I keep coming back to the Convention accounts and realizing they 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 lays out the Convention story. Varieties of Faith does not contain Altmeri sections that lay out the Convention story cleanly. It does not mention the Convention at all. Lorkhan tricked the et'Ada into the project. 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.
The Nordic brief: our god died building the hall
Nordic tradition (the Shor material preserved in the Five Songs of King Wulfharth and the older Atmora-linked fragments) flips the moral polarity. Shor made a place where Men could finally stand. The Elves murdered him for it. 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. The Tribunal Temple and Vivec's own 36 Lessons discuss the Heart and its significance. The 36 Lessons primarily focus on philosophical and theological concepts related to the Heart's power and the Tribunal’s role. At Red Mountain the Heart becomes a tool that three mortals use to rewrite the terms. The earlier Chimeri journey (Veloth's exodus) already framed itself as a deliberate rejection of Altmeri stasis. 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 later destroys or frees the Heart, the charter itself is damaged in public, which is why the Temple's authority never fully recovers.
The Anuad as the quiet master document
The Anuad sits underneath all of these. It turns the aftermath of Convention into an explicit war of Ehlnofey over the surface of Nirn: Old Ehlnofey (Mer) versus Wandering Ehlnofey (Men). The Anuad is a fragmented, enigmatic text, not a structured legal document. The interpretation of it as a migration-and-conquest framework is a significant extrapolation. Once you read the Anuad this way, the separate Convention stories look like counsel's arguments filed under different letterheads.
I am not claiming 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?
