Lore talk:Mages Guild

Redlink People

At the time of writing, Caranya, Hannibal Traven, Janus Hassildor, and Raminus Polus have a redlinked Tamriel article in the Oblivion section. Unlike Irlav Jarol, who points to a redirect page because he's mentioned on the People I page (due to him having written a book). Should the aforementioned four people be linked to their Oblivion articles, or should they be set up in the relevant People section and linked/redirected there? --Gaebrial 06:07, 30 May 2008 (EDT)

I'd say that Hannibal Traven and Janus Hassildor are important enough to have their own Tamriel page but the others should either have no link or go to the Oblivion articles. If there were proof of the members of the council of mages then I suppose Tamriel articles would be justified, but I still believe the information on this page is guesswork so the best solution may be to delete the line about the council altogether. –Rpeh^{•T•C•E•} 06:20, 30 May 2008 (EDT)

Bruma attack split the council?

How can the attack on Bruma have caused the council to split? Traven obviously first learns of it when the player returns from Bruma, and at that point Caranya and Jarlov have already left with their respective artifacts83.109.72.15 05:52, 14 February 2009 (EST)

When you first tell him the news, they haven't left, he says come back in 2 days time(by which time they have left). 86.178.224.253 03:46, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

Mages Guild Symbol Thingy?

You know that big circle with all the symbols inside it that is often found on the ground and hanging up on mages guils walls, like the one on the ground outside of the Arcane University; what does it it mean, there is some daedric in it and stuff, and i thought it must mean something? Mor'tar'iit 21:29, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

See this. --S'drassa ^•T2M 21:35, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

thank yaw, my totally awesome friend ^_^ Mor'tar'iit 11:29, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

College of Whispers/Synod

Is there any info at all as to why the Mages Guild disbanded other than "unknown reasons". Isn't there any info anywhere? Or was the player so terrible at being an Archmage that they said "screw it" and ended the guild? Does it talk about this in The Infernal City? — Unsigned comment by 206.45.192.198 (talk) at 01:23 on 15 May 2011

Yes, it is mentioned in The Infernal City, and no, it doesn't go into any further depth as to the reasons behind the split. Legoless 00:27, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

It might be because the Player Character in Oblivion eventually becomes Sheogorath full time. If that happened quickly enough after Traven's death, the loss of two Archmages in so short a time could've caused a lot of infighting amongst what was left of the Guild leadership. — Unsigned comment by 64.127.92.89 (talk) at 03:52 on January 3, 2012

Let's leave further speculation to the forums. Minor Edits 06:41, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

College will be the main Mages Guild in Skyrim

As the headline states, the College of Whispers seems like it'll be the 'main' Mages Guild faction, confirmed in this http://www.gametrailers.com/video/e3-2011-elder-scrolls/714851 video. I won't edit it yet though, perhaps it's too soon to add it? XinonHyena 16:24, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

That's "The College of Winter’s Hold", not the College of Whispers. It might not have any relation to the Mages Guild. I say don't add it yet. Legoless 16:27, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Definitely not. All we know is that it's the faction for magic users in Skyrim. It might not be related to the Mages Guild at all. rpeh •T•C•E• 17:07, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Various Issues

Not sure if anyone still edits this stuff, but I noticed several seeming inconsistencies throughout the article:

1. Typo "seen" The picture in the second era history section has the caption "Mages Guild Retreat, as sen in Legends", which looks like it should be "seen".

2. Typo "seen" Likewise for the caption in the teachings section, "Mages Guild Recruit, as sen in Legends".

3. Clarification of "School" Adoption The following quote seems off to me:

"By the Second Era, the Mages Guild taught its students the aggregate of magical research and knowledge collected over several centuries, however its instructional methods had become haphazard and disorganized. As such, a new model based off the Shad Astula Academy was quickly adopted."

The Mages Guild was founded in the second era, so the phrase "by the second era" seems odd. Furthermore, the new model couldn't be "quickly adopted" if it took centuries for the problems to develop. The in-universe document cited (Proposal: Schools of Magic) is from ESO, which starts in 2E 582. So even the Mages Guild, which started in 2E 230, was 352 years old by that point. And the body of work used in the curricula might have been far older than that.

Note that ESO isn't completely reliable as a timestamp though, seeing as some Daedric prince pulled lorebooks in from across time (mainly so people could read stuff from the other video games, I presume). It would be beneficial to see if there's any contextual information in ESO to cement the date for that document, but I haven't played ESO in a few years now to check it myself.

Going further still, if the document in question was published in-universe during ESO, the new model still wasn't "quickly adopted" at that point. ESO didn't have Alteration, Conjuration, Mysticism or Thaumaturgy schools, and the individual character classes had numerous "schools" not present in standard TES games (like "Daedric Summoning" for sorcs). If that proposal was the catalyst for changes between ESO skills and Daggerfall skills, the adoption would still be after the last patch of ESO (not sure if they even put dates into the ESO lore) and before Daggerfall (3E 405), giving us a 700ish-year period during which it could have occurred. If there's any information about schools of magic in Arena, that might limit it to before 3E 389, but that doesn't change much, and I don't recall Arena having magic schools.

Also note that Daggerfall didn't have Conjuration (just Alteration, Destruction, Illusion, Mysticism, Restoration, and Thaumaturgy), and Morrowind added Conjuration while getting rid of Thaumaturgy, so there's never a period where the exact model proposed actually existed (that we know of).

It's also worth noting the existence of Enchanting, which is present in ESO, Morrowind and Skyrim as explicit skills, and in-universe in the other games, but is not on the list in the proposal document.

Overall, I'd say the proposed model was never fully adopted, and was instead used as the basis for individual models used by different schools at different times. Which is, in fact, what the proposal proposes.

The page Shad Astula is probably similarly afflicted, and isn't much help on this subject. Since the Shad Astula is the college for the Ebonheart Pact, we might assume the curriculum in use is no older than 2E 572, but even that is suspect, since it could easily have come from some other institute that predates the ESO timeline, unless there's some other contextual information to say otherwise.

4. Classification Validity Likewise, this quote is off:

"This system of classification would survive throughout the centuries, however the schools of Thaumaturgy and Mysticism were gradually absorbed by the other six divisions."

As noted above, the system of classification in question didn't really "survive", since it never existed as such. Instead, it was used as inspiration for what did survive.

Additionally, while Thaumaturgy got merged into other skills in the Morrowind game (and doesn't exist in Oblivion either), there's no real reason to assume it doesn't still exist in-universe. Morrowind is just 22 years after Daggerfall, and Oblivion is just 6 years after that, and a continent-wide guild is unlikely to change every school in the world in that short a time period.

Finally, Mysticism wasn't merged by the Mages Guild. It was merged out-of-universe in the game Skyrim after the Mages Guild had already disbanded.

5. Don't Forget Enchanting! Which also means Enchanting needs added to the list of schools, since it's at least as much a school of magic as alchemy is. However, it might be added outside the quotation, since that list is explicitly from the original proposal.

6. Typo "Tamrielic" "Tamreielic" should be spelled "Tamrielic". (Near the top, when talking about hiring guards.)

7. Grammar/Accuracy of Necromancy Ban This section in the 3E history about Traven's ban on Necromancy is redundant with the statement a few lines later and breaks the flow of the paragraph:

"However, this was not a new policy: Vanus Galerion, the first Arch-Mage of the Mages Guild, was strongly against Necromancy and banned it."

Additionally, the reference to the Origin of the Mages Guild should be removed, since that document says nothing about banning necromancy.

8. Addition of Dissolution Date According to the page for Books:The Infernal City, the book takes place in 4E 40, so the dissolution of the Mages Guild would have taken place that year as well.

199.127.114.114 12:32, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

Thank you in your interest in editing, please see Editing Pages for some useful guides in helping you make these edits. --AKB ^{Talk Cont Mail} 17:25, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

Ok, I looked at your edits to my edits.

First, I made some new edits. I moved the section about "many mages graduated from the Mages Guild" to the top, since it was interrupting the flow between "what they do teach" and "what they don't teach". Then I re-wrote the first paragraph in contention almost completely, so it should flow better and explain the restructuring that took place. I included Dark Magic as an example of a school that existed before the restructuring so it can contrast with the fact that it doesn't exist after the restructuring.

I completely removed the excerpt from the Proposal document because it has little bearing on what we actually see in the lore. I replaced it with a list of the nine schools that are canonically present in the various other games. They're organized alphabetically, with the seven spell-casting schools above the miscellaneous schools.

I'm not likely to bother much with this if you just start some kind of edit war and revert all my changes. I've already wasted way more time than I intended after what was supposed to be a simple typo fix. If you don't like the new stuff, I'd urge you to fix it rather than revert it. Even if you revert a lot of it, I'd urge you to fix the grammar issues and correct the inaccuracies.

Second, let's take a step back before examining your last round of edits.

Really, there's a problem with the proposal as a source anyways. It makes the implication that the Mages Guild at the time wasn't using any schools of magic, and that simply teaching magic with the concept of "schools" rather than whatever might have come before was itself innovation. But that conflicts with what's actually present in the game ESO. Clearly, the Mages Guild was already teaching magic as a number of schools when this proposal was written. The book Simple Illusion Magic, from ESO, makes it clear that the Illusion school was already commonly known as a concept, even if the Mages Guild wasn't teaching it that way. Likewise, the school of Dark Magic was known, as shown by the note Dark Magic: Three Pretexts. Between the notes Where Magical Paths Meet and The Origins of Conjuration, it's clear that not only was Conjuration around at the time of ESO, but it actually predates the Mages Guild into the First Era. Etc.

So we know that schools of magic were already a thing, and that any restructuring of the Mages Guild curricula was just to re-arrange the exact schools being taught by the guild in an attempt to compete with the Shad Astula Academy.

You can see that someone else had the same ideas I've got by reading the article on the History of Magic:

"Some time before the Three Banners War, the curricula of the Mages Guild was seen as haphazard and disorganized. Gabrielle Benele saw that the Shad Astula Academy divided magic into eight "schools" and that this resulted in novice mages being trained in half the time, so she proposed the Mages Guild follow this model as well. The Guild did adopt this and while the number of schools have changed over time, the concept has endured since its adoption."

Note that the page on Conjuration suggests that Conjuration wasn't even a major part of the Mages Guild teachings until after Daggerfall (the Rift in the West), and notes that it isn't considered a "great school" in the Mages Guild Charter, which again implies the Proposal document wasn't followed to the letter.

Third, here's a list of problems with your edit. You may not care about them in relation to this article, but they may help you with future editing.

1. For the 4E 40 date, I was assuming the guild dissolved during the events of the book, which in retrospect was probably not true (I haven't read the book, so I'm not sure how it was written). I'm actually agreeing with you here, but I didn't feel like re-numbering everything else. :p

2. The "sentence fragment" was actually correct grammar, while the current version is a run-on sentence that is not correct. "However" needs to apply to the first sentence, which it does not, and there needs to be a second comma just after "however" to do it your way. For example:

"The Shad Astula Academy taught an elite curriculum created by master mages to be awesome-sauce. The Mages Guild taught its students an aggregate of magical research and knowledge collected over several centuries, however, and its instructional methods became haphazard and disorganized."

In that case, "however" is contrasting the first sentence with the independent clause in the second sentence. The second sentence then continues with a dependent clause. Note that we can simply remove "however" from the second sentence without changing the meaning or being improper grammar:

"The Mages Guild taught its students an aggregate of magical research and knowledge collected over several centuries and its instructional methods became haphazard and disorganized."

In our case, "however" applies only to the second sentence. There's no sentence preceding "The Mages Guild taught its students" to contrast with, so "however" doesn't apply there. Also note that you can't remove "however" from the sentence:

"The Mages Guild taught its students the aggregate of magical research and knowledge collected over several centuries its instructional methods had become haphazard and disorganized."

The second portion of the sentence is a complete sentence, and "however" isn't a conjunction, so you're just mashing two complete sentences together.

If you were taught that it's wrong to begin a sentence with various words like "and", "but", or "however", that's nonsense. But if you really wanted, you could move "however" to another part of the second sentence:

"The Mages Guild initially taught its students an aggregate of magical research and knowledge collected over several centuries. Its instructional methods, however, became haphazard and disorganized."

If you really want to put it into a single sentence, you could switch "however" to "but":

"The Mages Guild initially taught its students an aggregate of magical research and knowledge collected over several centuries, but its instructional methods became haphazard and disorganized."

3. In the same paragraph as (2), I noticed that you changed "an aggregate" to "the aggregate". This is incorrect. "The aggregate" implies there is only one, but there are many aggregates of knowledge throughout the TES universe, of which this aggregate is only one. You could change it to be "the aggregate collected by the Mages Guild", but that sounds stupid in the actual sentence:

"The Mages Guild initially taught its students the aggregate of magical research and knowledge collected by the Mages Guild over several centuries, but its instructional methods became haphazard and disorganized."

4. Still in the same paragraph, you changed "became" to "had become". Again, this is incorrect. "Became" tells us this happened in the past. "Had become" tells us this happened in the past, but before some other time. For example:

"The Mages Guild initially taught its students an aggregate of magical research and knowledge collected over several centuries. However, its instructional methods had become haphazard and disorganized by the time of the Three Banners War."

I actually like this version better, but it does require us to place the Proposal document at a relatively specific point in time.

5. So what about that specific point in time? You removed the reference to "circa 2E 582". Now, I'm not sure I like the idea of "circa" followed by a very specific date. It's not technically wrong, but it seems a little odd. My intent was to imply that it occurred in the timeframe of the game ESO, but that's not a lore-friendly way to write it. A better way would be something like I did in (4):

"As such, a new model based off the Shad Astula Academy was proposed around the time of the Three Banners War."

What I am sure about is that the article will greatly benefit from placing the proposal at a reasonably specific point in time. While certain documents are present in ESO despite being written long after ESO, I would assume this is not one of those documents. The woman who wrote it is in the game, and it seems likely the intent is that she wrote it shortly before the player arrived to read it. It's possible she wrote it decades to centuries before (depending on the lifespan of a Breton, which is debated without any good answer), or centuries after (if some kind of time magic brought the document back to ESO), but I'd call that silly without actual evidence supporting it.

If we assume the document can't be reasonably tied to the ESO timeframe, what's the point of including it at all? We know that Destruction, Restoration, Enchanting, and Alchemy are being taught to player characters as specific schools during ESO, and that all the schools in the proposal except Conjuration are being taught as specific schools by the time of Daggerfall. All that tells us is that the Mages Guild seems to teach magic to students as an arbitrary set of "schools" that are different from time to time and/or location to location, which might be noteworthy. And that at least one proposal to make an extensive overhaul of the then-current curriculum was written at some time during the guild's thousand-year lifespan, which isn't noteworthy at all.

6. Near the beginning of the paragraph, you've removed the word "initially" from my edit, for reasons you didn't specify. I deliberately put it there, because it shows the transition from "aggregate of knowledge" to "haphazard and disorganized" more readily. Of course, I left it out on my final edit, and wasn't really militant about keeping it in to begin with. But it wasn't a random inclusion the first time.

7. At the end of the same paragraph, you added a random opening curly brace that doesn't belong. Probably only notable if you revert everything.

8. Moving to a different paragraph, you've completely reverted to this very wrong sentence:

"This system of classification would survive throughout the centuries, however the schools of Thaumaturgy and Mysticism were gradually absorbed by the other six divisions."

First, as noted above, there's zero evidence that exact system existed, let along survived. My version makes it clear that something similar to the proposed system clearly survived, but the proposal itself has no validation. Second, Mysticism existed until the end of the guild, so including its absorption is blatantly wrong. Third, there's nothing "gradual" about the supposed absorption of Thaumaturgy, which went from a complete school of magic to (presumably) not a school at all in 22 years.

So that sentence needs to be removed or corrected regardless of whether my version is good or bad.

9. With regards to my version of the sentence in (8), you seem to have gotten confused by the wording. It isn't magic that stopped existing; it's the schools of magic as taught by the Mages Guild that stopped existing. Remember that there's no such thing as "mysticism magic". There are just methods of learning magic that label certain techniques as "Mysticism". Furthermore, we're not talking about magic schools in general; we're specifically talking about what was taught by the Mages Guild. The conceptual schools of magic taught by the Mages Guild clearly lived on past the guild's dissolution (and likely predate the guild), but the Mages Guild itself stopped teaching anything after it was dissolved. So Skyrim's lack of a Mysticism skill doesn't tell us that Mysticism was absorbed into something else in the Mages Guild curriculum. It just tells us that wherever the player learned magic didn't teach those spells as "Mysticism".

And, again, let's be fair. The fact that game skills were changed between the various games is purely a reflection of game design. It's pretty silly to assume that every time some out-of-universe game change happens in a 5-year in-universe timespan, that those changes were actually felt in Tamriel in any absolute sense. It's far more plausible to assume that different Mages Guild locations simply have different curricula, and that the player skills in a given game are indicative of the teaching methods of the local guild halls. And we get even more leeway in Skyrim, since the College of Winterhold was never part of the Mages Guild.

10. Still in the same paragraph, you've removed my reference to Enchanting. While enchanting is not a spell-casting school, it is clearly a subject taught by the Mages Guild, and should be included if Alchemy is included. The article seems to completely ignore the mountain of lore on this topic that is present throughout the TES games, and presume that a single re-structure proposal is the only thing worth mentioning. The fact is that Enchanting was taught to the player in ESO, Morrowind, and Skyrim, and is clearly taught to other people in Arena, Daggerfall, and Oblivion. The fact that it's not included in one document written during the time of ESO is irrelevant. The College of Winterhold document, Enchanter's Primer, even makes it clear that it was used in the Mages Guild long enough to be "raised to a fine art by the wizards of the Arcane University". Furthermore, it is included in the Mages Guild Charter as a requirement for joining, while Conjuration and Restoration are not.

11. Like the other paragraph, the sentence you reverted to incorrectly ties two complete sentences into a run-on sentence with the word "however".

12. Finally for this paragraph, you've re-added the reference to the proposal. Even if we assumed that the incorrect sentence was true, the proposal doesn't support this in any way, so it needs to be removed as a reference. If you want a reference for that paragraph, it needs to be something that A) supports the existence of the classification in question later in the timeline, B) supports the notion that Thaumaturgy was absorbed into other schools, and C) supports the notion that Mysticism was absorbed into other schools as taught by the Mages Guild.

199.127.114.114 12:37, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

I appreciate how much thought you've put into these edits, but you don't have to explain your reasoning anywhere near this level of detail or at all unless someone reverts the change. Not many people have the time to read these huge text walls. I think it would be better if you used most of this energy to improve other articles.

That goes for both posts. As for the second one, you may be right that AKB reverted more than was necessary. That often happens and usually by accident. I would highly suggest making an account as well. You seem to know what you're doing and we can always use more editors! —Dillonn241 (talk) 23:09, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

Mages Guild in Legends

With characters such as Arch-Mage Naris, Kianra Elsinor, and Taviah Al-Thir, appearing in the Legends game, as part of daily quests rather than the main story, and considering that the Mages Guild has been dissolved by the Fourth Era, does this make them non-canon? --KevinM^(talk) 06:02, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Legends quest giver npcs don't have to be placed in the Fourth Era timeline - especially that Legends had expansions themed around and set in Second (Alliance War, Moons of Elsweyr) and Third era (Houses of Morrowind, Jaws of Oblivion). In general whatever those characters do in "daily quests" isn't relevant for purposes of the story - but it's official product nonetheless. Tyrvarion (talk) 06:09, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Agree with Tyr on this, the Legends characters span different time periods and we have no idea if these guys are meant to be in the Fourth Era. Quests like Hlaalu Mastery are meant to take place in the Third Era since Caius is involved and the Hlaalu are still a Great House in it, for example. The Rim of the Sky (talk) 06:42, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

(←) Is it still possible to add Arch-Mage Naris' image to the Hall of Arch-Mages section, even though it's unclear which era he's from? For example, instead of the era and year, it could say 'Unknown Era' below his image. --KevinM^(talk) 18:28, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

I went ahead and added his photo to the section.Analeah Oaksong (talk) 18:38, 17 October 2024 (UTC)