The Pale

	Far to the north, in the frozen tundra and the rocky coast of the Sea of Ghosts, one would expect little life to survive. But life found a way to prevail even there: horkers, bears, ice eagles,… A plethora of wildlife exists even in the harsh, inhospitable Pale. Then there are, of course, another group; one that arrived later and conquered the land like no other lifeform – the Nords. Landing on the shores of what would later become known as Skyrim, the men of the North found themselves in a world much like their original homeland; cold, desolate, dangerous – a perfect land for the hardy northerners.

	As the Children of the Sky puts it, “The further north you go into Skyrim, the more powerful and elemental the people become” and although this can be seen first-hand by comparing the native Nordic population of one of the North’s great cities or any small fishing village to the inhabitants of the more southerly regions, such as Őstmark or the Rift, the fact rings particularly true when it comes to the wild northern men living outside settled Nordic society; the Norsjőar.
	Many theories exist regarding the origin of the mysterious people residing in the land of ice. According to their own oral traditions, they were guided southwards from their native Atmora by whichever animal god the particular tribe in question revere the most. Their long exodus across the frozen ocean, they believe, was the first one of its kind, making them the first Atmorans in Tamriel. Among settled Nords, this claim has often been disputed; the most common theory is that the Norsjőar are simply Nords who had turned to wild ways. Few have granted the ice people proper recognition: at most, scholars such as Hyrfin of Dawnstar admit that the Norsjőar arrived in Tamriel much earlier than the rest of the Nords, but that they did so as part of the many waves of exiles – renegades, outlaws and other outsiders that were forced to leave or left on their own accord years before Ysgramor and his people embarked on their journey.
	The Imperial University’s ethnology and linguistics departments have come to a conclusion of their own regarding the origin of the Norsjőar, one very much aligned with the pre-Nordic theories. It is without a shadow of doubt that they are an earlier arrival: their tongue has retained archaic features that were already gone from writing by the time of the first Nordic settlement, much like the language of the Skaal with which it shares many similarities.