[Speculation] Khaenri'ah are lizard people created from Nibelung's experiment with the abyss force

Makes sense, doesn't it? The Bathysmal Vishaps are a highly intelligent and fast-evolving kind. There have been legends about this for over a thousand years now.

- Enjou, Enkanomiya event

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It's a long story... We all once believed in the distant past that only forbidden knowledge could give us enough power to defeat the Heavenly Principles.

The Dragon King (Nibelung) acquired the power of darkness from outside of this world and led us in a fight against the order established by the outsiders.

- Apep

Hypothesis: Khaenri'ah people are lizard people created by Nibelung in his experiment with the abyss force. Khaenri'ah people then proceeded to completely forget about it and mistakenly assumed that they were descendants of Phanes' people, intermarried with actual Phanes' people, and then got punished by Nibelung or the abyss force during the Cataclysm.

It sounds wild, I know, but hear me out, I based this theory on the irl history of the Nibelung (aka the Burgundians, aka part of the Frankish empire), Nibelungenlied, Rosengarten zu Worms, and Wagner's ring cycle, all of which have been explicitly referenced by genshin's lore.

I. Wagner's ring cycle:

In the depths of the Rhine, the three Rhinemaidens guard the Rhinegold, a treasure of immeasurable value. The Nibelung dwarf Alberich is dazzled by the sight of it. The girls explain that whoever wins the gold and forges it into a ring will gain power over the world, but must first renounce love. Frustrated by his unsuccessful attempts to catch one of the girls, Alberich curses love and steals the gold.

Wotan, lord of the gods, is reproached by his wife Fricka: he has promised to give Freia, goddess of youth, to the giants Fasolt and Fafner in return for their building a fortress for the gods. When the giants demand their reward, Loge, the god of fire, suggests an alternative payment: the ring Alberich has forged from the Rhinegold, and his other treasures. The giants agree, and Wotan and Loge leave for the Nibelungs’ underground home.

Here they meet Alberich’s brother Mime, who has forged the Tarnhelm, a magic helmet that transforms its wearer into any shape. Mime tells Wotan and Loge how Alberich has enslaved the Nibelungs to work for him. Alberich appears and mocks the gods. Loge asks for a demonstration of the Tarnhelm and Alberich turns himself into a dragon, then into a toad, which the gods capture. Dragged to the surface, the dwarf is forced to summon the Nibelungs to heap up the gold. Wotan wrests the ring from his finger. Shattered, Alberich curses the ring: ceaseless worry and death shall be the destiny of its bearer.

The giants return and agree to accept the gold. The gods have to give up even the Tarnhelm, but Wotan refuses to part with the ring. Erda, goddess of the earth, appears and warns him that possession of it will bring about the end of the gods. Wotan reluctantly gives the ring to the giants, and Alberich’s curse claims its first victim as Fafner kills his brother in a dispute over the treasure. As the voices of the Rhinemaidens are heard, lamenting the loss of their gold, the gods walk toward their new home, which Wotan names Valhalla.

Source of Das Rheingold summary: https://www.metopera.org/user-information/synopses-archive/das-rheingold

The first thing that hits us in the face with Das Rheingold is that all the names are very, very familiar to genshin players:

  • Rhinemaidens = Rhinedottir.
  • Alberich = the Alberich line of Khaenri'ah, and Kaeya's surname.
  • Nibelung the race of dwarfs = Nibelung the dragon king.
  • Wotan = another epithet of Odin, whose other epithet is Irmin, aka King Irmin in genshin.
  • The ring made from Rhein gold = the ring on Dains' finger.

Zurvan: Now, now, there's no need to be so serious. Since you have seen the memories of the past, what I shall now tell you are not tales, but truth.

Zurvan: A long, long time ago, when I had first awakened amidst the sea of flowers, the skies were filled with anomalies of the dark hollow and there were monsters roaming everywhere — everywhere but this small land of refuge.

Zurvan: I gathered the might of Khvarena according to the divine bird's last wishes, and departed from the sea of flowers to subdue the monsters, until I met that golden-haired man out in the wilderness.

Zurvan: Half of his body had become that of a monster, but I did not sense an aura of monstrosity in him. When I discovered him, he was holding a ring tightly in his hand.

Zurvan: I brought him back to the sea of flowers, and when he awoke, he claimed to be a Dahri swordsman who had only survived because he had been cursed.

Credit to u/Express-Extent-2176 for telling me about this.

So yeah, genshin very obviously took inspiration from Wagner's ring cycle. As such, if we put together the plot of Das Rheingold, we can kinda sew together the vague picture of what actually happened in the last days of Khaenri'ah.

  1. Rhinedottir got ahold of some Rheingold and did some experiments with it.
  2. Someone from the Alberich line stole the secret from her and messed it up. In the background, king Irmin (in the role of his namesake, Wotan) plotted it all in the background in an attempt to... do something that probably has something to do with Nibelung the dragon.
  3. The gold was made into a ring.
  4. Gotterdammerung for the Khaenri'ah rulers. Disasters unfolded. Khaenri'ah got wiped. Half-Khaenri'ah were turned into hilichurls (aka genshin's dwarfs as a direct reference to Wagner's opera), pure-blood Khaenri'ah became immortal.
  5. The gold ring somehow fell into Dains' hands, who might or might not be aware of its true nature and brought it the surface.
  6. Rhinedottir went MIA. Pierro entered the service of the Tsaritsa. Chlothar escaped with his hilichurl son, Caribert.
  7. Kaeya was dropped off in Mond.

Well, this chain of events might not necessarily be true, but it's something to work on for us right now to speculate on the actual history of Khaenri'ah.

But why did the pure-blood Khaenri'ah got immortality, while the half-Khaenri'ah became hilichurls?

II. The irl history of Nibelung and Nibelungenlied:

While the Nibelung were depicted as dwarfs in Wagner's cycle, the reality is that they were the names for the royal family of the Burgundians. And the history of the Burgundians is an interesting one.

The Burgundians were a Germanic people who originally lived in the Baltic region before moving down to the Rhineland-Burgundy area, next to the Rhine river. They were later conquered by the (also Germanic) Frankish empire and later on considered to be Franks themselves. Incidentally, the Franks have been directly referenced in genshin with the names of Caribert and Chlothar. The fictionalized accounts of the Burgundians' demise were told in the form of oral history and then written down as poems in Germanic and Nordic folk traditions as the Nibelungen saga. And here is where we can start to see the connection between Nibelung the dragon and Khaenri'ah's royal line:

  • Khaenri'ah has been shown to be very blatantly Germanic, with influences from Phanes' Greco-Roman unified culture. In the Enka quest when we looked for books with Enjou, Enjou revealed that the abyss order and Khaenri'ah believed that they descended from Phanes' people like Enka instead of being vishap people themselves. This would track with the irl history, where the invaders, the Germanic Franks and Burgundians, both got reverse assimilated by the Roman culture of the Gaul region and became French.
  • Caribert and Chlothar both originated as names from the Merovingian dynasty of the Franks. In genshin, they are distantly related to the main royal line of King Irmin and the more highly-ranked Alberich.
  • Incidentally, sumanai Siegfried/Sigurd, the hero who robbed the Nibelung gold from the Nibelung and Schilbung dwarfs/ killed the dragons guarding the Nibelung gold (depending on the version of the saga) before gifting it to Kriemhild/Brunhilde (depending on the version), was also inspired by the Merovingian dynasty's naming system. Sumanai Siegfried also got his skin hardended by dragon blood. Dains is /probably/ in the role of sumanai Siegfried here with him managing to escape with the gold ring after the Cataclysm.
  • Alberich is the king of the Nibelung dwarfs in Wagner's opera. In genshin, the Alberich clan was the substitute leader of Khaenri'ah during the Cataclysm. Hence, we can make the connection that the Khaenri'ah people are supposed to be the genshin equivalence of the Nibelung dwarfs, a connection that is further supported by the hilichurl design in-game looking like, well, dwarfs.
  • In Nibelungenlied (the Germanic tradition), Nibelung is the name of one of the dwarfs whose gold Siegfried stole from. After Siegfried's death, Hagen, his killer, threw the gold to the bottom of the Rhine. His widow, Kriemhilde, went crazy afterwards and staged a decade-long plot to kill Hagen and Gunther for revenge and find the gold ring again. In Wagner's opera, Nibelung became the dwarfs who stole the gold from the Rhine daughters instead after renouncing love. In Norse tradition, the Nibelung dwarfs live in a cold and misty hell (cough gate to hell cough). In either case, Nibelung is always associated to the gold, either as the robber or as the robbed. Hence, we can be reasonably certain that Nibelung the dragon is very much involved in the history of Khaenri'ah, either directly or indirectly.

Now that we have established that Nibelung the dragon is definitely tied to Khaenri'ah in some way, we have to ask ourselves: why did the pure-blood Khaenri'ah got immortality, while the half-Khaenri'ah became hilichurls?

Here I propose the answer lays in Nibelung's messing around with the abyss.

Event:

  • Gold or the Alberich did some messed up thing with whatever experiments they did with the genshin's Rheingold, it unleashed the mega abyss curse in Khaenri'ah.

Effects:

  • Khaenri'ah pureblood, in a sense, got a big physical buff as a result, while the half-Khaenri'ah are still half of Phanes' human, with two halves incompatible with each other, and got cursed into dwarfs by whatever abyss force that was unleashed, now unable to be processed by Celestia's leyline system after death.

Hypothesis:

  • Khaenri'ah pureblood are vishap people modified with abyss force by Nibelung, which would tie in Nibelung's involvement in the history of Khaenri'ah, per the Nibelungen saga and Wagner's opera. And the experiment Gold and/or the Alberich messed with is probably similar to the experiment that Nibelung did himself.

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https://preview.redd.it/ikhxae4ly68b1.png?width=1050&format=png&auto=webp&s=91542adbca0fe230bcd6fda12cd84a92b480abab

Also, the primogem eyes do look kinda vishap eyes...

III. Conclusion:

Hoyo writers love Nibelungen saga. Khaenri'ah's story is very highly likely to be a reference to Wagner's opera + some irl lore and history of the Nibelung people/Burgundians. And Khaeri'ah's people are probably vishap people modified with abyss power by Nibelung. Well, probably. At the very least, they're somehow related and Nibelung should be very much involved in the research that brought about the destruction of Khaenri'ah, so that's that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯