and he did worship the Nordic pantheon. That is, the traditional Atmoran pantheon. The Old Ways. With the animals.

And I did converse with him on the subject. With what I gathered from these conversations, on Ulfric’s dismissal of Talos worship, was that Talos represented a kind of unity between the races of Man which he believed to be toxic. He condemned this idea as nothing more than a euphemised conception of Imperial tyranny. In other words, he thought of Talos as a hidden imperialist symbol under which the Cyrods would conquer all other races of Man, fooling them with claims of an anti-Mer Lorkhanic endeavor. I call this an elaboration on his boyhood hatred of Tiber Septim.

As for Mer itself, Ulfric thought little of the elves. He disliked them in the way that a soldier must force himself to dislike the enemy. At this stage of the war, the high elves posed little threat to Skyrim strategically, and the potential banning of Talos worship was alright with Ulfric. Public opinion in Skyrim had not yet shifted to the vehemently elf-hating stance it has today (even the dark elves in Eastmarch were welcome enough until the Concordat and the Stormcloak uprising). The Great War, again, seemed like Cyrodiil’s problem. In fact, the Nords may have even blamed the Empire for forcing them into any kind of involvement with the high elves, who had previously been isolated from them. Ulfric hated the Empire and not the Dominion. He thus expressed a need to wean Nordic faith away from the Imperial model – he never abandoned this plan, and it’s something I will have to leave for the next chapter!

So Ulfric came to really detest the Empire throughout the dawn of the war. Despite this he quickly rose in the ranks. That was probably due to his knowledge of the Thu’um, which though not as powerful as bardic verse might imply, was both useful and intimidating (imagine a huge gust of wind wiping half a dozen elves off their feet). Within a year Ulfric went from being my equal to my superior. I had an arrow metaphor going, right? Well the point where the arrow (Ulfric) snapped was in the month before the sack of the Imperial City. At this point the Nords from Skyrim were much more involved, many entering through Nordic Colovia into the Heartlands to defend the road between Bruma and the Imperial City. The high elves were creeping onto the shores of Lake Rumare, and we were getting reckless in our attempts to hold them back. In a particularly nasty attack on the west banks, a few higher-ups were captured for interrogation – Ulfric was one of them. And we never came back to liberate them. Most escaped and caught up with the rest of us again, and some deserted. None died or even sustained any real injuries while held prisoner, and I’ll explain why in a second.

Now I can’t confirm this for certain. But word from the other captured soldiers in the cells next to Ulfric was that he gave up valuable information almost instantly. Ostensibly, the interrogator didn’t even need to hurt him (that’s Elenwen, by the way, who is now the ambassador here in Skyrim). Ulfric let her smack him a couple times and then answered every question. Was it because he was weak-willed? No. It was because he didn’t give a damn about the Imperial City. He made the decision to resign rather than resist for resistance’s sake. His grudge against the Legion was inflamed by the fact that we left him and the other prisoners behind due to the dire situation, a fact that Elenwen made sure to mention to Ulfric. On the one hand, the other captured soldiers were furious. On the other, they were thankful that Ulfric satisfied the Thalmor and everyone could leave (it surprised me, too, that the elves didn’t just kill them all afterwards, as one would expect – perhaps they considered Ulfric a potential asset?).

Ulfric’s stubborn sense of honor, though lapsed in Thalmor captivity, ironically did not allow him to desert. Besides, we all figured the war was almost over. Ulfric and a few other soldiers returned to Lake Rumare and caught up with the squad. There was no time to throw blame, so whatever happened in Thalmor custody went unmentioned outside of mere gossip. Said gossip was mainly composed of sleazy jokes. It wasn’t easy for me to understand the situation – again, most of what I write here is unconfirmed, yet quite probable with everything else I know about Ulfric. Long story short, Ulfric’s interrogation inspired little hatred of the Thalmor, but instead a kind of surreal awe, along with more disdain for the Empire.

The Forsworn also seized the Reach and established an independent kingdom the next year. When the news got out, Ulfric was pretty quiet about it compared to the other angry Nords. In retrospect, he saw a chance to appeal to the popular opinions in Skyrim and prove his power where the Empire could not intervene. No doubt he felt strongly about regaining the Reach, but more than that, he was inspired by this opportunity and immediately began to form postwar plans. This is another subject for the next chapter.

Ulfric was injured in Red Ring, the battle that rekindled the Legion’s hopes for victory. He was hit by falling debris and broke several ribs (couldn’t shout for a while), leading to his discharge. It was in the midst of post-Red Ring euphoria that Ulfric left the war for good, briefly staying in the Palace of Kings in Windhelm to recover from his injuries. He experienced the closing scenes of the war – the armistice and the White-Gold Concordat – secondhand, amidst Windhelm civilians.

In this time he became receptive to public opinion. The Nord mood was characterised by feelings of betrayal, especially when the soldiers returned. Nords had fought on behalf of their Empire, only to receive an ultimatum just as sour as the one that provoked the war in the first place. Most Nords also overestimated the Battle of Red Ring and believed that the Empire could have fought on and eventually driven out the elves. The common viewpoint still remains – Titus Mede II cheated the Nords, and the rest of the Empire, by the ‘cowardly’ act of signing the armistice. Ulfric’s uniquely pungent hatred of the Empire suddenly became an attitude that everybody shared. Ulfric hated the White-Gold Concordat, but he also loved it because it would let him manipulate the masses.

The greatest woe was the banning of Talos worship, and this was the first time Ulfric recognised that he would need to put on a mask to gain popular support.

Another major point of the postwar decisions that only slightly angered the Nords in Eastmarch, and was considered a boon to most in Cyrodiil – but the Colovian Nords detested – was the agreement to maintain Skyrim’s southern borders. As long as Skyrim remained part of the Empire, Cyrodiil kept its northern territories, which denied the Nords the prospect of gaining the corridor to Tamriel’s Western coast (a potentially important area for trade with Hammerfell, as per Ulfric’s ambitions). The Colovian Nords, subject of Ulfric’s deepest sympathies, who wanted to escape their ‘traitor-emperor’ more than ever, could not be assimilated into Skyrim while Skyrim was still an imperial province.

I will repeat that the Nord ex-soldiers were the angriest. It was they who first cried ‘betrayal,’ and the civilians followed. This is a crucial fact because it provided Ulfric with a nice personal gang to start his ‘Stormcloak Army’ from.

This, too, is a point for a later chapter, and it only gets crazier from here, folks!