What I'm referring to is this:

http://fessicsfavorites.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/empire-of-tamriel.jpg

You'll notice in the bottom-left corner a scale marker.

Is this official? I apologize if this has been brought up a bazillion times in the past but I'm not a huge lore buff and this seems a bit ridiculous IMO.

If that small scale marker is 100km then they are saying the Imperial City Island in the middle of Lake Rumare is 100 kilometers in diameter? 60 miles wide? Thus the continent of Tamriel itself is actually roughly the same width as the United States? Does that not seem a bit off for some people, especially with so few cities dotted around? Granted, Europe in the medieval era was just as big as it is today, of course, but civilization certainly wasn't so vastly spread out. 9 cities over such a vast expanse?

Of course, thinking of Cyrodiil or Vardenfell from the games can't be a good judge either but could it believably be that enormous? Then thinking of the traveling that occured in the books, from Colovia to Rimmen in, what was it, five or six days? That's over 1000 km, at a horse's walk? Roughly 6-7km/hr?

So really the question to all the lore buffs is: is this accurate or is this something a fan slapped on there?

None at all, that sounds accurate.

To put you into perspective, the only game in TES to ever cover the scope of the actual world is TESII: Daggerfall. It literally takes two weeks to travel from top to bottom, and it is roughly the size of England. And there were towns and cities dotting the entire bay area.

TESIII and IV shrunk the world to represent it in a condensed manner, so the devs can focus on adding more detail to the world, instead of piecing together an entire country inside a game disk.

I'm sure there is nothing it is actually based on, so yes: someone slapped it on there. As to the actual scale, that is probably up to everyone's imagination.

Every game have different scales, it's hard to know which one is "proper" without reading the lore.

So lets read The Pocket Guide to The Empire instead, which say that there are ~250 miles (~400km) between the Red Mountain and Mournhold, which means the scale on the map is wrong. Instead of being 100km, it's about 50km.

The ingame worlds of Morrowind and Oblivion are scaled about 1:10 (just quick random number from my head), while Daggerfall is absolutely gigantic, despite covering a smaller area.

If any game in the series is an accurate representation of the scale of the world, it's probably Daggerfall, the scale tends to shift between games though so it's possible to be certain just how big Tamriel is, but it's certainly safe to say it's much larger than Morrowind or Oblivion would indicate.

As fat as the travel time between Colovia and Rimmen, I'd guess that it was the author not having an accurate sense of scale rather than the result of the actual size of the world, I think it's safe to say that Tamriel is not, in any way, small.

I put that 250 mile distance along with the size of Daggerfall in one map. It's fairly consistent.

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y199/Proweler/Lore/distancemeasured.jpg

Now the important thing is that while they're not exactly in agreement and we can't determine the exact scale it does provide us with the ball park we should be thinking off. Simply put, it doesn't matter if Tamriel is 1500 miles across versus 2000, as long as it's not 15.000 miles we're cool.