So having finished Trespasser and absorbing a lot of lore, are we going to talk about the fact that the Dalish lore is 100% truthful? Hear me out.
There’s a conversation in Haven with Solas about the memories of Ostagar, about how the soldier watching a traitor and a villain quit the field and another who saw a competent commander sounding a retreat to save his men. Solas says himself that both these accounts are true, despite seeming to contradict one another. Truth is a matter of perspective.
Solas gives the Dalish a lot of flack for not recording history correctly, and from his perspective that critiscism would appear to be fair. He knows about the evanuris, their plans, their crimes and the intimate underpinnings of the civil pantheon war that resulted in the creation of the veil. However, Trespasser has allowed a third perspective to be considered: that of the elves who weren’t actively participating in Solas’s rebellion against the evanuris but those, evidently, that agreed with the system and worshiped the gods. They saw Solas’s actions in creating the veil / locking away the evanuris as an act of treason, of betrayal, not of salvation.
Where this becomes really interesting is the Dalish: whom we’ve been led to believe had somehow misinterpreted historical accounts in grossly inaccurate ways. But despite these inaccuracies, they still got a lot of details correct, and the base facts weren’t wrong just with a strange political slant that seemed to have come out of nowhere.
Instead, what is looking far more likely is those elves that were left defending Arlathan and then became the first Tevinter slaves were those who passed down this lore, and from their perspective, all of the Dalish legends would be true. They felt sore and betrayed and cut off from their own world, and it suddenly becomes clear where the Dalish interpretation comes from – it isn’t the Dalish interpretation at all. Somehow they’ve managed to preserve and recount the version of the tale told by those left behind, with uncanny accuracy.
What might be untrue to Solas – who saw all of this go down – might be true to another group who were in the dark during the upheval and then found themselves alone and dying in the world. Can anyone blame them for idolising what they thought was their last hope and slandering the person they held responsible?
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