Going on Daggerfall alone, the size of the area of High Rock and Hammerfell surrounding the Illiac Bay is about 62,394 square miles, close to half the size of Great Britain.

From that, would Tamriel be about the size of Europe?

I ask because I can't accept the idea that the great homeland of the Imperial empire would be smaller than Rhode Island. (using Oblivion as a reference).

And could one have a reasonable shot at accurately predicting the size of the rest of the nations by using Daggerfall as a reference?

No, I dont think so.

I would assume that the size of all of Tamriel would suit Europe quite well if not more.

Tamriel is smaller than Europe. It's about the size of the state of Texas.

The in-game "size" is game-mechanics only and is not an accurate representation of the actual size of Tamriel. The one exception might be Daggerfall, as it is the game with the largest scale.

A Europe sized Tamriel would make sense, but there really is no concrete support either way. I personally prefer to think that it is larger.

The way I could find out how large it is, is to take the scale of DF, and find the area of Tamriel. It's pretty much a square, so it shouldn't be that hard when the scale is known.

Isn't there that reference of the distance from Mournhold to Vivec?

I'd agree that it's about the size of Europe, if not bigger. I think it would really take you a few weeks to get from Seyda Neen to Balmora. Walking there doesn't take that long at all in real time. Walking in Daggerfall sure the hell did. But even then, I think Daggerfall was at a smaller scale than what it should have been. The big cities like Sentinel, Wayrest and Daggerfall should have been much much much bigger. I could walk to one end to the other in about 20 minutes real time. I can't walk from one end of Los Angeles or San Bernardino to the other end in 20 minutes. It'd take me days of travel just to cross the city.

Of course there isn't much to prove any suspect about the size.
But my guess is that Tamriel is similar in size to Europe and that the whole of the continents that we know is in a similar size as our continents.

It is 250 miles from Red Mountain to Mournhold which corresponds with Daggerfall scale.

I wonder, is one of those big lore forum questions the Infernal City finally answers?

Do you have a reference link? I'd like to read where he said that.

I found http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?s=&showtopic=859979&view=findpost&p=12527179 by searching for "miles Mournhold".

The full quote mentioning the distance from Red Mountain to Almalexia is in the First PGE: "On a clear day (an exceedingly rare event), the peak can be seen from Almalexia, 250 miles to the south." It doesn't say where in Almalexia, which is a much more expansive city than the center of government in Mournhold, but it's likely meant to be approximate anyway.

The in-game scale doesn't match the lore scale all that well. High Rock (in Daggerfall) is smaller than Florida and about the size of Tunisia. In Oblivion, Cyrodiil is about 8 x 6 kilometers in map units, and at the 1:30 scale used for time, that makes it a bit bigger than Maryland, about the size of Switzerland, and all of Tamriel much smaller than Europe.

I think it's most accurate to grant that it is in "reality" much larger (at least the size of Europe) and reduced in size and scope for gameplay.

yeah, but they could make it to scale. But the game would cost hundreds of dollars, take up half a terabyte and we probably could expect a 15 year gap between each game.

Ah, that was it.
I can never remember the exact distance, nor where it comes from.


That's why some people suggested that Oblivion should have taken place only in the imperial city and Rumare Island, in order to fully do it justice. Much in the same way Daggerfall only gave us some of high rock and a bit of hammerfell, and Morrowind only gave us vvardenfell, and Redguard I believe took place entirely on Stross M'kai. Oblivion was actually the first game to give us an entire province, unless you count Arena's closed worldspaces.

I've always thought of it as the size of mainland Asia (at least) with maybe some of Europe.

That is my opinion.

In the first edition pocket guide we see that Wayrest has about 100,000 people living inside of the city (not including the people outside of it).

Then you have what-at least 8,000 years for the population to grow, and still the settlements are a good it spread out...

So it's safe to say that DF's rendition of Tamriel's size is true to lore?

Muthsera,

The distance between Red Mountain and the city of Almalexia was first given in http://www.imperial-library.info/pge/morrowind.shtml, in which the following was said:

"The vast Volcano of Tamriel, this giant mountain dominates the north of Morrowind. It is a small continent all to itself, riven from the rest of Morrowind by the remains of a colossal crater. On a clear day (an exceedingly rare event), the peak can be seen from Almalexia, 250 miles to the south."

Thus I remain...


Yours in the Scrolls,


___The Word Merchant of Julianos

useng the scale of 250 miles from red mountain to mornhold, i printed out a map, got out a ruler and a pen, and did some mental math. Tamriel+summerset= around 862,500 miles squared. That's just short of an Alaska and a half.

Sorry, I got mixed up in my last post.

Extrapolating from the 250 miles it's Cyrodiil that's the size of Texas, not the whole of Tamriel.

I think it's safe to assume that Tamriel is about 85% the size of Europe...
Which would be somthing like Canada and the USA combined... Which wouldn't make sense with the climate differences, from say blackmarsh to skyrim, but then again, it probably has more to do with elevation than distance from the Nirn equator....

In Daggerfall the Game world is something like 161,600 square kilometres, so the rest of Tamriel must be much, much larger

Europe ? Area: 10,180,000 km2 (3,930,000 SQ MI)
Canada ? Area: 9,093,507 SQ KM
United States ? Area: 9,161,923 SQ KM

Not really. But I'm too lazy to crunch the numbers myself.

You can't go by scale in any of the games, except Daggerfall maybe. The worlds in Morrowind and Oblivion are condensed. When you walk into a village and you see 10 houses, in reality it's probably at least 25. The city of Vivec, as it is portrayed ingame, probably would need at least 5x as many cantons as it has for a modest tally of population and businesses. And that's excluding children and other characters omitted from the games.

I don't think Tamriel is as small as Europe, however. Maybe Asia.