Elda Early-Dawn is a Nord who has run Candlehearth Hall, the inn of Windhelm, for nearly thirty years. She is warm, busy and motherly towards her guests – unless those guests happen to be Dark Elves.
Where to find them
Behind the counter at Candlehearth Hall. The great room is upstairs and there is a rentable bed on the ground floor. Her helper Nils works there too, and if anything happens to Elda, he takes over the inn.
Services
She rents a bed for 10 gold a night and sells food and drink. Ask her about the inn’s name and she’ll tell you about the candle above the upstairs hearth: it was lit 163 years ago, when the building was the home of a warrior named Vundheim, by his son Deroct after news of his death arrived – and it has burned ever since without anyone knowing why. As with other innkeepers, she can also point you towards local bounty work, which you then hand in to Jorleif.
Quests
She is one of the possible marks in the Thieves Guild job The Fishing Job.
Personality & relationships
Elda is chatty and a little old-fashioned. She warns you not to put out the famous candle, and not to take the flirting of her waitress Susanna personally. She is also openly suspicious of the Dunmer refugees in town, and greets a Dark Elf Dragonborn coldly – something even Susanna calls out. If Windhelm falls to the Empire she misses Ulfric, saying he stood up for Nords.
She has a soft spot for Brunwulf Free-Winter; the two flirt in the inn and talk about building a cabin near Riften one day, though she worries the place would fall apart without her. She also pours a sympathetic mead for Jora, swaps dragon rumours with Captain Lonely-Gale, and asks Calixto Corrium about a strange ring a guest left behind.
Also in Windhelm
Race, level, class and factions read from the Skyrim game files; story details checked against community wiki articles and written in our own words.
