Black Marsh is not what you think.

AlwaysOnFire

From the very beginning, we have been told a lie about Black Marsh.

It is not a marsh!

According to Wikipedia:

A marsh is a wetland that is dominated by herbaceous rather than woody plant species. Marshes can often be found at the edges of lakes and streams, where they form a transition between the aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. They are often dominated by grasses, rushes or reeds.

Clearly, the main area of Black Marsh we have seen thus far, Shadowfen, is not a marsh at all:



But what is it?

According to Wikipedia:

A swamp is a wetland that is forested. Many swamps occur along large rivers where they are critically dependent upon natural water level fluctuations. Other swamps occur on the shores of large lakes. Some swamps have hammocks, or dry-land protrusions, covered by aquatic vegetation, or vegetation that tolerates periodic inundation.

It is a swamp!

But that's not all. Shadowfen itself... is not a fen at all!

According to Wikipedia:

Along with bogs, fens are a kind of mire. Fens are minerotrophic peatlands, usually fed by mineral-rich surface water or groundwater. They are characterised by their water chemistry, which is pH neutral or alkaline, with relatively high dissolved mineral levels but few other plant nutrients. They are usually dominated by grasses and sedges, and typically have brown mosses in general including Scorpidium or Drepanocladus.

Shadowfen vegetation is clearly incorrect for a fen, and unless we have a reading on the water chemistry here, we cannot accurately call it one. Or a bog-- which is known to be acidic rather than alkaline. To avoid any confusion, we might more generally refer to Black Marsh as just a wetland.

While it is possible that there are other portions of the region that do adhere to this misnomer, we must conclude that those who named Black Marsh were not aware of the significant differences between marshes, swamps, fens, bogs, and other semi-aquatic environments. They are not synonyms for the same thing!

It is my hope that in the future we can strive for accuracy in correctly identifying and conserving the flesh-eating wasp infested beautiful wetlands of Tamriel.

Rohamad_Ali

Well I'm glad we got that hurdle cleared . So many can sleep peacefully again .

Draqone

And Greenland is not really green (most of the time).

And Iceland is not always icy.

So basically, pay no attention to what people say and what names people give to places since they rarely have an idea what they are talking about.

[Edit to remove real-world politics]

Savos_Saren

Wait... baby powder isn't made of babies?!?!?

SaRuZ

And you aren't really Salt.

BigBragg

I live in a desert named after a blanket of snow.

WhiteCoatSyndrome

This is why you should all bow before your Aldmeri overlords--the mer call it Argonia.

In defense of the people who continue to call it Black Marsh, the whole place is supposed to be super lethal to any non-Saxhleel who visit, so it's probably difficult for dryskins to verify most of that.

Presumably its name in Jel makes sense.

Jitterbug

Best post for this week.

FluffyReachWitch

The Second Empire was bad at naming things. I assume they just did what Imperial scholars and loremasters are so famous for and grabbed the nearest Marukh-approved Official Imperial Thesaurus, then picked the first synonym that made everything sound gritty and mysterious.

ArchMikem

And I live in a city that's named after a lake that's really more like a pond.

Danikat

While you're technically correct I can say from personal experience that even many of the scientists responsible for studying and maintaining wetlands don't worry about the exact names for them under most circumstances. They will tend to call them all wetlands for simplicity but when talking about a specific one they'll go with the existing name even if it's technically incorrect. (Like the common names of animals and plants - no one's going to rename the elephant shrews just because they are not elephants or shrews.)

Whilst it's almost certainly an out-of-universe mistake (considering the number of continuity errors in Arena, like calling the emperor Uriel VII and Uriel IV in the same block of text, it wouldn't surprise me) it would be easy to carry that over to an in-universe mistake. Maybe the person who first named Black Marsh didn't know there were different types of wetlands. Maybe they came from a place with marshes but no swamps, or they were attempting to ask some argonians the name of the area without the benefit of a common language and settled on their best guess of a translation.

Draqone wrote: »

And Greenland is not really green (most of the time).

And Iceland is not always icy.

So basically, pay no attention to what people say and what names people give to places since they rarely have an idea what they are talking about.

My personal favourite is Canada, which is derived from a word meaning 'village'. Via the infamous method of European explorers landing somewhere, asking the locals what it's called and writing that down as the name of however much of the area they found before they decided they felt like a new name.

Along those lines maybe they were in an area of marsh at the time and the argonians they were speaking to misunderstood that they wanted the name of the entire region, not just that little bit.

RavenSworn

and I live in a country that literally says fake lion... in a zone that has a high population of tigers once before. Tigers =/= Lions smh

Lyserus

Molag Bal is not a Ball!

LMar

I quite enjoyed this post.

Stonefalls is also not an area with falling rocks. Dustfall would be more appropriate. Perhaps PyroclasticFalls?

BadLuckCharm

LMar wrote: »

I quite enjoyed this post.

Stonefalls is also not an area with falling rocks. Dustfall would be more appropriate. Perhaps PyroclasticFalls?

Oh, i'm quite certain that when the volcanoes in the area get really grumpy, stone does fall.

Gilvoth

Draqone wrote: »

And Greenland is not really green (most of the time).

And Iceland is not always icy.

So basically, pay no attention to what people say and what names people give to places since they rarely have an idea what they are talking about.

[Edit to remove real-world politics]

this quote is truth ^
in addition to this, we know that the way people pronounce and sometimes change names of things does vary with "culture age" and location.
what today we call "smoke" was in the 70s referred to as "refer" and in the 80s as "weed"
what we see in eso is infact the past for all of us. wether we agree with it or call it other names is irrelevant.

vyndral13preub18_ESO

What the hell is going on in here? My world is upside down!

sumisu1

muh swaaaamp

Ankael07

Im from Turkey and this post blew my mind

starkerealm

ArchMikem wrote: »

And I live in a city that's named after a lake that's really more like a pond.

I live in a city named after a dead guy. I for one am very disappointed that the city isn't made out of dead guys.

Totes-Bode

Don't forget the Greenshade loading screen that describes this open, bigsky prairie-land as "TAMRIELS MOST PRISTINE GRAHTOAK JUNGLE".

Grymmoire

And, isn't it also odd that one cooks bacon but bakes cookies?

Enslaved

Lyserus wrote: »

Molag Bal is not a Ball!

This reminded me of Bilbo T Baggins, I saw once in Cyrodiil, for some reason, lol.

starkerealm

Grymmoire wrote: »

And, isn't it also odd that one cooks bacon but bakes cookies?

I usually bake bacon. It goes faster, because I can get entire batches ready to go at once, instead of needing to cook a couple strips at a time.

Epona222

As I grew up in a rural area in England with plenty of marshes and peat-bogs but NO swamps with much tree growth, I am aware of the difference

I've always been interested with the depiction of Shadowfen, because like a lot of areas in the game it uses an archaic topographic descriptor in its name that will be familiar to some of us - and a fen is typically a an area of flatlands either lower than or close to sea level and regularly flooded resulting in saltwater marshes - Shadowfen is anything but flat and it's not predominantly grasses/reeds - it's clearly a swamp as far as I am concerned, and the use of 'fen' is a misnomer. (Another one that I feel similarly towards is Malabal Tor - where's the peak? The zone should just be called Malabal. The bit at high elevation is the Tor.)

Sheva I 7 I

LMar wrote: »

I quite enjoyed this post.

Stonefalls is also not an area with falling rocks. Dustfall would be more appropriate. Perhaps PyroclasticFalls?

You mean Ashfalls?

LMar

Perhaps Sometimesashfalls!

Horker

dude

InnocentOfCrime

Well I could have told you the swamp bit. I live in Louisiana (America's armpit) and they actually make a fair representation of what is outside my front door, right down to 80% of the wildlife designed to kill you and the locals trying to do the same.

By and large I'd say they captured the swamp aesthetic rather well, even if like you said the naming is a bit off.

But seriously everything here is trying to kill us, even the bugs....

AlwaysOnFire

InnocentOfCrime wrote: »

Well I could have told you the swamp bit. I live in Louisiana (America's armpit) and they actually make a fair representation of what is outside my front door, right down to 80% of the wildlife designed to kill you and the locals trying to do the same.

By and large I'd say they captured the swamp aesthetic rather well, even if like you said the naming is a bit off.

But seriously everything here is trying to kill us, even the bugs....

How's life as an actual Argonian?

FLuFFyxMuFFiN

Black Marsh sounds better than Black Swamp