The Elder Scrolls – Mapping the Series’ Future

The Elder Scrolls is a series of RPGs famous for, among other things, its deep and far-reaching lore. And as a result, this seemingly harmless instance of holiday greetings was quickly turned into a mystery by the series’ fans. According to some of them, the image linked above holds the key to figuring out the setting of the next The Elder Scrolls game, or at the very least, the next The Elder Scrolls Online expansion.

Check out this massive Eurogamer article to get a glimpse of what it’s like to really love The Elder Scrolls. Here’s a quick excerpt:

Some fans have had fun with more far-out ideas. There’s an interesting, if slightly flawed theory here about the next location being Akavir, the separate, mysterious continent to the east which plays home to snake-vampire-people and another humanoid race they’re assumed to have eaten. If you take the time to read the in-game books (who doesn’t?!) you’ll know that the Akavir have invaded the continent of Tamriel a couple of times, via Skyrim, in the past. So mysterious that even the in-game books about it is called Mysterious Akavir, it’s long been a source of infatuation for fans who want to see something completely new in a main series Elder Scrolls.

The issue here though is, one, that the thing at the top is a book, rather than a block of wood symbolising a boat. Likewise, the mysterious coin dubbed “The Wolf of Solitude” does refer to High King Svargrim, and there is a book, found in the recent, Solitude-set Elder Scrolls Online: Greymoor expansion, called The Wolf of Solitude that talks about him fighting off enemies. But he doesn’t fight off the Akavir – the two Akavir invasions took place a couple of hundred years either side of the period when Svargrim was around, and the book itself just suggests that if they had attacked, they’d have probably run off at the sight of him.

If we’re looking for clues pointing to Akavir, we’d do better taking a step back to the tweet, and looking at the picture as a whole. One thing that does point to Akavir in the image, for instance, is the compass, down at the bottom. That bottom candle isn’t just beneath the word Hammerfell and in the Hammerfell region – it’s also placed exactly at the tip of the compass arrow pointing due east. As in, to Akavir.