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SPOILER INFO
Very mild spoiler – lists the names of some Skyrim locations and objects and gives some general information on one of the Skyrim towns.
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The Skyrim game doesn't support the renaming of things by the player. I have seen only one mod that enables the player to rename things and that doesn't even work properly. You can, however, rename one or another individual thing with TES5Edit if you happen to find a mod that has a record for that thing. That's how I was able to give understandable names to potions, name some unnamed NPCs etc.
However, long before I discovered that Tes5Edit tweak, I renamed a number of locations. Physically in the game, they were still referred to by their standard names, but in my own records I started using the names given by myself, and I also did so in my articles and game reports.
It all started by my renaming Riften into Bitchen one day. I mean, the jarl is a woman, the steward is a woman, the court wizard is a woman, and even the oligarch is a woman. That kind of absurd matriarchy just calls for a rename. Apart from which, even a number of male NPCs in that city are real bitches. (Although there are very nice people there as well.)
Then I adjusted the spelling of some settlements in order to make them sound less English and more Nordic. I also optimized the spelling of settlement names consisting of more than one word.
Then at one point I felt I just had to rename Markarth into Morpork. (Yes, it could be argued that Markarth should actually be Ankh and Riften should be Morpork, but I wanted the new names to resemble the old ones in order to avoid confusion.)
I was unsure what to do about Dawnstar which, firstly, sounds nothing like Nordic, and secondly gets uncomfortably confused with Dawnguard. I had established a rule of not using non-English letters, but the spellings Donstar, Daanstar or Danstar just didn't look right. So I made this one exception and renamed the town into Dånstar.
Here is a table with the new names and conventional names for your reference:
| name used by me | conventional name | |
| Bitchen | Riften | |
| Darkwater | Darkwater Crossing | |
| Dånstar | Dawnstar | |
| Dragonbridge | Dragon Bridge | |
| Falkert | Falkreath | |
| Hviterun | Whiterun | |
| Ivarsted | Ivarstead | |
| Morpork | Markarth | |
| Ravenrock | Raven Rock | |
| Roriksted | Rorikstead | |
| Shor | Shor's Stone | |
| Skaal | Skaal Village | |
| Solitud | Solitude |
Please note that after I had destroyed the mafias in Morpork and Bitchen, I gave the cities their original names back.
The changes affect only the names of settlements, not the names of holds. Hviterun is still surrounded by Whiterun Hold etc. That way, there is no ambiguity – it is clear that "Falkert" means the town and "Falkreath" means the hold.
I also shortened some names for categories of people that need to be written about often and are uncomfortably long and/or might cause confusion because one and the same term can mean several different things (such as Imperial meaning things concerning the Empire as well as one of the races; an Imperial soldier is not necessarily Imperial by race):
imp means Imperial Soldier
Also "imp captain" (Imperial Captain) and such.
Note that the Imperial race is still referred to as "Imperial".
stork means Stormcloak
Also "stork leader" and such.
virr means Vigilant of Stendarr
forn means Forsworn
dard means Dawnguard (a person, not the Dawnguard organization nor the Dawnguard quest nor the Dawnguard DLC; what were Bethesda thinking by creating such appallingly ambiguous terminology?)
alikr means Alik'r warrior
(Alik'r is the name of a geographical region)
All the above changes affect names of weapons (stork cuirass, imp light armor etc.) but don't affect names of non-settlement locations (Haafingar Stormcloak Camp, Riften Stables etc).
Further, I created two new words: storkorg and imporg (obviously inspired by the Russian word "partorg"). They refer to the dudes usually at jarls' residences who keep telling you how you ought to join the storks or imps, respectively.
For the sake of clarity, I am adding the common English plural ending s to some words where the authors of Skyrim chose to omit it thinking it looked fancier. For instance, I intentionally spell the plural of "thalmor" as thalmors.
When I talk about something happening physically in the game, I mean things like I clicked the right mouse button, as a result of which my character moved his right arm and hit the NPC with his sword, and the NPC's health was decreased and he ran away. When I talk about something happening in the imaginary reality, I mean things like the NPC ran away because he was afraid of me, having realized that I was much stronger than him.
It is (understandably) commonplace in Skyrim game reports to write "then I went to such-and-such and did such-and-such" instead of the inconvenient "then my player character went to such-and-such and did such-and-such". In order to minimize confusion, I tried to adhere to the following terminology in my past game reports, with varied success:
I refers to my player character – the fictional person who is imagined to walk around in the virtual world of Tamriel;
my higher self refers to me the real person who is playing the video game "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim".
When I say I knew something from my magical visions, it means that I, the real person, remembered something from my previous Skyrim games.
I mean, my player character can't know things that happened in another game, because he didn't exist in it. On the other hand, I, the real-world-person, can't wipe those things from my memory. (Neither do I want to.) So in the imaginary reality let us assume that my player character is occasionally having dreams that give him precognition of one or another thing he hasn't yet encountered.
When I say I knew something from rumors, it means that I, the real person, read about it in online help articles.
That occurs when I run into some difficulties in my game (such as frequent crashes or a necessary quest that appears to be impossible to complete) and decide to seek external help when I'm at the end of my wits.
My most recent game report Always Lost, Always Hopeful, started in June 2019, is slightly different. Its terminology is similar to what's described above, but the game report is strictly first-person, written entirely from my player character's perspective. All specific terminology is explained by the protagonist at suitable moments. Any technical metadiscussions and generic rants will be in articles separate from the game report. And, as I'm most please to point out, by the time I started that game, I was already able to change the geographical names on my game map as well. :-)
[originally published 2016-10-28]
