Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-68.231.83.252-20171025135448/@comment-33309363-20171108191810

First the Ehlnofey wandered all of Tamriel (including Skyrim) before evolving and differentiating leaving basically no mark on the land.

About two thousand years later the Argonians arrived and found an empty little province and didn't even use it well, they just messed about in Cyrodil insted. Shortly after the Khajiit showed up and did't do anything either.

Rougy a thousand years further the Dwemer (a highly advanced race of elves) and the Falmer/Snow Elves (whatever you want to call them) appeared and colonised the land adding farms, mines and building real cities instead of petty villages.

Around two hundred years late the Nords arrived en masse by boat from Atmora, refugees from a devastating famine and recieved aid from the snow elves but not the Dwemer who saw them as a threat (and turned out to be right).

Eventually the Snow Elves realised that they couldn't provide for themselves and the ever-increasing refugee population of Nords. They also began to be outnumbered by the Nords and became paranoid. On the Night of Tears the snow elves went into the nordic city of Saarthal and massacred the citizens, even killing women and children. This really piss*d off the Nords especially Ysgramor who rallied five thousand elite soldiers and a load of farmers with pitchforks to kill the elves.

This began a huge war in which the Dwemer, Ayleids and Falmer all had to protect against the growing human populations (which now included the cross-bred Imperials and Bretons but not Redguards just yet), it was a huge war and included many battles including the Battle of the Moesring and ended in the near-extinction of the pure Falmer and the Ayleids, contributed to the dissapearance of the Dwemer and gave rise to the Alessian Empire.

The Nords had at this point taken all of Skyrim except The Reach which after the Dwmer incident was mostly empty, the Reachmen saw their chance and took it as their homeland (we all know how that worked out).

All in all the Nords don't technically hail from Skyrim, they hail from Atmora but they didn't really steal it, more like they took it by force.