It's not canon lore. The three "expert" antiquarians nearly always contradict one another's opinions, and often reveal their ignorance on wider matters. It's more like "this bloke down the pub told me that..."

RaddlemanNumber7 wrote: »

It's not canon lore. The three "expert" antiquarians nearly always contradict one another's opinions, and often reveal their ignorance on wider matters. It's more like "this bloke down the pub told me that..."

...which is probably where you would literally have to start with if trying to identify relics belonging to a people with no real written history (Argonians) or suffered multiple society-destorying invasions (Orcs.)

I can see how, we lucky ones with access to the entire TES lore from places like UESP can be disappointed by the suggestions of the scholars that are analyzing the relics we found, but pretty much anything newly discovered is going to start with random guesses based on the knowledge available, even in RL.

At the very least, I would think the purple treasures- the ones that have only one entry and you normally can only excavate one of- to be new lore, since they are immediately identified with little debate as to what they are amd signify.

Okay, so to just put it in simple terms, what is canon in TES is different and arguably a little more complicated than it is for other series.

I think the general consensus one should come to, and as Todd Howard once talked about, is that what you see in the games yourself can be considered canon, factual, truth. However, when he said this, he was referring to how the writers go about writing the newer titles and utilizing previously established information. For us, this can still apply in a manner of speaking.

In large part what happens during the events of the games, where you're the main character, falls heavily into personal narrative. Consider you are playing as the Vestige (ESO's player character) and you go about the storylines in order of release. Now consider you're playing as the Vestige but this time you're going about the storylines in whatever manner you please, such as playing through Greymoor first and then moving on to the Planemeld plotline. Both of these flows of events are considered canon within one's personal narrative. For one character you follow the storyline by release, and the other you just do things in whatever order, and both of them are canonical for those specific characters. The events themselves did happen, but which exact Vestige did them and in what order is entirely up to you and based on which one you're currently playing.

Next, remember that through Antiquities the theories from the rest of the Circle are entirely canon, as it is literally just them theorizing what the things you dig up are, and what they were used for, and where they came from. To say that the codex information you gather is not canon is to ignore the fact that a lot of TES lore is built upon theories and is meant to be corroborated and contradicted by other sources and evidence. What matters is what you believe to be true. It could be that the Psijics can read water, just as it could be that they can't. You have to decide that for yourself based on the information given to you through the theories presented. The entire point of the Antiquarian's Circle is to scry and dig up ancient antiquities so we might paint a better picture of what First Era history, and perhaps even longer ago, was like. The codex presents information in the form of the Circle's theories based on what you dig up and send back to them.

Finally, and somewhat funnily, a saying from Assassin's Creed tends to paint a good picture of how one should view TES lore. "Nothing is true. Everything is permitted." A lot of the lore is based around the theories of people in-universe as well as us on the outside looking in. We can never tell if any of these theories are true until we see them with our own eyes in one of the games, and even then it'll bring up more questions than it answers. The nature of TES lore is to provide a vast multitude of pieces we can all put together to form different conclusions of events and subjects. Whether these things get an "official" answer in the future, or the past, we cannot really know until it happens. With this in mind, the most simple way to put this is: Yes, the theories presented by the Antiquarian's Circle when you send over the things you dig up are canonical theories presented by characters in-universe. This means they are canon. Whether you choose to believe their theories as truth or not is up to you and what fits into your personal narrative.

RaddlemanNumber7 wrote: »

It's not canon lore. The three "expert" antiquarians nearly always contradict one another's opinions, and often reveal their ignorance on wider matters. It's more like "this bloke down the pub told me that..."

Which is pretty much what Elder Scrolls canon lore is. Just remember this next time you see something written by Narsis Dren in a TES game.

Wether or not these antiquaties and their analysis is actual canon lore, that analysis draws on a lot of references to established lore.