Fellow Dovahkin,
I was walking out one night from Riften and came across three swords and and axe floating in mid - air at about 45 degrees to the horizontal as if someone was holding them.. I sent a firebolt through them but it went straight through. I thought the wielders might have been invisible.

Any idea what is happening ? After hanging around for a while, one of the swords fell to the floor, but still no clue why. They are ordinary steel swords nothing special.

Buggered if I know what,s going on.

Ive seen an npc performing a sitting animation...in...the...air.

How about the body of a Whiterun guard floating 20 ft high on the back-side porch of Dragonsreach, where you trap the dragon? It looked really goofy during the dragon-riding animation.

HA! I just saw this today, a battle axe floating in a doorway and blocking it. I picked it up, so I was able to proceed. Weird, tho.

it s a glitch , do you remember you had a fight there one time ? you probably had
just a small glitch

That battleaxe in the doorway however thats is i think is intentional , if that is the dungeon i think it is

NPCs will sometimes drop weapons when they are fighting or dying, or the weapon gets separated from them somehow, and then when they die the weapon becomes a separate object in the Skyrim game world. (Meaning, it's not part of the NPC's inventory if you search them, and must be taken/dropped/manipulated as a separate thing). If this happens, when the dead body is cleaned up the gear that got separated from its owner doesn't get cleaned up sometimes, and when you reload the game after that, the game has to put it back where you left it, and sometimes it glitches and puts it back in the same general location but it's off just enough that the stuff ends up floating or clipping into something else instead of being where it should be.

This is the only explanation I can think of for this phenomenon. I always found this floating stuff in locations where it would make sense that it was the debris left over from a fight where somebody died, the bodies have been handled by the game so they're not there but all the debris they dropped before dying is there. Sometimes I know this is the case, because I was IN the fight that left all the debris and wasn't able to loot it at the time, I'll go back along that same road and it's still there only floating at eye level.

In any case usually I've found that just walking into the stuff bumps it so that it drops to the ground. And if you are on PC the Unofficial Patch goes a long way towards fixing this problem IIRC by not allowing gear that is in the inventory of NPCs to be separated from them when they are killed, it remains part of their inventory unless you search them and take it. If you don't take it, it will disappear from the game world when the body does.

I have a lot of stuff floating about. Yesterday I saw a mammoth actually levitate to about 50 m above the ground as I walked by. That is, he wasn't floating there but was on the ground and rose up 100% vertically as I walked by the camp.

My guess is that this is due to someone playing MW has unloosed a very powerful Levitate spell which has leaked over into Skyrim.

Thanks, bud, sounds sensible enough to me.

A bottle of Honningbrew Mead. My first thought was: Skyrim's version of a light beer.

I find it a curious scene whenever I find floating weapons. It makes you wonder what happened and how they float. Thats Skyrim for you. Always making you wonder.

About everything the npcs sell at the market of Winterhold float in the air in my game. It's kinda weird to have to move through all that stuff just to get to the seller.

^{Ok I just found flying fish. I'm like 12 miles off the coast of the tower stone straight North of it and I'm looking at salmon swimming above the ice like 30 feet in the air. WTF I wanna fly}

I was just wandering around the northern part of the map - admiring the scenery and there just floating in the air was a bottle of mead.. just hanging there like it was nothing.. I thought that was cool and went on my way.

And you just... left it there? What are you, some kind of milk-drinker?

You meant Windhelm I think. They don't levitate when you arrive the first time in town; it happens after a while. One of these glitches Bethesda is working on, I hope.

Bug..and a very clever one. These floating weapons can make things disappear in odd ways... For example if a static is placed where they are floating..when the area resets, the static is gone, while the weapon remainds. They also add to save game bloat. There are 2 PC mods designed to deal with this. I don't know if official patches addressed this though..

Oh and if you see them slowly floating upwards in the sky...

..don't know what to say about that..but it can happen.

Ah whoops, thanks for the correction. Windhelm it is, of course.

Huh, wait, those things also bloat your save games?! Arrrrrggghhfufussock!
*ahem* Well, I'll see how things will turn out. Otherwise I'll have to take on the job of trash collector with my character for a while ...

Ah, and I've seen an orcish sword floating up in the sky once. I'm assuming it died and went to Sovngarde. Wouldn't that be nice? Or well, maybe Malacath's plane ... Weapons don't wear down anymore 200 years after the Oblivion Crisis, they just fulfill their time and die. After-effect of two planes banging in each other.

If you're playing on consoles, loot dropped weapons and give them back to the dead person who dropped them so they despawn with the corpse. Otherwise, they remain forever, sometimes floating in the sky, and also contributing to a bloated save file.

Also, be sure to pick every nirnroot you come across, as their increasing glow also bloats the save file.

Bethesda need to hire those who made the unofficial Skyrim patch...

Some of them you can't pick up. They are just there.

Actually stuff used to float in Oblivion as well, sometimes if you picked one thing up off a table, everything else would explode in different directions or just up and float about.
Never really bothers me in fairness - magic is never far below the surface on Nirn so I always put it down to a disturbance in the force - as it were

That glitch seems to happen the most in my game.

Something like this:

http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/578955258294733221/8964C93C063B3C8151CCAC3E9635E20D11C8C252/

I don't think so; they were already there, they just float instead of laying on or hanging from the stall. I've had this and my saves never got bloated.

This - as said it's not their presence, it's their location which is the issue...

Heh! Before the last two patches came out I saw a shovel slowly ascend vertically from the ground into the sky like a rocket blasting off in slow motion. Only happened once though. You see absolutely all sorts of things happening in this game. Except what you dream of in hope...