Scripts of Tamriel: Daedric

Scripts of Tamriel, Volume VIII: Daedric and the Dark Elf Language

By Lucianus Dozanior of the Imperial College

Despite the inscrutable nature of the demons of the outer realms and their Princes, one thing magicians throughout the Empire have uncovered and thoroughly studied about them is their script, simply known as Daedric.

What came as a surprise to our Empire when the Dark Elven province of Morrowind was integrated into the greater whole, back when Talos walked this world, was that the aforementioned mer who inhabited the volcanic and ash-wracked realm had adopted the script as their own.

The tongue of the Dark Elves, known as "Dunmeri" or "Dunmeris", utilizes the Daedric script for rendering both their own speech as well as Tamrielic. The Dunmer are the most numerous employers of the script in their day to day, altering the script in slight ways to make the written form legible and usable.

An irregularity in the Dunmer utilization of the script is their typography. Notably, Dunmeris does not need to be rendered in strict left-to-right fashion like Tamrielic or other Elven scripts, and does not need to form distinct word clusters.

Typical typography for horizontal town signs, the rendering of the names of their Tribunal Gods, and aphorisms they may put on banners is clustered together aesthetically. Each word in a settlement's name or a phrase has their starting letter larger than the rest, and for emphasis the starting letter is often a distinct color, hanging in the background of the rest of the glyphs.

For vertical writing (typically on obelisks and tapestries), the glyphs are allowed to overlap one another. Dunmeris usage of Daedric, in short, is freeform and flexible, making it difficult for outlanders to translate such a text without having been raised to be fluent.

Where Dunmeris diverges from the wider Empire's usage of Daedric script is within the composition of magical scrolls and enchanted items. Daedric is a popular script to transpose spells and other magical formulae onto enchanted objects, especially by the greater Mages Guild, as it is also utilized by the Daedra of Oblivion. Evoking the outer spheres, especially with Destruction and Conjuration incantations, proves effective in ensuring the spell functions.

With evident objects, the glyphs Xayah (X) and Yahkem (Y) are consistently omitted, as they are exceedingly rare in daedra-born inscriptions found throughout the outer realms and near-completely absent in their nymics. This can be best exemplified in the Mages Guild's proliferation of the most common incantation, "WOE UPON YOU", rendered as follows:

WOE UPON YOU