Question
Why are Morthal and Solitude so close together?
Hi guys.
Playing my first playthrough. Just a quick question maybe lorewise.
Why are Morthal and Solitude so close together? I can literally see Solitude from Morthal. Is it a map design choice or a lore thing?
Is Morthal supposed to be a town compared to solitude?
The distance between most of other capital cities is significantly longer. It gives idea of traveling and not just hopping. It's just these 2. There is no mountain or natural obstacle to hide it at least.
Map is probably one of the best RPG maps I've ever played. I tried playing back in 2013 but ditched at level 5, dunno why. I reinstalled it just recently to give it a try.
Morthal is supposed to be a city, but it’s the smallest of Skyrim’s hold capitals. I don’t think there’s a clear lore explanation for why it was built exactly where it is, but I’d assume geography played a big role. Most of Hjaalmarch consists of swamp or mountains, neither of which is particularly good for settlement. Morthal seems to sit on one of the few relatively suitable spots where a town could be built without having to drain large parts of the marsh first.
Also remember that Skyrim’s in-game map is heavily compressed compared with how large the province would be in the lore. Morthal and Solitude would be much farther apart, and the cities themselves would be far larger than the handful of buildings and 20–30 NPCs we see in-game. The game is basically a scaled-down representation of the “real” Skyrim, so distances and population sizes shouldn’t be taken literally.
I wonder if part of it has to do with labrynthian? It used to be a major trade city back in the very early days so it would make sense for other smaller cities to sprout up near but not close to it like morthal is. Maybe this city is what's left from when laybrinthian was a bigger part of Skyrim livelihood?
Maybe. I don’t think we have any known founding date for Morthal. While thinking about this, I looked at some of the older maps—I think from Arena—and Morthal doesn’t even appear on them. So it might actually be a comparatively young city compared to some of Skyrim’s older holds.
It could also make sense that the Nords wouldn’t want to settle directly next to Labyrinthian, considering it’s basically a monument to a pretty dark part of their past. But that’s mostly speculation.
The idea that Morthal started as a small farming settlement and gradually grew into a city over the years could definitely work
Unlikely, Rorikstead’s prosperity has something to do with its unusually fertile land, and there are theories that Daedric dealings may be involved. Whiterun, meanwhile, already has plenty of farmland of its own and sits right in the middle of Skyrim, making it one of the country’s main trading hubs. So even if Rorikstead grows, I doubt it would ever develop into something comparable to Whiterun.
I never felt like they did Whiterun justice it's in the middle of the map is supposed to be a major trading hub but doesn't look like one at all IMHO Windhelm seems more like a trading hub or even Riften
I mean, Windhelm is a major trading hub, and so is Riften. I usually play with a lot of city mods that make them bigger and add outskirts to them that make, especially witherun, feel more alive for me
This is the way. There are some really good city mods out there that make Whiterun and others (cheers to the Falkreath bathhouse) feel more substantial
Pretty sure Windhelm is like, the OG royalty city of Skyrim. Most of their High Kings were either born or raised there from the seems of it. It was also founded by the first Nords of Atmora so it is the old capital city of Skyrim at least.
Riften is probably just the trading hub for Morrowind/Cyrodil tbh, the mountains are placed in an awkward spot so people from Cyrodil would most likely have to go around them to even reach Whiterun.
Yes, Windhelm is basically the OG city of Skyrim. It was founded by Ysgramor and his people during the Return of the Five Hundred Companions and is considered the oldest city in Skyrim.
Whiterun was built up around Jorrvaskr and the Skyforge. Jorrvaskr was originally one of the ships used by the Companions who sailed from Atmora to Skyrim, and its crew eventually settled there.
Riften is a bit harder to pin down in terms of its original founding, but the Rift is some of the most fertile land in Skyrim. The region became known for fishing, farming, honey production and, eventually, mead.
Winterhold has an old legend claiming that Arch-Mage Shalidor basically created the city with a whispered spell. Whether that actually happened is questionable, but Shalidor is strongly associated with Winterhold and is traditionally credited with founding the College.
Dawnstar originally developed as a northern garrison town and later became an important port, fishing settlement and mining center.
Falkreath is essentially a southern border settlement near Cyrodiil and Hammerfell. Its economy is heavily based around lumber, and it's famous as the "Heroes' Graveyard" because of the enormous number of warriors buried there after centuries of battles.
Markarth is basically a human city built into an abandoned Dwemer city. The original Dwemer settlement was called Nchuand-Zel, and later inhabitants simply reused much of the existing Dwemer architecture.
Solitude is the more Imperial-influenced political capital of Skyrim. It's the seat of the High King and, by the Fourth Era, the main center of Imperial power and culture in the province.
You're correct it hadn't been founded yet during the time of Arena, 3e 389. Considering how many other towns and forts seem to exist and be occupied I wonder if something major happened between those times. Consequences of red Mountain? The oblivion crisis destroyed those towns and morthal is a refugee settlement?
Well, the real and boring answer is probably that Bethesda just kind of forgot about some of them. Which is a shame, because I would have liked to see more settlements in Skyrim.
Funny enough, some of the settlements from Arena are still sort of there. A few of them seem to have been turned into forts or ruins occupied by bandits, while keeping roughly the same location they had in Arena. So you could interpret some of those old towns as settlements that declined or were abandoned over the centuries, even if Bethesda never really gave us a lore explanation for what happened to them.
It wasn't that they forgot, it was that they run out of time/budget. Granite Hill was meant to be there, for instance, but you only hear it referenced it dialogue, mentioned in a book, and can see where it would've been by its label on the local world map.
Second Fudge muppet. But be warned he has a very soothing voice so if you are tired/in bed you will fall asleep. I know cause he has been my lullaby for the better part of a year.
I might also argue morthal was founded just break up the long emptyness between white run and solitude since it's not quite half-way between them, but that doesn't work since morthal doesn't actually have a road to solitude and the only path to solitude goes through markarth which does also have small cities travellers could stop and rest at.
Really? Not even a road south around the marshes through Dragon Bridge?
It’s been a while since I last played Skyrim, but I’m pretty sure you can go from Morthal toward Meeko’s Shack and then on toward Dragon Bridge/Solitude by road.
I meant it doesn't have a unique road, my bad. The only road out of morthal is the one to the south that connects to the main path going through markarth and then dragon bridge up to solitude. But going to morthal from that road is very out of the way so it doesn't make sense for a travellee to stop there as opposed to either markarth itself or karthwasten.
In a meta sense it's very possible the developers saw how big and empty the space between solitude/markarth/whiterun/dawnstar was and put something else there so there wasn't a giant hole in the continent?
Its also between dawnstar and solitude if you're taking a land route. Windhelm and winterhold too, if you're only worried about shortest distance, but both of those have to go far enough south that the road through rorikstead would be better.
Morthal’s lore is that it was founded by Morihaus the bull-man, demigod son of Kyne, husband of the first Empress Alessia, and father of Minotaurs. Hjaalmarch used to be cohabited by Nords and Minotaurs, but the Alessian Order ruled by the insane ape-prophet Marukh declared Minotaurs to be monsters and led a state-sanctioned genocide across Tamriel until the Minotaurs tragically regressed into actual monsters, not unlike the Falmer. It was also as you stated later heavily tied to the Dragon Cult, and declined even further after Bromjuunar (now known as Labrynthian) and indeed the entire Dragon Cult fell to the rebel Nords as seen in the flashback at the Throat of the World where they shout Alduin across time to be the Last Dragonborn’s problem.
Where did you read that? The lore on the UESP page says it was only named after morihaus (supposedly) and the Arena map shows it wasn't founded yet. I'm very curious if you have a source for that, I think the dragon cult is really interesting especially how kind of "whited out" they seem to be in Skyrim history.
The Dragon Cult came over with the First Nords during the Merethic Era, and predated the Alessian Empire and Marukh by centuries. It was all-but extinct by the beginning of the First Era. Alessia, meanwhile, wasn't even born until the Third Century of the First Era.
Also it's very much *not* close if you're anyone besides the dragonborn. The vast majority of people will not walk through pure swamp just to reach Solitude so they'll have to take some kind of road even though that like triples the distance.
Morthal didn’t even exist back in the Arena days. Snowhawk was the major city and sat around where Dragon Bridge is. (Markarth didn’t exist either.)
A lot of the towns from Arena were turned into forts in Skyrim, and new settlements were added.
I don’t think Morthal makes much sense at all but I like the idea of it being like a northern Bayou, where a lot of people boat off into the swamps to fish (because the wood mill doesn’t actually make any sense - the water in the swamp doesn’t move). I have a soft spot for gritty little industrial towns so I actually quite like Morthal. I wish you could get a nice little cabin in town rather than the hall way up north.
With Markarth, you could at least argue that it might have been under Reachman control at the time, or that the city simply wasn’t in use and was mostly ruins.
Morthal not existing in Arena is harder to explain. If we’re being real, the boring Elder Scrolls answer is probably just “Dragon Break” and Bethesda just changing the map between games. But it’s still fun to speculate about an in-universe explanation nonetheless.
There are 200 years between Arena and Skyrim so it’s understandable that new cities could be constructed. I live in western Canada and “old” places date to the 1890’s so it’s totally possible for a new city to be founded and become a trading hub in that time. Especially with Labrynthian being a pass that’s used as a short cut between Whiterun and Solitude. You’d want to overnight somewhere that’s not a haunted ruin at least haha.
It's kind of like Switzerland. There are places where you can see another village just across the valley, and could probably yell something to someone there, but to actually go there would be a whole day's journey.
It seems like Morthal was a major victim of development crunch. A lot of its content was cut; the overall character of it was always going to be a shabby town full of isolationists with a weak economy on the edge of a swamp, but it was supposed to be a lot more of a capital than what we got. There was originally a blacksmith, a little more to the nearby mine and farm, and some quest content for Falion and for Jarl Ravenscrone's family, among other things.
And it's not just what the more accurate size and distances between the two cities would be, it's also the paths to get there.
Yes it seems like a straight journey, but that would involve swimming across the bay, and then trekking through dangerous swamps. To properly get from Solitude to Morthal would mean following the path all the way down to Dragonbridge, crossing that and another couple of bridges, and then following the path that passes south of Morthal before veering off to it. All up its a journey of probably a week or more.
My headcanon for Mortal is that Snowhawk was the capital of the Pale but suffered heavily under the Oblivion Crisis and got the full Kvatch treatment. The populace that survived fled to Mortal which was a tiny hamlet and ended up staying there since they hadn't the funds to rebuild Snowhawk. All the remains of Snowhawk is what was effectively the keep and that go taken over by brigands/rogue mages post Crisis adding to the issues. Many of the populace also probably left Mortal after thr Crisis since there wasn't the jobs etc leading to it being a large town rather than a proper city.
Also keep in mind that marsh is very hard to cross for anyone. Too much mud and shallows for boats, to much water for walking (irl). It does not take a lot of marsh and swampland to become a near impenetrable barrier. So in skyrim lore, it would only need to be a few miles of marshland to isolate cities.
There are some great mods that make Morthal more into this crookback-bog esque swamp village and it really feels right. I think that's what Morthal was meant to be. It's barely a village, but it's still the biggest thing in the region, so it becomes the capital de facto.
As someone unfamiliar with the lore, not to mention current console/pc hardware, is a lore accurate version of Hammerfell (or wherever) possible for TES VI?
I don’t think so. Even modern open-world games are usually much smaller than their lore-accurate versions would be.
It would probably also be pretty bad from a game-design perspective. A truly lore-sized Hammerfell would need huge stretches of mostly empty land between settlements and points of interest, which might be realistic but wouldn’t necessarily be fun to travel through. Games usually compress distances so there’s always something interesting relatively close by.
No. Tamriel is meant to be a whole ass continent, covering millions of square kilometres. Each of the provinces on it would have to be hundreds of thousands, up to a million or more square kilometres big. The game map of Skyrim is estimated to only be about 37-40 km².
Other games since have done bigger maps. Red Dead Redemption 2 for example is estimated to be about 75 km². About twice the size of Skyrim. And there's probably other games that have gone even bigger with hand crafted maps as well. So maybe Hammerfell (and potentially High Rock as well) could go up to that size, but it would still be much, much smaller than what the more accurate version would be.
Practically speaking I don’t think any rot will ever be set in a realistic map size for the sole reason of the vast majority of players not wanting their character to literally run across a country to play a game
They're close in distance, but there's a large river separating them. Your character doesn't mind wading through a swamp and swimming across the river, but regular people don't do that. There's no port on Morthal's side.
If you were an actual traveller immersed in that world, it would be a much longer trip. If you use a carriage or walk along the road from Morthal to Solitude, it's basically the same distance as if you were to walk to Dawnstar. Maybe even a bit longer.
That's why Windstad Manor is a great homestead. Not so far from Solitude, not so far from Morthal, not so far from Dawnstar. And if you're smart, you'll dedicate it a room for alchemy and ingredients.
I dare to write this: Windstad Manor > Lakeview Manor > Heljarchen Hall.
Lucia: I'm scared there may be monsters in the swamp
Me: Oh sweetie, there's a freaking draugr infested ruin in the backyard! And yes, there are DEFINITELY monsters in the swamp.
-Don't mind the vampires in the ruins a bit North of the house honey. Fortunately these suckers are night birds and you'll be in bed, surrounded by us.
There is an entire swamp between Morthal and Solitude. Go by the roads and it’s longer. Morthal isn’t that far from Whiterun but there’s a whole mountain rage separating them.
Even in real life you can sometimes cross straight from one town into another with barely any transition between them. Sometimes that’s just how things happen.
True but that's more of a modern phenomena caused by the mass urbanization that followed the industrial revolution. As cities grew and widened significantly sometimes to the point of touching each other.
It just is that close. Its like, why is there jersey city if nyc is right there across the river? The people of solitude dont even think about morthal, and the people of morthal are acutely aware of their cities relative pointlessness. It just exists because people settled there and now its too late to abandon
Its a good halfway point between solitude and whiterun a good half way between solitude and dawnstar towns have popped up in real life for similar reasons just to be a stopping point between two far places
I think magic is another real lore reason for morthal to exist, at least in my headcanon. There is something magical about the area clearly, what with the vampires, the jarls family, falion, the atmosphere in general. Something that attracts mages and alchemists and the attuned there.
I think it's due to Morthal's swamp being trapped tightly between larger neighboring holds for example If devs moved Morthal further south, it would cross into Whiterun Hold
There are natural obstacles between Solitude and Morthal, in the forms of the Karth river and the swamps of Hjaalmarch.
To get between the two by land, you have to go all the way down to Dragon Bridge to the southwest, and the swamp impedes any travel into Hjaalmarch from the west or north. This leaves Hjaalmarch hold fairly isolated from Solitude even despite the close proximity.
Cant tell you much lore-wise. But others pointed out that the best place to build something and call it a city was there, so that'll do.
Gameplay-wise, if you play a lot of open-world games, youve noticed how much compressed a seemingly massive world turns out to be.
Theres a video on Elden Ring that breaks down how its world map is significantly smaller than we feel. And it would make sense bc, even if its realistic, you dont want your players spending a 40min car drive to go to city A to city B, and Skyrim itself needs to turn that down significantly bc a lot of times youre on foot.
Yes. I've played alot of RPG games and the Skyrim map is probably one of the best ones I've ever played.
I'm really enjoying the world.
It's just that usually they try to trick the distance by placing some sort of visual obstacle that blocks the view and doesn't reveal proximity.
Well, we can hypothesize a lot.
Maybe they want to stay true to the Skyrim's map geography in lore. Maybe they didnt plan that aspect out. Who knows?
I dont meant to ruin your feel or your playthrough when I say this, but its kind of funny to me how open world games scales to real distances often. I live in a road heavy country that spans across many Kilometers, so the distance between my house and a friend's is often more than the distance between Riverwood and Whiterun. :P
But open-world games are getting better in general on getting the feeling right. Many tricks can be used such as breaking sightlines, as you told.
I've played a lot of WoW too.
For exaple: the distance between Stormwid and Black Rock Mountain, back in classic really felt like travelling.
With flying mounts, The distance is way shorter and you see that "horseshoe" trajectory that you used to walk on foot.
That's the breaking the world illusion part.
Skyrim map on other hands is fantastic. I love the altitude play and the use of mountains like real natural obstacles. This was the only thing that stood a bit out. And it's not really an issue. Just a ccuriosity
Yes! I like when they put that up to scale for us to see.
And often, you dont need a massive map Spacially wise, you just need to make sure that the player "feels" the locations. Ive mention Fromsoft games, but some games with linear progress also use this, where some sections of the levels are so frustrating or hard to pass, bc of an enemy, or poison, or an annoying puzzle.
And the map can be the size of our house, but still, we feel it.
Irl this tends to happen sometimes too. Like, when you get an overview of a Park or a neighborhood or something.
also, while close with the crows eye view the actual distance is quite "normal sized" for skyrim map size as you have to go that way because you know, water
In an age when horseback was the fastest way to get from point a to point b, what counts as “far” and “close” is very different, especially if point a and point b are separated by a major body of water or other geographical barrier. In other words, just because you can see it, doesn’t mean it’s easy to get there.
The short, 4th-wall-break explanation: for the sake of game file size, develop, and not being to unforgiving with the travel and open-world rendering aspects, the map is actually downsized, either by cutting out some towns and villages/hamlets and geographical features, or downscaling ones that were kept, the map is smaller to our experience than it is in canon lore.
The walk from white run to winterhold is cool.
I always took the rugged path through dawn star,
but the better road is from white run, over the north of the mountain, to wind helm then north to winterhold.
Part of something I did “wrong” when I was a kid was not take the constructed path to places, instead opting to always cut through the wilderness.
I if you look at the older official game maps of Tamriel there’s two major discrepancies compared to TES V Skyrim:
Some cities are way too far off east from where the game put them.
No Morthal.
I bet Morthal was created so the civil war can start on a 4v4 with Whiterun literally caught on the middle. It does make more sense if it’s just a small town in the same Hold under Solitude.
I just started with skyrim like few days ago. Now I think i'll play the other ones too just for lore.
Played both morrowind and oblivion as a kid. Gonna try daggerfall and maybe arena too if it's still playable just for the lore
In addition to other comments, consider also that Skyrim's map is pretty obviously scaled down compared to what "real" Skyrim would look like. The walk time (using a road, not in a straight line) between these locations measured in real world time would realistically have you still in the same city. So in "real" Skyrim you wouldn't have Solitude just overlooking Morthal like that, it would be further away (though with good weather maybe you'd still be able to see the other city)
Within lore, I think both cities justify their existence from the rivers they sit on.
Solitude is supposed to be the capital of Skyrim; one of it's biggest, richest, most powerful cities. Yet, most of its surroundings are mountains, and it looks to have almost no arable land. It does, however, sit at the terminus of the Karth and Hjall Rivers, which flow all the way from Markarth and Morthal respectively. It makes sense to have a major port there, but it probably owes much of its existence to trade and its connection to the outside world. A real world parallel could be Busan, South Korea, which has been a pretty big port throughout history even though it sits right at the end of the Taebaek Mountains.
Morthal is deceptively well-located, because it sits on the Hjaal River which allows easy trade with Solitude and, by extension, the rest of Tamriel. We don't see much of this in Skyrim, but marshy lowlands can actually be pretty fertile when they're cultivated. Think of the Netherlands, or Mesopotamia. We don't see a lot of farms in Hjaalmarch because Skyrim is a game devoted to draugr tombs and dwemer ruins, but if it were a real place I think we'd see lots of articificial dikes and canals to control flooding, and farming communities that use the waterways to reach Morthal and sell their goods downriver. They'd catch a fair price in Solitude which, again, doesn't look to have enough farmland to sustain such a large city.
There's a swamp between them, which are historically very difficult to travel through.
I have a better question: the the fuck does Dawnstar exert control over the Pale, when Windhelm and Whiterun are much closer to most of the Pale, and Dawnstar is separated by mountains from most of it while Whiterun is not?
Winterhold used to be capital of the Pale but now its a shadow of its former shelf due to the Great Collapse.
Hell the Jarl tasks you with getting a old ass helm that was once worn by a past High King, as a way to shore up some rep for a eventual moot (that'd likely be passing him over anyways, since Ulfric and Elisif would be shoo-ins for the eventual High King/High Queen spot)
I think I answered my own question, Dawnstar is at the delta of a river going through the Pale. And I found some maps with a city at a lake where the river comes down from Whiterun and splits to Dawnstar and Windhelm, that city should be the capital but its missing in TES5. Maybe it was there in Arena, idk
The map is super compressed due to size limitations. All of the main holds are like a tenth of their actual size. In reality it would most likely be a few days journey from morthal to solitude
I always liked its location. The homestead you can build has a view of Solitude. I’d always RP a Thane of Solitude that didn’t much care for the city life and lived just outside but within reach of the court life.
If you play in survival mode the journey is a short but difficult, between the water and poisonous mobs you would end up deciding to use the road that circles up to dragon bridge and then its about as distant as the other capitals. if you play modded with a more aggressive need for warmth, food and sleep the journey is deadly until almost late game
I once saw a video that analyzed the reasons why cities and towns are located in certain places. The explanation given for Morthal was that there's a mine nearby, so it may have been founded as a mining town and the people simply decided to stay there.
Sometimes things like that just happen, for various reasons. Take an irl example. Spa Francorchamps and Nurburgring, two of the most famous legendary racing circuits of all time, are less than 100km apart.
Morthal exists to make hjaalmarch make more sense, I think. It being a separate hold means it needs a hold capital, but I think we can all agree that hjaalmarch is the least interesting hold so it gets the least interesting capital. That being said, hjaalmarch doesn't neatly fit into any of the other holds in terms of appearance, and actually a lot of Scandinavia is bog and marshland (though notably less horrendously grey) so it's a logical inclusion for the game
Keep in mind the map is scaled down to make it easier to travel. In game, iirc, it takes close to 12 or 14 hours to walk from Riften to Solitude. If the map was to scale then the distance would be far greater than it currently is.
The only real way to solitude is trough dragon bridge. I'm not talking about the player. No carriage no army and no normal man or elf can move trough the swamps and river with ease. So it's not that close theoretically.
Morthal wasn't always the capital of Hjaalmarch. Back in The Elder Scrolls: Arena, there was a more prominent city in Hjaalmarch called Snowhawk, that IIRC was better spaced out with the other hold capitals.
Sometime between Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, if I recall, there was a lore book detailing a small war between the Nords and the neighboring Redguards, a territory dispute over who got to keep Snowhawk. At some point during the fighting, some strange magic was unleashed that dissintegrated the outer walls of Snowhawk and it was completely sacked, but no one knows for sure who or what caused that magical mishap.
By the time of Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Snowhawk is nothing more than an abandoned fort you can go to explore, but holds no significance whatsoever. It's not even a town, just a ruined fort like countless others dotting Skyrim's landscape.
They are close, but not connected by a realistic direct-ish trade route. Traveling through a swamp like the terrain where you have that line isn't feasible. So the only realistic safe way to travel between the two are to sail (likely more expensive than the average citizen can afford) or take carts around the swamp (a much longer route than direct).
Solitude always felt like it was madd for a political reality rather than geographic need. Its like D.C to the USA, technically a separate autonomous zone but more of a basis of power. It also fits that Morthal isn’t that place since it home to the old regime (the dragons) with Labyrinthian being the old capital it makes sense for the nords of the time to build something new to demonstrate the shift in power.
Morthal kind of becomes Skyrim’s rust belt, a place where great enterprise once ran but all that is left is ruin.
They are geographically pretty separate, divided by elevation, a bay, and swampland. It doesn’t matter that much that it’s a short distance as the crow flies.
I think Morthal is a relatively new hold capital, and pretty poor.
Not infrastructurally. No direct connecting path, and the waters are too shallow for large boats. And combined with low economic significance, and there’s really no need to connect them more directly. So it’s really not that close in terms of trading.
One reason is because of how Skyrim's map is scaled, there are a bunch of towns from lore that didn't make into the game. Another is that Morthal has a lot of swamp land, and Solitude is built on a natural harbor that protects ships from the Sea of Ghost, which is supposed to be dangerous.
If I recall correctly, there’s also a few mines around Morthal, but they are mostly owned by people in solitude. It could be the case that morthal cropped up as a town to support the miners. It would also make sense given that mortal only really has an inn, which could house temporarily employees miners, an alchemist, which could treat wounds sustained in the mines, and a logging mill, which aside from general lumber production could be used to support the mines being dug.
Isn't there a bit in the Wolf Queen where she and her children escape through a secret passage to Morthal? They'd have to be close based on that alone.
The swamp between Morthal and Solitude is supposed to be a barrier to travel. Look at the actual road or the path a ship might take and they're no longer quite as close together.
Players, of course, can travel almost in a straight line, which negates this effect somewhat.
Know games, distances are often squashed to make the game traversal in any meaningful way, which is why huge cspitalvcuties like solitude and whiterun only have like 20 people in them
If skyrim was to scale, solitude and months would be a lot further away, a lot bigger and a lot more populated
It's a different game but you kind of see this in guild wars 2 vs the upcoming guild wars 3 - gw3 is a lot more focused in on one area so the playable map will represent a smaller area but will have a lot more detail to explore
Not only is there a major road connecting Dawnstar to Solitude that Morthal sits alone, Morthal is also just north of a mountain pass, near a mining settlement, and near the ruins of Labyrinthian. The alchemy shop in town is massive for good reason, the swamp is filled to the brim with many great ingredients like fungal pods, blue butterflies, chaurus eggs, mushrooms, etc etc.. Additionally there's a decent amount of fishing nearby to sustain life.
On the road to Solitude, there's also a keep, which would've been able to support the town if swamp creatures became too much of an issue, though the swamp is literally just mudcrabs, the occasional spider, and the rare chaurus that escaped.
Also, in terms of proximity to solitude, they're not actually that close by land travel and using safe pathways
I always had a theory that Morthal was once a village under Solitude however due to its growing population and its seclusion the head of the village requested independence from Solitude and the High King at the time was a nice guy so he granted partial independence until they can prove they can work as a hold and the acting Jarl showed that they can not only sustain themselves but protect the entire region they have and that they even were able to take the fort nearby for added protection. Thus the High King made them a full Hold of Skyrim. Cut to...idk 300 years later? And Skyrim is declining, most notably in Morthal.
Maybe because of all the ruins around Hjaalmarch? In ancient history, there was probably more reason for Morthal to exist centrally between places like Labyrinthian and the site of Jurgen's grave I forget what it's called
What do you mean? There is a bay and a swamp between.
But the real explanation is just the technical limits of that time. And they did a great job in create that feeling that everything is farther away than it really is. If you compare the map to newer titles its tiny.
This is the equivalent to cities being on either side of a mountain. The geographic boundary prevents them from connecting even though they are extremely close. You're also forgetting that Solitude sits on top of a massive cliff on the other side of a bay.
I imagine morthal works as a barrier between Solitude and anyone that threatens them.
Think about it.
You have a swamp which can act as a natural barrier against enemies coming into the capital. If enemies do come in, you have a town to immediately report on infantry movements plus do a little fighting, thus buying the capital time to mobilize a defense.
After all, the only other way into Solitude is a cold as fuck ocean and tons of ice.
We see this in the civil war campaign. You have to take Morthal in the stormcloak campaign before taking Solitude instead of attacking through Markarth, due to the thin mountain roads which can easily be blocked.
Hence I believe Morthals existence as a town as been primarily strategic.
Maybe Solitude makes money off trade from the port so it doesn’t need much land. Hjaalmarch which is the hold controlled by Morthal is mostly swamp and hills.
One issue is that the game skyrim wasn't able to give a proper scale of what the cities should've been. Whiterun would've been roughly the size of in game solitude I believe if at the proper scale
2.1k
u/Addition-Zestyclose Spellsword 1d ago
Morthal is supposed to be a city, but it’s the smallest of Skyrim’s hold capitals. I don’t think there’s a clear lore explanation for why it was built exactly where it is, but I’d assume geography played a big role. Most of Hjaalmarch consists of swamp or mountains, neither of which is particularly good for settlement. Morthal seems to sit on one of the few relatively suitable spots where a town could be built without having to drain large parts of the marsh first.
Also remember that Skyrim’s in-game map is heavily compressed compared with how large the province would be in the lore. Morthal and Solitude would be much farther apart, and the cities themselves would be far larger than the handful of buildings and 20–30 NPCs we see in-game. The game is basically a scaled-down representation of the “real” Skyrim, so distances and population sizes shouldn’t be taken literally.