Who can tell me on what planet does Tamriel exist? I can't seem to find it any where!?! I am working on a back story for my character and am tying to keep it lore friendly for the most part. Thanks.

The Planet of Nirn is where Tamriel is located.

Nirn.

Nirn is not a planet in the typical sense though, rather, it is a sort of world, surrounded by Aetherius, which can best be said to be space. Oblivion are other worlds or planets within Aetherius. The sun and stars are openings into Aetherius, and the moons are debated, but considered to be the body of Lorkhan, one of the gods.

nirn, or mundus, i've heard it called either

Close. Nirn is a planet within Mundus, the mortal plane which is separated or contained within (not sure which) Aetherius, the primordial whatever. The sun and stars have been said in myths contained in books within the game to be holes ripped in "space" or Mundus by some of the first gods when they left Mundus after creation and returned to Aetherius. You can't always take what you read in the books as 100% correct; remember that you can find books that say Alduin is Akatosh, and books that say he is not. Always take the content of the books with a grain of salt.

The two moons are said by myth to be the fragments of Lorkhan's body, after his heart was ripped out and cast to Nirn.

I wonder what would happen if a schollar were to insist that Nirn is a planet orbiting a star which is one out of countless billions, and that the moons are lifeless barren masses orbiting Nirn? Would he be burned as a heretic?

No someone would take him to one show him he was wrong then burn him for being a heretic

lol

I think some people around here want to burn people at the stake for suggesting such a thing. I've had one guy INSIST that everything written in books was literally exactly correct - for no good reason. And in fact, they can't be all correct. As I said, there's a book that will claim Alduin is Akatosh, and a book that says he isn't.

Mundus is the realm, or if you subscribe to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brane_theory, the dimension/brane. Oblivion is made up of various other dimensions linked to Mundus through the stars and various terrestrial portals, i.e. the Oblivion Gates. Nirn is essentially Earth, and is orbited by the twin moons of Secunda and Masser, which are said to be parts of the body of Lorkhan, the creator-god of Nirn and patron of Man, who was split in two when he was destroyed.


Yeah, TES lore is wierd.

Mundus is the physical plane, as opposed to Aetherius and Oblivion.

And i have my doubts that the moons are a corpse of a god, and stars holes to Aetherius I mean, Earth was flat only few hundreds year ago

They certainly aren't traditional moons though. Their lunar phases are physically impossible, and their phases have major impacts on Khajiits.

Nirn is the planet. Nirn is orbited by Masser and Secunda (first one is the big one, second one is the small one), and by the eight aedric planets. All of these are part of the mortal plane, Mundus. Surrounding Mundus is Oblivion, which is what you see at night. Oblivion is where the realms of the Daedra are. There's also the outer realms, which seems to be a generic term for various unnamed realms within the Aurbis (the universe created by the interplay of Anu and Padomay) Finally you have Aetherius, which is where the Magne-Ge reside. Stars are essentially holes into Aetherius, with the largest one having been torn by Magnus himself when he fled creation. (Also, we know stars are such holes because the Tamrielites have essentially launched space expeditions to Aetherius)

no lol. nirn is the planet, it is a physical planet. mundus is the space that nirn is located in.

Wow, I got more of an explanation that I thought possible. Thanks everyone. Now I have even more substance for my back story. The more I do my outline and research into the lore of Tamriel the more I will have to write about. I fear this is going to take awhile. I was shooting for a novella length back story? Oh, boy! I think I stept in it! Thanks so much for all of your insights. Kudos!

Yeah, lore will do that. It's all quicksand and http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Sand_burrower from here.

Some my friends at Starbucks have been trying to get me to play Star Wars, but I have this thing about having to pay-to-play, especially since my only income right now is social security. That said, this back story project is going to be time consuming, but hopefully worth it. If it's good enough I will probably upload it to Nexus for others to read?

Benjeel sand burrowers are from a single player game (Jedi Academy), not TOR.

As for your back story, consider tossing it up to the fan-fiction forum a tad further up on the forum list.

Roger that!

I think it's sensible to question information taken from ancient poems and scriptures, but it's also sensible not to dismiss things that we consider too fantastical. It's said in the myths that what gives the world it's life, or what anchors the world into existance, is the sundered heart of a god, Lorkhan, and by taping into the powers of that heart can give mortals god-like powers. In Morrowind we confirmed most of that to be true. We also know that the meteorite Baar Dau (The Ministry of Truth) did retain all it's speed and force through the power of Vivec as with him gone the object resumed it's course with all that force as if it never stoped, obliterating the city of Vivec and causing Red Mountain's eruption back in the first years of the fourth era.

Tamrielic mages have explored the moons, Oblivion, and Aetherius, and lived to tell about it. We don't know how accurate their knowledge of cosmology is, but they're not making claims about the nature of the Sun and stars simply out of ignorance. We know that Tamriel doesn't work just the way our world works. We don't have any reason to assume, at this point, that Tamriel is a sphere rather than a disk, or even some other shape, or that the Sun is just the nearest star and not actually larger than the stars.

On this particular point, there is. Daggerfall has a spinning globe you can see in-game, and the map that came with Redguard has latitude and longitude coordinates, indicating a spherical plane.

Except both books are correct. It's a sort of Ship of Theseus problem: how many parts can be removed before a thing is no longer that thing? What happens when you replace those parts with other parts? What happens when those discarded parts are added to a new thing? If two things switch all their parts, at what point does one become the other? At some point, Alduin was Akatosh. Is he still Akatosh? He's not all of Akatosh anymore, and he's got quite a bit of other stuff in him now, and some other guy has been svcking up alot of the pieces of Akatosh recently. So who's to say if Alduin is still Akatosh, and if not, when he ceased to be him. And if he is not Akatosh, then who is?

There is no good answer to the Ship of Theseus: it's one of the few philosophical conundrums to which there is nothing like consensus.

Tamriel is the continent, Nirn is the planet.
The Mundus is Nirn and its orbiting sattelites and planets.
Beyond the Mundus lies Oblivion and beyond that Aetherius.
All these things combined plus outer realms not mentioned above is called the Aurbis.

As for the reality of this, Imperial Mananauts have been to the moons, Altmer Sunbirds have pierced the Aetherius.
Various gods are very real and interact with mortals and there is simply zero evidence in support of a more traditional physical universe as the one we inhabit, as opposed to the mystical universe for which there are countless tales and lots of (circumstantial) evidence.

http://www.imperial-library.info/content/cosmology

Edit: To Huleed:
There is also the orrery in Oblivion.

Infinities within infinities, orbiting infinities. . . always puts my brain in a headlock.