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Anyone who's played Arena knows that the rotation of Nirn is reversed-- the sun rises in the west and sets in the east.

Last night I was accepting a quest from Lord Demetrius in Riverbridge, and he asked me to go to Greenspring to retrieve a writ for him. He described Greenspring as being to the east, although it's actually due west of Riverbridge.

This made me wonder if the map for Tamriel and the various provinces had originally been intended to be mirror images of how we've come to know them, and that perhaps the rising and setting of the sun-- as well as certain dialog about the east-west direction in which certain destinations (i.e., other cities) lie-- might somehow be programmed according to the original orientation of Tamriel.

Have any of the original developers ever mentioned anything relevant?

I had another quest from Lord Demetrius. (I was spending a good bit of time in Riverbridge while exploring the nearby mines which contained the map to the Ring of Khajiit.) This time Lord Demetrius wanted me to kill a troll whose lair was to the "east." But on the map of Black Marsh the troll's lair was far to the west of Riverbridge, clear on the other side of Black Marsh.

One possible explanation-- aside from a "bug" or "programming error"-- is that "east" is whichever direction the sun rises in, whereas "west" is whichever direction the sun sets in. Given the fact that the sun rises on the opposite side of the horizon in Arena as it does in real life (and in the other Elder Scrolls games), that would mean that the compass should look as follows:



But the compass shown on the map, and the compass directions shown at the top of the game screen, conform to a normal compass in real life.

So I'm beginning to seriously think that the map of Tamriel may have been originally designed to be a mirror image of the way it ended up-- that is, with High Rock in the northeast corner, Morrowind in the northwest corner, Black Marsh in the southwest corner, and Summerset Isles in the southeast corner-- and with each of the individual provinces also being mirror images of the way they ended up. This crazy theory of mine is predicated on the assumption that the graphical routines for drawing the rising and setting sun-- as well as the motions of the stars and moons-- are somehow tied to the original compass directions of the map, and that if it was decided to flip Tamriel around the other way because it looked better (or something like that), that the manner in which everything was flipped around somehow caused the sun to rise in the west and set in the east, and with certain dialogs continuing to refer to specific quest destinations as lying "east" or "west" of the quest giver's location.

That's my loony theory, and I'm stickin' to it!

The loony(?) theory thickens.

This morning the Baron of Raven Spring in High Rock sent me to White Haven to retrieve a writ. He said that White Haven is east of Raven Spring, whereas it is almost due west, once again suggesting that at the time the dialog for the quest was written, the map of High Rock-- and therefore of Tamriel as a whole-- was originally reversed from what it is now.

There has been at least one other job I've accepted in which the direction of the other city wasn't mentioned in the dialog, but it was mentioned in my journal and the direction was "correct" according to the standard map of Tamriel. I'm guessing that the text for that journal entry was written later, after it was decided to flip the map around (by my loony theory).

Okay, I've done a number of quests for the town rulers, and as far as I can tell, if they mention the direction that the dungeon lies in relation to the city, I'm pretty sure it's backwards 100% of the time-- east instead of west, or west instead of east, or southeast instead of southwest, etc. The only exception is if they say it's to the north or to the south. This was true of the quests I did in Black Marsh while I was working on finding the Ring of Khajiit, and it's also true of the quests I've been doing in Hammerfell.

This is a very interesting find indeed!

I've never noticed that the sun goes in the opposite direction to the real world, nor that the directions provided by quest givers are contrary to the cardinal directions shown on the map.

I can only make guesses about the internal mechanics of the game, but could it be that there's some bug that simply swaps east and west in the quest/journal entry texts? At least in Daggerfall, the many details in random quests' dialogue and descriptions are provided as variables inserted into the text that is displayed to the player, rather than written as plain text, so there is a possibility that a programming error resulted in the east/west directions being confused most of the time.

As far as I've seen in Black Marsh, in Hammerfell, and now in Skyrim, any quest given by the local ruler-- which are the only ones that send you off to another town, or to a dungeon out in the wilderness-- is 100% consistent about flipping east and west around. Some of these quests don't mention a direction-- the ruler just says that the location has been added to your map-- but in every single case where the ruler mentions the direction, east and west are swapped. And it appears that those directions are mentioned in the journal entries, too.

I haven't started documenting this, but so far it's been so consistent that it can't be explained by typos. I think your comment about variables which get filled in by the program might be spot-on, because I think there's a problem with the way some of the equipment store names are generated-- not the ones where the owners' names are randomly selected such that they're usually different from the names shown in the "Where is..." list of equipment stores, but the ones where the name is "The village Equipment Store," or "The city-state Equipment Store," etc.; I'm pretty sure the words "village" and "city-state" (and the third size, "town" or whatever) were supposed to be replaced by the actual names of the towns.

So based on the fact that the sun, moons, and stars move west-to-east instead of east-to-west, coupled with the fact that (as far as I've seen) all of the directions mentioned by town rulers are reversed in terms of east and west, I feel fairly confident about my theory that the map of Tamriel was originally designed as a mirror image of what it came to be.

But I've never seen any "Did you know?" factoid or developer comment to that effect, so an alternative explanation is that the map of Tamriel was always meant to be as it is now, but that some kind of "master" or global east/west variables which control how the sun, moons, and stars are drawn, as well as how different locations on the map are verbally described in terms of their relative directions, somehow got flipped around in the code.

In any case, I think it all makes for some interesting theories!

I just found something that might help. Page 62 of the Codex Scientia (the official hint guide) depicts a compass on the wall of some dungeon with the east and west markers swapped. That contributes to the theory that everything was intended to be reversed at some point.

Nice find! And the compass image? That makes it hard to deny that something was going on. (I'm late to this conversation, but this was very interesting.