http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2e/Edoras.jpg

;D

And apparently so is Edoras? .

I always think,"Hey I see Rohan from here.... Oh wait."

*Edoras
^.^
But seriously, was watching The Two Towers today, just had to post this for anyone who wasn't aware.

You do know they used CGI for the LOTR films?

I know now it is called Edoras, but I honestly did refer to it as Rohan. My lack of LOTR knowledge is showing....

Yes? What? I do not actually believe that this is a real location, just pointing out that Bethesda blatantly stole this from Peter Jackson/Tolkien's image.

Oh, Okay, the topic title threw me .

I think that most people do know that they stole/borrowed/sampled Edoras for Whiterun, but it is remarkably similar. I would call it 100% Jacksons image though.

I was going to say 'Jackson's image' but didn't want any fan boys screaming at me that it was a book first haha, so I quickly changed it.

Except they didn't. Hill forts and fortified towns like that were common in the iron age and well into the medieval period in some places. And Dragonsreach is modeled after Viking longhouses. If someone "stole" something, they both did. Tolkien himself was heavily influenced by Anglo-Saxon and Norman culture among plenty of other things. I guess you could say then that he "stole" this stuff too...

There is enough variation in hill forts to safely assume they intentionally payed homage to Edoras.

Paying homage it might be. But that's a different thing. Tolkien certainly didn't "steal" from Kalevala when he wrote The Children of Húrin.

Judging by Google image search, Edoras and Whiterun look pretty damn different, though. They share pretty much nothing designwise, except that there's a town with the ruler's palace on top of a hill, and both have celtic/nordic-ish style decorations. Whiterun is much more extensively fortified too.

Tolkien was inspired by quite a lot of mythology and ancient-modern history, he did however create his own world from these inspirations, Bethesda instead stole a town already created in the fantasy world almost down the positioning of the houses. I've encountered you [censored] before, refusing to accept that the developers of a game you love ripped off large portions of their game from film and literature. It's true, look at that picture and look at Whiterun, then compare it with every other hill fort/town you have ever seen, there is very little variation between Bethesda's Whiterun and Jackson's Edoras.

Woops, meant to hit edit not quote so I could retype 'fan boys' for some reason typing those two words as one censors them. I don't know how to delete the second comment sorry.

There are a few differences that make the interior of Whiterun pretty different to Edoras, the river and courtyard for one and the fact it is more house and less hill unlike Edoras.

Of course it's not identical, but it's hard to deny that Whiterun and Whiterun hold and Rohan and Edoras are different; they're incredibly similar, even down to the snow capped mountains in the background. Bethesda was at the very least paying homage to Jackson's image, it is at the very least an easter egg for LOTR fans.

I don't exactly love this game. It's in many ways a step back from the previous ones, and it has a mass of problems, but it's still rather playable. What I am saying, is that there's something wrong with your priorities. Form follows function, and if you have square kms upon square kms of flat plain to hold, you find the highest spot, and build a fort on that. It's not exactly some flash of genius solely made up by JRRT. Besides, this game has plenty of things that have been seen in previous games, movies and literature. But those games, movies and books had that kind of stuff too. Every form of art borrows constantly from everything it can. I find it amusing that this single issue now somehow broke the camel's back for you. And you seem to get quite worked up about it too...

There's a difference between borrowing something, or being inspired by something and stealing it.
That's like if one pop singer blatantly stole the beat and a large amount of the lyrics of one of their songs from a previous pop singer, and while everyone's up in arms about the plagiarism some dude comes along and says, "hey, every pop artist borrows from other pop artists, every pop artists steals their sound from those that invented pop." No. That is just stupid. You cannot create anything without it having similarities with something that has already been created, that is true, but creating something virtually identical to something else is not the same as creating something with similarities to something else.
Now I'm not saying Bethesda is plagiarising Jackson's work here, I'm not saying that at all, merely trying to point out that Bethesda clearly made Whiterun to look very similar to Edoras and they made Whiterun hold to look very similar to Rohan, it was clearly intentional and clearly an homage to Peter Jackson and Tolkien's image. This is obvious to everyone else I have talked to who has seen the film and played the game.

You have clearly not heard of MC Hammer, or indeed, any other rap artist since forever.

Now, this is quite different from your previous "Bethesda blatantly stole this!" line. Which one is it?

Damn, I never knew they looked so much alike.

Or the http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac. Mind you, much of the music made using it is far from bad...

Don't see it. I mean they look alike, but then again so do many of the towns from medieval history that had the same function... Whiterun is also far heavier fortified then Edoras, is build more on the same level with just Dragonsreach standing on top of it...

Yes they placed a town on a hilltop with the castle at the top, how many 1000 year old is that idea? 7000 probably.
At least they had enough sense to not build a wall at the ground level outside the hill, you build the wall on the hillside to make it higher, yes they knew it 7000 years ago but hauling stone is different from CGI.