The Horse - Folk of Silverhoof Content . I scoffed , of course , when I heard the rumors . A lost colony of Redguards on the northern coast of High Rock ? Patently absurd . But the rumors were so persistent , so consistent , that eventually I was moved to take a sabbatical from my pedagogic duties at the Academy and travel north to see for myself . And behold , by the tears of Morwha , it was so ! All of the scholarly details will be found in my forthcoming paper " Sevenfold Truths of the Tribe of the Herd - Mother , " but I shall summarize the main points here , as I feel this tale is too wondrous to wait upon the slow march of scholarship . On the northwest coast of the High Rock region of Rivenspire , some leagues west of the city of Shornhelm , is a pastoral basin known as the Vale of Silverhoof . Abiding there , as they have for the past three thousand years , is a tribe of Redguards who go by the simple name of the Horsemen . How did they get there , and when , and why ? Unfortunately the Horsemen have no written records , but their oral traditions are strong , and I have recorded those that have been passed down from one generation to the next . The elders of the tribe were generous with their time , particularly two named Muzar and Yalaida , and from their tales I have been able to piece together the following tentative history . The Horsemen originally came from Yokuda , of this there can be no doubt . Though they have become unavoidably " Bretonized " over the centuries by contact with the Nedic folk who surround them , they retain a number of Yokudan words in daily speech , all spoken with that drawl in the vowels we associate with the steppes of old Akos Kasaz . A few examples will suffice from their riding terminology : to tell a horse to turn left , the Horsemen say " Netu ; " to turn right , " Netu Hu ; " and to halt , they say " Selim . " Of course , " netu " is Old Yokudan for " turn , " while " anselim " means to stop or to cease . So the Horsemen are of Yokudan descent , most probably from the herding clans of northern Akos Kasaz . The elders of the tribe maintain detailed oral accounts of their genealogy , and from the number of generations they record , it is possible to date their arrival on the shores of Tamriel to the early sixth century of the First Era . This was a period of upheaval in High Rock , when the Direnni Hegemony was in its death throes and the Breton kingdoms were just establishing themselves , a time when a colony of determined settlers could find a niche and establish itself before it could be driven out or absorbed by the indigenes . And according to the tales I heard from Muzar and Yalaida , this is exactly what happened in the Vale of Silverhoof , nearly two centuries before the Ra Gada came to Hammerfell . Why the Horsemen came to this land is harder to determine , for on that subject their tales veer into the legendary or even mythical . Here I must speak about the tribe ' s unorthodox religious beliefs , for they are central to their traditions and identity . For the Horsemen do not worship any of the Old Yokudan gods as we know them , instead venerating a sort of divine animist spirit they call the Herd Mother . This equine entity acts as the tribe ' s guiding and protective deity ; young Horsemen must commune with her on a vision journey they must partake by themselves that acts as a rite of passage to adulthood ( similar to our own tradition of Walkabout ) . This " Herd Mother " is otherwise unknown to modern scholarship , but of course the vast majority of our cultural records were lost in the cataclysm that swallowed the Old Isles . The Horsemen ' s tradition is that the tribe left lost Yokuda in order to preserve their worship of this Herd Mother , which was somehow endangered in the Old Isles . Their stories describe the journey from Akos Kasaz in a flotilla of " swimming horse - ships " given them by the Herd Mother , in which they " crossed seventeen seas " before reaching Tamriel . We may discount this tale as somewhat fanciful , but the Horsemen claim to have brought their eponymous mounts with them from the Isles , and this I do not doubt . For to the eye of this connoisseur of horseflesh , the steeds of the Horsemen are unmistakably identical to that breed we call the Yokudan Charger , and could have come directly from the Aswala Stables in the Alik ' r .