The Elder Scrolls: The XVII Princes of Oblivion

[Kareeah_Indaga]

1. Sure, but as I said - the one thing we know for stone cold certainty about the Blades' intel on the Thalmor is, it wasn't very good. Even at the height of their power, they could neither accurately estimate the Thalmor's strength nor anticipate their moves. Esbern's speculation may be relatively well informed, but it's still speculation.

Citation needed. While we know they were on the losing side of the Great War, we know the Blades won enough minor victories that the Thalmor still consider them a threat. We also know that the Blades no longer had a direct line to the Emperor, as the Mede Dynasty replaced them with the Penitus Oculatus, so they were fighting with a handicap. And on top of that the area protected by the Blades got hit by more in the way of disasters (succession crisis right after the Oblivion Crisis, Umbriel, the fall of Baar Dau and the Red Year) than the Thalmor prior to the Great War.

No indication whatsoever that their loss was due to bad information.

(Edit: 1a: I'm also not entirely convinced that "Loremaster" translates accurately to "chief intelligence analyst". Seems likely that "Archivist" might be a more plausible equivalent.)

While that is not untrue:

He was not a field agent, but is now believed to have been behind some of the most damaging operations carried out by the Blades during the pre-war years, including the Falinesti Incident and the breach of the Blue River Prison.

He knew enough about the Thalmor's plans to hurt them and to avoid them when most of the rest of the Blades' organization was killed.

2. Spot on? I thought we agreed just a few pages ago that Alduin wasn't, perceptibly, trying to destroy the world.

Eh? He knew Alduin was going to come back before he came back, which was why everyone thought Esbern was crazy.

That's no reason to have it written down in the Embassy, unless either (a) you are over-confident in the Embassy's own security and sure it could never fall into unfriendly hands,

...which is the Thalmor to the T.

or (b) you don't mind it falling into unfriendly hands because it's not actually true, but designed to mislead your enemies. In the former case, the lack of other written evidence in the Embassy remains unexplained. In the latter case that lack makes perfect sense, but we'd have to admit that any other evidence was also unreliable anyway so what's the point.

As I believe has been pointed out before, if you're letting your enemies get into your inner sanctum just to mislead them, that's not cleverness that's incompetence, and the Thalmor aren't that.

Also, they had the location of Esbern written down as well, and that is perfectly verifiable.