That is so bad ass. I wish you could actually buy a globe of Nirn. Maybe Bethesda will make one someday to sell. I would so buy one!

No....there are many continents besides Tamriel...it is a sphere and has 2 moons, it orbits around a star, it's like our planet in many ways.

No it doesn't. Where is the evidence that it orbits?

Night and day. Light....if there was no sun there would only be darkness.

Huh? Dude, what are you talking about? Why do you think Nirn is imaginary?

I concur. That's just the physics of the universe.

paw's right. You're wrong. Revolutions around the sun isn't the same as revolutions around an axis.

Find cosmology in TIL.

And you people shouldn't have raised this thread from the grave.

Why isn't Nirn just spinning in place? The sun isn't an object that can be orbited.

I don't count the sun-as-hole thing a part of the wilder Temple Zero school of thought.

I can't find any cosmology on the imperial-library website. There's astrology/astronomy but no cosmology.

Dun worry.

It's under "obscure texts."

http://www.imperial-library.info/obscure_text/cosmology.shtml

Well, I'd chide you for not reading the stickied FAQ, but well I don't expect anyone to read the FAQ anyway.

Like Mariel linked, This is the Temple Zero School of thought. The metaphysical tinhat conspiracy theorists of Nirn.

I wonder exactly what celestial bodies are represented in the Orrery.

But also, the zodiac-like movements of the firmament would suggest that Nirn is moving around Magnus. Or all of the cosmos (Or Oblivion, depending on what you believe) is spinning around Nirn.

I've always wondered that, as well. But if it can appear that Oblivion is spinning around Nirn, could Nirn not be the one spinning, while Oblivion remains stationary?

I think oblivion is another dimension.
So they wont be spinning around each other or past each other or what ever.

Oblivion surrounds Nirn. If anything, Oblivion would be what we call "outer space", if we're going to talk in Earth terms.

:sigh: I linked on cosmology. Listen to Stendarr and suffer to read.

Well, pratically anything is possible. If the other planets are technically planes of other gods and not FINITE like Nirn is, then that could be a (odd) possibility, though I personally don't believe it yet.

I don't presume to know what laws the Elder Scrolls world goes by, but everyone keeps using real world science and real world physics to try to prove that Nirn is round. Who ever said that our world and the ES world follow the same basic laws? Maybe what we consider gravity is, in the ES world, literally some God's will that holds everything to the ground. Hurricanes aren't due to air pressure but because of Kynaryth's wrath, etc. And I think I spelt Kynaryth wrong..
Again, I don't presume to be even remotely close to the truth, just throwing the possibility out there.

It's said in the Lore that Nirn is a finite ball. There's a post in this very thread that references it.

I'm not some huge lore buff but all this doesn't make a lot of sense. There is night and day and season, so there must be a sun and the planet must rotate. There are stars in the sky.

Several of the month names have "sun" in them (Sun's Dawn, Sun's Height, Sun's Dusk) so there must be a Sun. I don't know what Magnus is and I looked it up and all I got was that it's the name of some god.

Instead of devising all of these "theories" it is easy to just see Nirn for what it is. A spherical planet with two moons in an orbit around a star, neighboring many other stars.

About Magnus, he's responsible for the spherical hole called the Sun AND the magic that reigns down on Nirn through sunlight.

He's the architect of Creation; he drew the blueprints. The sun was made when he got mad and left before Creation was truly made by Lorkhan. It's the hole he left in.

If it didn't say that http://www.imperial-library.info/obscure_text/cosmology.shtml, it would be a compelling argument that Nirn is flat.

These aren't theories. These are beliefs as written in the lore. Sure they can be wrong, but we don't want them to be, and it would make all the effort that went into them pretty worthless. The whole http://www.imperial-library.info/obscure_text/cosmology.shtml document is a delightfully playful Borgesian spin on a very mundane subject. That, in case you were wondering, is cool.

Magnus is a sun and a hole in the fabric of sky leading to Aetherius. Simple, eh?

When it's night time, looking at the sky is staring at the sea of oblivion, and stars are the pinpricks at the edge of that sea. When it's day time, you're staring at Magnus's technicoloured dreamcoat, and the realm of aetherius. Seasons aren't explained in the text, but could simply be the influence of elemental forces, caused by anything from Y'ffre to the stars to variations of magick.

But neither theory can be proven.

At least in Morrowind, they did the moon's transparent shadows properly.


You could see stars that were BEHIND the moons, through the moons' shadows.


They did away with that in Oblivion, probably because the little kiddies were threatened by otherworldly physics.

The Sun (Magnus) is a hole, you can't orbit a hole. But Nirn does indeed have night and day, so either Nirn orbits a hole, or the hole orbits Nirn.