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Would the fourth era be the end of Tamrielic history? Isn't Alduin the "harbringer of the end times"? I wouldn't think his death would end that, being a god and all. So... Is this the end?

No.. it was stated plainly in the main quest this isn't the end. Alduin eats the world at the end. He failed, obviously. He may return one day to finish the job, but not this time. The Kalpa will continue to run on.

Using that logic, the First Era would be the end.

Yeah, you have a good point there.

Granted all signs point to Alduin having ended the world before. These time epochs are known as Kalpas. Paarthurnax even mentions previous Kalpas, a concept brought up previously only in MK's obscure works.

Thing is, if the Kalpa ends, all of Mundus dissolves and the interplay of Anu and Padomay at the beginning replays itself. Then the world comes back together and time restarts at the Dawn Era. That clearly hasn't happened. Alduin has been thwarted in this Kalpa, not once but twice. I'm not sure if that ever happened in any of the previous versions of Mundus.

So out of curiosity, in each kalpa, do the large, general events occur in the same way? These events being the creation of each race, the landscape and towers of Nirn remaining the same, etc. Or can reality be shaped in others forms?

Grove-of-Hares wrote:So out of curiosity, in each kalpa, do the large, general events occur in the same way? These events being the creation of each race, the landscape and towers of Nirn remaining the same, etc. Or can reality be shaped in others forms?

There are differences. MK and others have given hints that the previous Mundus may have been largely a water world. Molag Bal was also known as Lyg or something and was either their Akatosh or their Lorkhan, and the Dreugh and other aquatic races were the equivalent of man and mer. In fact one of MK's new snippets from the unpublished Second PGE refers to Dreugh as "Cephelomer" or something, and that's consistent with one of their earlier descriptions as "Altmer of the sea." So basically lobster people...or crab people, were the dominant empire of the old Kalpa. The Ruddy Man was a leftover myth echo of Molag Bal's previous aedric aspect. Vivec faces him in one of his Sermons. It's implied in the Seven Fights series that the Greedy Man manages to trick other spirits into hiding pieces of Nirn each time Alduin eats the world, so some places and races sometime cheat death and exist from one Kalpa to another. Perhaps the Dreugh are leftovers.

Wait, I know this is unrelated to the topic, but if the Greedy Man hides pieces of Nirn....do you think maybe that is why the Dwemer disappeared Kagrenac may've thought that something considerable was going to happen and he wanted to preserve his race in the next Nirn...ee gads, I elaborate more every day, the Mer are awfully interesting.

Nah...we have a thread or three on Dwemer on the first couple of pages here. It's possible to find out quite a bit of where they actually went in a quest in Morrowind, and an Imperial Library author wrote a pretty good piece on what happened to them. The most likely explanation is they became the golden skin of the giant golem Numidium. That's not really the same as what Lorkhan does to trick Alduin. In fact it's a deeply un-Lorkhanic thing to do. The Missing God wants to preserve Mundus and the lessons mortals learn so they can transcend and become great. The Dwemer thought Mundus profane, like the Aldmeri Dominion do, but their method of escaping their limited bodies was a bit different.

It's not entirely impossible Kagranac was trying to preserve his race until the next Kalpa, mind you. Other races have done similar things somehow. It's implied the Ayleid sorcerer king Umaril's father was a god who managed to escape the last Eating of the world. It seems far more likely based on what we learn about the Dwemer that their goal is to never return to Mundus if they can help it though.