Hey lore experts. I'm writing a fan fiction book about Morrowind (among the hundreds of others, I know...), and I have no idea what kind of realistic size the landmass has. I did a couple searches on the forum, looked the Imperial Library and the UESP, and still found nothing.

Can anyone provide some info on this, please?

Somewhere I've read that there's 250 miles betwen Mournhold and Red Mountain. http://images.uesp.net//c/c3/TamrielMap.jpg

mhmm, that figure is mentioned in an in-game book, if I recall correctly.

Meaning Tamriel overall is 675,390 sq miles. That's 1,749,260 sq kilometers. That is around the size of Libia.

Cyrodiil = 137,382 sq mi
Elsweyr = 42,577 sq mi
Valenwood = 46,713 sq mi
Black Marsh = 75,327 sq mi
Morrowind = 122,173 sq mi
Solstheim = 5,581 sq mi
Skyrim = 78,950 sq mi
Summerset Isles = 34,435 sq mi
High Rock = 45,626 sq mi
Hammerfell = 86,626 sq mi

Since Tamriel is supposed to be roughly the size of Europe, I'll chalk this up to "fantasy writers have no sense of scale."

How did you figure that anyway? Just go to photoshop, delete the writing and dill with the same color, have it give you the pixels of each color and convert that to miles?

I was able to determine that Red Mountain itself was roughly half the size of Olympus Mons on Mars. Then again, I assumed the map I used had correct scale.

Lets also mention that Illiac Bay area, in TES:II, is roughly the size of Great Britain.

I imported the jpeg map into autocad, scaled it up until the distance between the peak of Red Mountain and Almalexia were 250 miles apart, then I made an area calculation of each territory based on that size.

Don't get me wrong though, I really want Tamriel to be much larger. If I remember right, making that distance from Dagoth Ur to Almalexia be 1000 miles would mean that Tamriel is the size of Africa. I really want the land to be huge.

My question is, how would this affect the size and placement of the towns? Would Morrowind still have the same number of towns it usually has, just with an inordinate amount of distance between them? And how much bigger would, say, Balmora be compared to its in-game size?

I would think that Vvardenfell would have a low number of high-density settlements. Balmora would be about the size of a mid-level city, say any of the ones that spring up around metropoli in the real world, and an Ashlander camp would be the size of an average neighborhood.

I imagine Balmora would be the fantasy equivalent of a sprawling urban vomit-puddle due to the money-grubbing nature of House Hlaalu. Houses packed together like sardines, rat colonies dotting the alleyways, sewage flowing openly into the streets while you wait for the rain to wash it away...

Put the calculator down :tongue:

On a similar note, If Cyrodiil had the scale of Morrowind. The Imperial City would be double de size. The other Cities would be roughly the same size they are now. Villages would be small unwalled towns (Pelagiad/Gnisis size). And Hamlets, farms or inns would have a larger collection of buildings resembling villages. In addition to the existing locales there would additional settlements. The way Cyrodiil was represented in Oblivion there would be additional villages, if it was a jungle it would be logical that there wouldn't be alot of real estate.

Thanks for the answers guys, it helped a lot.

Basically the previous posts nailed it.

I'd say Balmore would be about the size of 3 of Vivec's canton's, but then again don't take my word, i'm not too skilled at guesstimating :nope:

was this necessary?

@Bazz: The cantons seem huge to me so I would say Balmora is roughly 2 cantons in diameter. I am just imagining this all in my head though.