I was wondering what the name of the plant in Oblivion called St Jahn's Wort(in vanilla Oblivion) and St John's Wort(in real life and edited by the unofficial Oblivion patch). What name did bethesda intend?

They intended to name it St. Jahn's Wort, presumably, so as to make it a tiny bit more exotic.

The UOP team thought that it was dumb and changed the name back to what it really is.

As far as lore goes, this isn't really important, anyway.

St. Jahn's presumably.

It'd be a bit weird for a real world religious figure to make an appearance in TES.

EDIT: Ninja'd.

Since most of the other plants in the game share names with real-life plants, but the numerous Sts. John are associated with the real world Christian church, they did a little homophonic switch to Jahn's, presumable after an important church father within the Temple of the Nine.

St. Jahn's Wort, so funny! Hah hah! What will they think of next?

Blah :rolleyes:

This is one of those things I can imagine the devs chuckling to themselves over, thinking they are so clever. Kinda like how every quest title is a pop/geek culture reference. Makes you think they aren't really taking the world they build seriously. Shame.

So true. This is one of the reasons I like Morrowind more, they actually treat it respectfully, as a different world.

Anyway the reason why I needed this is because I created a book where this herb is mentioned so I wanted to know if I should write Jahn or John. Thanks for the info.

Yeah, they treat Morrowind respectfully as a different world. That's why there's the Fat Lute, the BanHammer, Charles the Plant, and Indiana Jones.

;) as well as quite a few others.
The difference is that in MW they are mostly hidden away; in OB they are right there staring you in the face--you can't avoid them! There's nothing intrinsically bad about including easter eggs, but there is in the way you present them. Stuffing the game full of silly references and putting them out in the open is just ridiculous.

I blame the QA guys for not speaking up about those.

I wouldn't call an abundant type of flower an "easter egg"... If it was something like Chuck the Plant from Morrowind, yeah. Maybe. But even then, a reference to St. John's Wort would be a pretty crappy easter egg anyway.

So all this tangent on easter eggs and pop culture references seem a bit off topic IMO. St. Jahn's wort is just an attempt at making something a bit more exotic. It's very mild http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CallARabbitASmeerp.