OK, so this is driving me nuts. I keep hearing people say "I took an arrow to the knee" is supposedly "nordic slang" for getting married. Then I hear that is a bunch of bull, and its a joke by bethesda since there are no greaves in the game.

I found a couple blogs and quotes from interviews, but does anyone have a straight answer?

http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=85479

http://sfwflot.tumblr.com/post/49846339760/arrow-to-the-knee-as-old-norse-slang-a-tribute-to

""It's a great line," Howard continued, laughing. "[Senior Bethesda game designer] Emil Pagliarulo wrote it.

"This was late in the project. We wanted to have the guards to have more personality. They're usually just grunting, telling you what to do. So we had Emil go in and write a lot more stuff and have them reflect you. So the guards say the most about you and what you've done: 'Oh, I like that armor.' 'I hear you're doing this.' And then, there is a suite of, 'Why am I no longer a guard? These guys are adventuring. I'm stuck here with dragons.' That was just one of the lines."

Pagliarulo wasn't available to tell us just why he wrote that line, but at least we now know why it's in there. It's there for you, gamers. The guards want you to know that you matter."

There's no meaning behind the arrow in the knee thing. it's just something silly that became a meme.

That's what I thought, I'm just sick of people still saying ITS BECAUSE THEY ARE MARRIED LOLZ.

"I use to walk around town like you, but then I took a meme too far"

That being said, it just became a meme, All your base. . .

....are belong to us. XD

Makes sense.

The internet is the last refuge of people who don't know what they're talking about.

Pretty sure it's not old norse slang. It seems to have been picked up as fact by a lot of people, but my googling did not yield any good sources on this. I even tried to search for it in my native tongue (Norwegian), still got nothing that backs the claim of this phrase meaning marriage in old norse.

It's not true, and that's the end of that.