User blog comment:Zippertrain85/Harkon's backstory?/@comment-5450493-20130505155445/@comment-3217145-20130506130418

That's not exactly true. You see them in other Elder Scrolls games all over the place. They're not as common as the native race, but they're just as common as everything else (about as many Nords in Oblivion as Altmer or Khajiit, for example, even if Imperials are more common). As royalty, sure, it's more likely that a Nord-descended king would be in Skyrim, but it doesn't prove anything. There are Orc chieftains in Skyrim after all, when they "should" be in Orsinium.

Btw, Serana didn't have any idea what the "Empire" was, so that means she was shut away in the First Era or earlier, and that they became vampires even before that. If they're from a couple hundred years before the founding of the Empire, then the Nords wouldn't have even crossed over from Atmora yet. There's pretty much no lore from before that time, so it's not surprising one petty warlord wouldn't be mentioned. It also means the title of "Jarl" may not have been in use yet, or that the rule of law was so weak that anyone with enough followers could rise up and claim themselves "king" of whatever they wanted. His "land was vast, and wealth seemed limitless" statement would make perfect sense if he's talking about a freshly discovered, unclaimed (by humans) Skyrim.