You can hear sadness in the music for what became of the snow elves. One of my favorite lore reveals in the game. I felt so sorry for Gelebor knowing he was perhaps the last of his people.
I have a mod on Special Addition that let's you play as a male or female Snow Elf and I almost exclusively play as them. Gelabor isn't alone in my game 😉
This song has the ability to creep up on you as you play this part of the game. You're not really paying attention to it until the volume of the song goes up and then that's when it grabs you and then you start to flow with the game and you don't want to leave. It captivates you and you just want it to hold you and not let you go. Thank you for taking the time to share such captivating music.
That is exactly it. Then the wonder, melancholy, and sheer grief just hits you as you realise what you have to do. I know Vrythur is an absolute tool but I kind of understand what he did because he was forsaken by his god. He is a Shakespearian tragedy in action - he would rather watch his kind wiped out and the world die in his mad quest for revenge. However, having to kill one of the last two known surviving Snow Elves to remedy this hit me really hard. 😢
@@cathdodd5072absolutely agree.but it is so fitting to this sad and tragic story that it has to end this way. this depicts real life where a happy end is not always forseen for us.
The story of Dawnguard, all of Dawnguard, is one of tragedy. This song perfectly encompasses it all, and it plays amidst the ruins of the story's greatest and most impactful tragedy. It opens with the Vigilants of Stendarr, an order originally founded after the Oblivion Crisis to protect people, being destroyed by vampires, but not after it had fallen to not much more than hypocritical witch hunters. Then you come across the Dawnguard; an organisation of Vampire Hunters, composed of many who have lost family to vampires, lead by a man so dead set on destroying all vampires he can't tell friend from foe. An organisation of vampire hunters built from the ruins of another order that fell from grace. Next you discover Serana, a woman who has been entombed in a crypt for over 4000 years to discover her family is still broken, and the world is no better than it was when she went to sleep all those years ago. All she wants is a family, parents who care about her, a peaceful life, but she knows that she can't have that anymore. Then there's Harkon. A man so obsessed with a prophecy that his family, his own daughter, became nothing more than tools to him, to the point where after thousands of years apart from his own daughter the first thing he asks her is if she still has the Elder Scroll. There's the Soul Cairn, which is itself a realm of tragedy. Filled with lost souls trapped there after deals gone wrong, fights lost, or tricked in the pursuit of more power. They're forced to roam a hollow realm where they are seen as little more than currency and sustenance for the beings that reside there. You meet Valerica, a woman so frightened and fixated on making sure her husband fails in his obsession that she would lock her daughter, who she claims to protect, away forever just to prevent him from succeeding. She made her daughter miss thousands of years of her life, for what? Nothing had changed in her life by the time she awoke again. After comes Durnehviir, a dragon that sought to stand out and prove his power amongst his kin by commanding legions of the undead, tricked into endless servitude by uncaring masters until he can no longer return to the skies he misses because staying there would ultimately kill him. Shortly after is Vyrthur's tragedy. Turned into a Vampire by one of his own initiates, Vyrthur is forever separated from the thing he held most dear; his god. Vyrthur was once able to commune with Auriel, in his words he "had the ears of a god", but as soon as he was betrayed and turned to a vampire his connection to Auriel was cut off. Whether this was Auriel's doing or not is irrelevant, Vyrthur believed that he had been betrayed and cast aside by the very god he had dedicated his life to, and he swore vengeance. So he waited, for millennia. Yet when the chance came for him to finally get revenge, he was cut down by someone allowed into the Vale by his own brother. Finally we have the greatest tragedy, that of the Snow Elves, for whom Gelebor is the voice. The Snow Elves were once a proud, powerful, and beautiful race, with architecture and craft of a kind unlike any other. Who knows exactly why they attacked Saarthal, perhaps they wished to steal the Eye of Magnus for themselves, perhaps they wanted to protect the world from it. Either way they could not have forseen the retaliation this evoked from the Atmorans and later the Nords. How could they have forseen that this one action would provoke a genocide of their people? When they turned to their fellow Elves for help only one offered them shelter, the Dwemer. But then the Dwemer betrayed them, and blinded the entire race, permanently, and made them slaves. There the Snow Elves toiled in the deep until they rose up in rebellion to fight masters that vanished from existence shortly after. Forgotten and alone these Betrayed rebuilt and relearned, forever a shadow of their former selves, until one day a tribe or warband descended upon the Forgotten Vale where they slaughtered possibly the last surviving remnants of the Snow Elves they once were, because they had long forgotten that they were once the Snow Elves themselves.
This song culminates the atmosphere of Forgotten Vale and the destiny of once so beautiful race perfectly. So lonely, so cold, so empty, so sad, so fragile. Only echoes and a touch of magic is left.
This place..... The moment I made it to this area in my very first playthrough, I started crying and I didn't even know why. You can just *FEEL* the melancholy and loss drifting through the air and skimming the tops of the ice floes in the Vale. Much later on, I made sure to play through Skyrim as a a Falmer myself using one of the many mods on the Nexus. Certainly gives one a drastically different picture of the Nords, the very culture you are the mythopoetical saviour of. They didn't deserve this. Damn the Nords of eld, and double-damn the Dwemer.
Amen to that, Skyrim (at least its main story) tends to be massively Nord biased, but under the surface no race or faction is truly free of evil deeds.
The Snow Elves attacked the Atmorans first. Slaughtered them. They asked for their fate... For the 500 companions to come and take over their land of Skyrim... Later Making Skyrim for the Nords.
very well said. just playing the game for the first time and just experience this level. it touches my heart and make me recognize how fragile and transitory our world is.
My favorite track and place in all Skyrim. Unforgettable memories, hearing the music while exploring the vale was truly magical. Sadly, a moment that won't ever repeat like the very first time. Still, I'm grateful for being able to experience it. Thank you. 🙏🏻
The journey through the cave with Serana, not knowing what comes next and being greeted by the Forgotten Vale, one of the most unique and memorable moments, just pure and magical art. Cheers travelers 🍻
The track itself is still sort of fragmented. I have never actually found a higher version of it. I just dabbled with the equalizer to make it sound more acceptable. Thanks though! ^^
@@SurfieExtends Every piece of this song its beyong almost everything that's called "music". This piece of music is not from this world. I tell you. Its like it was composed by every best compositor that ever existed. So don't worry. Its more than perfect. For me its DIVINE!
Me too. 🙂 The first time I heard it in game... As I came out of the caves, crested that cliffside, and stared out into the beautiful expanse before me... I literally sat there for what seemed like an hour, just listening peacefully, admiring this monumental game, and enjoying that specific moment in time. It was honestly a magical moment that I'll never forget. 😌
Even though they may have caused the night of tears… it’s hard not to feel sorry for the tragedy of the falmers extinction/degeneration that this music kinda tells.
Love this song, and love this area. Also, who else loves to Fus Ro Dah Vyrthur off the tall tower and onto the ground far below? Turns the epic fight into a comically short, anticlimactic one. It's my favorite way to kill him.
I read once that Jeremy Soule, the composer for this track, heard it in a dream, and had to make it reality. That is the only explanation I can think of for this music, it sounds so other-worldly, the only place a human could manifest it from is a dream.
![Forgotten Vale (Extended Version) - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim [Dawnguard DLC] OST](/img/logo.svg){kind=logo}
