Before anyone gets their panties in a bunch please don't take this too seriously or think I'm bashing the game over a tiny nitpick, I just thought it was funny.


Anyway, the bards who sing this song claim that it's a traditional song of Whiterun. The first line is "There once was a hero named Ragnar the Red, who came riding to Whiterun from ole Rorikstead!"

However, Rorikstead was in fact named after the man Rorik, who appears no older than 60 and claims he bought all the land while everyone was fighting in the great war, which ended about 25 years before the current date. Even assuming the town was built and named immediately after he bought it, the town still couldn't be more than 25-30 years old. Giving enough time for people to settle there and for people to learn about and write songs about it, there's no way that song could be in any way "traditional". Not to mention I hardly think it's earned the title "ole Rorikstead" when it's in a country with cities like Windhelm that are over 5000 years old.

Obviously those pieces of lore were written by two different people....

whoops.....

lol good find

How do you know Rorik isn't a vampire and has really lived for thousands of years, and that there wasn't another great war he was talking about?

Wait.... a bard... writing a song... and trying to spread it as traditional!?

Blasphemous!

Bard colledge is all about Speechcraft. Lies and decieving, most of the time. Even their most prized song about "Olaf" is lies upon lies upon lies, you basically help them make up crazy stuff to fill up missing bits. Not to mention Age of agression and age of opression being the same song with just couple of words changed.

This happens in middle ages song writing a lot...for example, "Good King Wenceslas" only had Wenceslas in there because his name had 3 syllables, and there weren't many kings whose names would have fit the tune.

So the bards used Rorikstead, because it was the only town in Skyrim that they could get to rhyme with "Ragnar The Red"

Old Rorickstead, referring to the place before it was bought and renamed. The original name was probably forgotten. But behold, we have the Arena map to refer to.
http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a39/mariedanj/Arena/SkyrimMap-1.png

So, Old Rorickstead = Granitehall

but that doesn't rhyme with Ragnar the Red, does it?

Sure, sure, there's some good reasons why the song would exist, nobody is questioning that. Still, none of these excuses change the fact that this can't be a traditional song

Luke Skyrimmer's could.

It could theoretically be a new song about a traditional story about someone from Granitehall, but the song couldn't be traditional because it wasn't known as Rorikstead until a few years ago.

It's like if I wrote a song about Paul Bunyan and said it was a traditional song.

Does the game even say it's a traditional song?

I thought the same thing.

Maybe the bard is like a kid today who thinks a song on it's third cover is actually the original version

I believe the NPCs, like Sven, say it before performing the song.

If it's a ~30 year old song it would at least be a "classic".

Okay, so it's a recent tradition.

It's a horrible song anyway; if it had been sung for hundreds of years, bards would likely have been outlawed by now.

Nords are dumb.

Rorikstead is also listed in the 'Holdings' book on Farengar's table...showing that Rorikstead is an old name. Guess the town changed hands (and names) a few times, and now another Rorik has it.

Then perhaps the inconsistency is about Rorik himself. Basically the first reply to the thread explains the situation.

I noticed this just yesterday. Glad to know I'm not the only one to wonder about this.

I noticed this too, but I wrote it off as either a lore blooper or just part of the storytelling tradition of the era - most of our real-world 'traditional' songs and stories have undergone the same sort of reinterpretation over time.

Maybe the song got twisted around a bit for artistic freedom by some earlier aspiring adventurer who just happened to apply for the Bards College? I don't know if it has happened before, but I know it has happened since