Dwemer History and Culture Contents . Collected Essays on Dwemer History and Culture Chapter 1 Marobar Sul and the Trivialization of the Dwemer in Popular Culture by Hasphat Antabolis While Marobar Sul ' s Ancient Tales of the Dwemer was definitively debunked in scholarly circles as early as the reign of Katariah I , it remains one of the staples of the literate middle - classes of the Empire , and has served to set the image of the Dwemer in the popular imagination for generations of schoolchildren . What about this lengthy ( but curiously insubstantial ) tome has proved so captivating to the public that it has been able to see off both the scorn of the literati and the scathing critiques of the scholars ? Before examining this question , a brief summary of the provenance and subsequent career of Ancient Tales would be appropriate . First published around 2E670 , in the Interregnum between the fall of the First Cyrodilic Empire and the rise of Tiber Septim , it was originally presented as a serious , scholarly work based on research in the archives of the University of Gwylim , and in the chaos of that era was taken at face value ( a sign of the sad state of Dwemer scholarship in those years ) . Little is known of the author , but Marobar Sul was most likely a pseudonym of Gor Felim , a prolific writer of " penny dreadful romances " of that era , who is known to have used many other pseudonyms . While most of Felim ' s other work has , thankfully , been lost to history , what little survives matches Ancient Tales in both language and tone ( see Lomis , " Textual Comparison of Gor Felim ' s A Hypothetical Treachery with Marobar Sul ' s Ancient Tales of the Dwemer " ) . Felim lived in Cyrodiil his whole life , writing light entertainments for the elite of the old Imperial capital . Why he decided to turn his hand to the Dwemer is unknown , but it is clear that his " research " consisted of nothing more than collecting the peasants ' tales of the Nibenay Valley and recasting them in Dwemer guise . The book proved popular in Cyrodiil , and Felim continued to churn out more volumes until the series numbered seven in all . Ancient Tales of the Dwemer was thus firmly established as a local favorite in Cyrodiil ( already in its 17th printing ) when the historical forces that propelled Tiber Septim to prominence also began to spread the literature of the " heartland " across the continent . Marobar Sul ' s version of the Dwemer was seized upon in a surge of human racial nationalism that has not yet subsided . The Dwemer appear in these tales as creatures of fable and light fantasy , but in general they are " just like us " . They come across as a bit eccentric , perhaps , but certainly there is nothing fearsome or dangerous about them . Compare these to the Dwemer of early Redguard legend : a mysterious , powerful race , capable of bending the very laws of nature to their will ; vanished but perhaps not gone . Or the Dwemer portrayed in the most ancient Nord sagas : fearsome warriors , tainted by blasphemous religious practices , who used their profane mechanisms to drive the Nords from Morrowind . Marobar Sul ' s Dwemer were much more amenable to the spirit of the time , which saw humans as the pinnacle of creation and the other races as unenlightened barbarians or imperfect , lesser versions of humans eager for tutelage . Ancient Tales falls firmly in the latter camp , which does much to explain its enduring hold on the popular imagination . Marobar Sul ' s Dwemer are so much more comfortable , so much friendlier , so much more familiar , than the real Dwemer , whose truly mysterious nature we are only beginning to understand . The public prefers the light , trivial version of this vanished race . And from what I have learned in my years of studying the Dwemer , I have some sympathy for that preference . As the following essays will show , the Dwemer were , to our modern eyes , a remarkably unlikeable people in many ways .