The Convention accounts do not behave like a shared creation story. They behave like rival deeds of title. Each culture tells the story of Lorkhan and the Heart in a way that quietly establishes why its people hold the moral right to Tamriel.
That is the thesis. The variations are not just theological color. They are national charters.
The Altmer brief: we never consented
The Monomyth's Altmeri telling, "The Heart of the World", is the elven brief. Lorkhan tricked the et'Ada into the project: "this was a trick." Auri-El and Trinimac defeated him, tore out his Heart, and could not destroy the Heart (it declared itself the heart of the world), so Auri-El attached it to an arrow and fired it away. The Elves position themselves as the least-descended survivors of spirits who were swindled. Their charter is restorative: Tamriel is a flawed prison, and the purest bloodlines retain the standing to judge it and, if possible, reverse the damage. The physical scattering of the Heart is framed as justice against the trickster, not as a gift to mortals. Even this telling records the other side's grievance: "The Men dragged Lorkhan's body away and swore blood vengeance on the heirs of Auriel for all time."
The Nordic brief: our god died building the hall
Nordic tradition (Shor, as Varieties of Faith in the Empire and the Five Songs of King Wulfharth describe him) flips the moral polarity. Shor sided with Men after the creation of the world, and elven gods conspired to bring him down. In the Five Songs, elven giants "ripped out Shor's Heart and used it as a standard to strike fear into the Nords." The Heart is evidence of that crime. Men therefore inherit the land by blood-price. When Nords speak of Shor's death they are not mourning a distant god; they are reciting the clause that makes Skyrim and the wider continent theirs by right of the fallen. The Convention becomes a founding sacrifice rather than a cosmic fraud.
The Yokudan counter-charter
Redguard myth (Sep in the monomythic Yokudan tellings, the Walkabout material) treats the hungry snake as the one who forced the issue and then paid for it. The focus is less on ownership of the continent itself and more on the right to keep moving and surviving inside a broken creation. Still, it functions as a charter: we are the people who learned the rules of the skin-ball and refused to lie down. Their claim is earned endurance rather than original purity or sacrificial inheritance.
The Chimeri/Dunmer seizure
This is where the pattern gets sharpest. In Vivec's own account, The Battle of Red Mountain, Sotha Sil brings the others "a vision of a new world of peace, with justice and honor for nobles, and health and prosperity for the commoners, with the Tribunal as immortal patrons and guides," and they "transformed ourselves with the power of Kagrenac's tools." At Red Mountain the Heart becomes a tool that three mortals use to rewrite the terms. The earlier Chimeri exodus under Veloth had already broken with the Altmer: Varieties of Faith says Azura taught the Chimer "the mysteries needed to be different than the Altmer." By the time you reach the events of 1E 700 the Dunmer charter is no longer "we were wronged" or "our god died for us." It is "we took the divine spark and made it work." That is a radically different theory of title: ownership by successful usurpation. When the Nerevarine disrupts the Heart in 3E 427 (Azura says it was freed; most people believe it was destroyed), the charter is voided in public. After the Red Year of 4E 5, the Dissident Priests took over the Temple and restored worship of Azura, Boethiah and Mephala as the Reclamations.
The Anuad as the quiet master document
The Anuad sits underneath all of these. In the paraphrase players can read (The Annotated Anuad in Morrowind, A Children's Anuad in Oblivion and Skyrim), a war between the Old Ehlnofey, ancestors of the Mer, and the Wandering Ehlnofey, ancestors of Men, reshapes Nirn, and the text assigns the spoils outright: "The Old Ehlnofey realm, although ruined, became Tamriel." The Wanderers are left divided on the other continents, and then: "Eventually, Men returned to Tamriel." Once you read the Anuad this way, the separate Convention stories look like counsel's arguments filed under different letterheads.
This is not a claim that every priest or skald consciously thinks in property law. The pattern is older and deeper than that. Cultures tell the story of the Heart in the shape that justifies why they belong here and why their rivals' claims are defective.
Speculation, clearly marked: if a future game returns to the Heart or to a new Convention-scale event, the political fight will not be about "what really happened." It will be about whose charter gets written into the next era's official memory.
Which race's version feels to you like the most naked land claim once you strip the theology? And does the simple geographic fact that the Heart landed in Resdayn give the Chimer and Dunmer a stronger original deed, or does their later loss of it undercut the whole approach?
Sources (UESP): The Monomyth, Varieties of Faith in the Empire, Five Songs of King Wulfharth, The Battle of Red Mountain, Heart of Lorkhan, Dissident Priests, The Annotated Anuad.