You mean like the guard who says "I used to be a soldier until I took a sword to the chest." How come nobody mentions him? I've ran into him a number of times, but all anybody ever talks about is the arrow to the knee.

If it's a fantasy universe, how'd they all learn English?

If TH cared about making an immersive fantasy RPG, he'd make the game entirely in a fantasy lagnuage that players would need to gain fluency in before playing. English totally breaks my suspension of disbelief.

At least the dragons speak some strange language. There's actually a whole vocabulary. It all sounds like Goa'uld or Klingon to me.

Correct me if i'm wrong but i'm pretty certain iceland isn't scandanavian.

Maybe, maybe not. Icelanders speak today a variation of Old Norse, which was spoken in Norway at least.
But it is a Nordic country, and they speak almost the same language and got many of the same traditions.

In D&D its called "Common." In Star Wars, its "Galactic Basic" or just "Basic."
And several real world languages have multiple different dialects, and even sub dialects. Its quite possible for a word to be slighty different from region to region, and town to town.

I call it lazy game design.

Whaaat? Har vi alver?

In the Old World it's called Reikspeil, but I think that is German for "Empire language" or something.


Yeah, of course. Check your garden.

Weird that Google Translate would put "chevalier" (knight) for adventurer. I mean "aventurier" is pretty straightforward for a translation. I mean for crying out loud, adventure comes from the French aventure (and prior to that from Latin). lol

Google, you disapoint me.

Not entirely true. Swedes, Norwegians and Danes understand each other fairly well, but Finnish and Icelandic is nothing like the Scandinavian languages (even though a lot of Finnish people still learn Swedish at school). I would never be able to understand Finnish or Icelandic without a dictionary.

EDIT: All right, I admit, Icelandic isn't impossible, but it takes quite a while to figure out. To me, it looks like medieval or even runic Scandinavian writing.

well I leave my Carl at my house, so it works for me, yes I refer to all my housecarls as Carl, even Lydia.

Finnish is in its own language family altogether, and I don't even know if it's any more closely related to Scandinavian languages than anything else. For all I know it might be a distant cousin of the Slavic languages, or perhaps you'd have to goi all the way back to some Proto-Indo-European language to find a link with other European languages.

But my understanding was that Iceland was settled by Scandinavians - not sure which. The Danes, maybe?

But what I wanna know is, did Danish pick up much German influence? Whenever I used to build model airplanes that had foreign language instructions on the side of the box, I could pick out a couple Danish, Swedish and Norwegian words that seemed kin to some German words I knew.

Danes are kind of Norse.. they're sort of part of South Sweden. Or like.. they wish they were.

No one cares about scandanavia. If it wasn't for Amsterdam you'd all be forgotten.

But you have dragons, that must either svck, or is totally awesome.

I put the "knight" there instead of "adventurer". Since the post I replied to mentioned the French in the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Agincourt and arrow injuries. A joke, you see?

Been to Norway. And no. No trolls or saber-cats

In a way it is. It's fairly close to Old Norse, and still uses the letters commonly used in Old Norse and Old English, like eth(e) and thorn(t). That's why it looks "medieval".

my name is carl i live in a house all this confuses my sense of being

Finnish is a part of the Fenno-Ugric language family. The other members include Estonian and Hungarian, plus a number of smaller languages. Estonian is somewhat possible for a Finnish-speaker to understand and vice versa. Hungarian is completely different though. It's funny when someone's speaking Hungarian in TV for example, and I'm not paying attention, I could mistake it for Finnish, but when I do pay attention, the words make zero sense to me.


The first inhabitants of Iceland were Irish monks. Then settlers from Norway moved in, and they decided to pack up and leave, IIRC.

I saw that documentary, really spooky those trolls!

It's also not Skyrim, it's Sky rime.

Oh wait, it's not, because it's a fictional game.

Right, let's get a few things straight. Iceland isn't a part of Scandinavia but the Icelandic language is much closer to Old Norse than any of the Scandinavian languages such as Norwegian or Swedish. This is evident by the fact that we can actually read text written more than a thousand years ago.

Norwegian Bokm?l is somewhat similar to old Norse too, but it's nothing like Icelandic, which has barely changed in the last thousand years.

The people of Skyrim are based on the stereotypical norse culture and mythology and Bethesda uses a lot of (real) norse names and words in Skyrim. It is however obvious that they didn't get a professional translator to do it for them since one of the NPCs is named Heimskr which literally translated to "Stupid"

Húskarl is the correct spelling of the Old Norse word but since Skyrim isn't a simulator of medieval Scandinavian culture then it doesn't matter how they spell it. House-Carl or House karl or even huscarl are all correct in the ES fictional universe.

Are you sure it wasn't intentional?