Your Definitive Guide to the Size of Tamriel (Patreon)

If you google for the size of Tamriel, you’ll find hundreds of results. Many of them will cite the same figure from the Pocket Guide to the Empire 1st Edition as the answer to your question:

“...the peak [of Red Mountain] can be seen from Almalexia, 250 miles to the south.”

From there you draw a line on the map, then use that line to determine the size of the rest of the continent. 

Simple, right? Unfortunately, not quite.

There are three fundamental problems: 

1) Differences in maps

2) Conflicting figures

3) Map projection

Difference in Maps

The PGE1 map of Morrowind is vastly different than the modern map of Tamriel that is typically used to calculate scale. Moreover, the PGE1 Morrowind province map doesn't even match the PGE1 Tamriel map — it's compressed vertically, and the Almalexia is located further south-west. When you stretch the province map to fit the continent map, there’s quite a bit of difference between how long the “250 miles” should be. When you add the more recent Tamriel map into the mix, the resulting "250 miles" line is even shorter than the other two. Furthermore, since none of these maps are topographic, we can only guess at where the “peak of Red Mountain” is actually located. All of this adds up to many miles of difference.

Conflicting Figures

Of course, the PGE1's 250 miles figure isn’t the only number we’re given.

Lord of Souls tells us that Lilmoth is roughly 15 miles from the southern shore of Black Marsh. If you take that segment and add it up until it makes 250 miles, we see just how different it is from any version of the PGE1 measure.

Another commonly cited figure is that Daggerfall’s game world is the size of Great Britain. It’s unclear if the Iliac Bay (smack dab in the middle of the map) is included in that calculation, but would make a big difference to the scale. Of course, the Daggerfall map is also quite different from the modern shape of Tamriel (see below), much like that of the PGE1, so taking a straight measurement of the peninsula and extrapolating from there is going to result in funky figures.

If you do want to count it out, cutting the map in half smooshing northern Hammerfell with the High Rock peninsula gives you a shape that overlays remarkably well with Great Britain, and results in a distance of just over 500 miles north to south (or east to west in High Rock). 

On a map of Tamriel, this distance should be roughly equivalent to that between Morrowind and Red Mountain. In other words, extrapolating from the Daggerfall measurement and map would give us a Tamriel twice as large as that of the PGE1 numbers.

Going back even further than Daggerfall, the manual for Arena tells us that Tamriel is “three to four thousand kilometers east to west and two to three thousand kilometers north to south.” If we overlay the 250 mile lines from the PGE1 onto the Arena map, we get a Tamriel that is roughly 1300 miles (2100 km) or so east to west and 1,000 miles (1600 km) north to south, instead.

Finally, the same Pocket Guide that provides us with the 250 miles to Red Mountain figure also gives us another example of distance:

“Torval is the city-state of Elsweyr's spiritual and temporal ruler, the Mane. He and his tribe live here in stately and exotic palaces built from massive timbers of Valenwood oak, whose territorial borders are only a few hundred miles away.”

Let’s look at the map again. Taken together, these numbers make no sense. According to the 250 miles measurement, no place in Elsweyr is "a few hundred" miles away from Valenwood, least of all Torval, which looks to be right near the border.

Map Projections

There is one additional thing to keep in mind  — maps are flat, planets are round. The look of a country on a map does not match its actual scale on a globe. This is most easily demonstrated with earth, as in this great online interactive example.

If you look at a flat map of Europe, Denmark and Serbia appear to be about the same distance north to south. However, when you go to a globe and measure it out, those same two lines represent two entirely different numbers -- 250 miles in the case of Denmark, and 340 in the case of Serbia. While differences in map projections and the curvature of Nirn can certainly be used to help explain the variance in the figures cited above, it also makes estimation of actual scale much harder, as we have no idea how big the planet is, where on it Tamriel is located, or the sort of projection that is used to arrive at each map, three vital factors in figuring out actual size. 

In short: even if you decide on a figure you like, you can’t just draw an even grid and multiply to get the size of the whole continent.

Closing Remarks

As we look at all this, it becomes clear that Tamriel was not created with scale in mind. Not in its lore, not in its maps, and most especially not in the games that depict it.

If we take the map literally, the walled area of the Imperial City is anywhere between 15 (if we trust Infernal City) and up to a hundred (if we trust the PGE1: Elsweyr section) miles across — as is every other city in Cyrodiil. The Infernal City figure puts it at the size of greater London. That same number gives us a Niben river that is somewhere between 10 and 15 miles wide, which makes it closer in size to the Chesapeake Bay or the Long Island Sound than to the Nile or Mississippi rivers.

So, where do we go from here? 

I say don’t worry about the specific numbers (“how long does it take an unladen Riften swallow to fly to Solitude"), but rather pick a general scale that suits your fancy and think about what it means for the world. What kind of cultural and ecological diversity can be expected in a Tamriel the size of Egypt versus a Tamriel the size of Eurasia? What infrastructure would the Empire need to hold that sort of territory? How do the stories from the games scale up and translate to "reality"?

Those sorts of conceptual considerations will reveal far more about Tamriel than any numbers.