What do all these runes say? (spoilers?) ROBRAH RULES!

DewiMorgan · April 2014

The first one you'll come across is this one, which is found throughout Coldharbor, either in its large form, as shown, or just as the central head with writing around it.

The inner ring reads (from the lefthand horn, clockwise):

LD HARBOR MOLAG BALMOLAG BAMOLAG BAL COLD HARBOR LD HARBOR

The outer ring reads (once for each section):

ROBRAH RULES

The ROBRAH is just a mirror-flipped HARBOR. The RULES is very strange: all letters except the first R are mirror flipped; and the S is also vertically flipped.

These glowing circles are present in Cheesehollow, and most likely other places:

They read (from the 12:00 point):

SE AZURA PRAISE AZURA PRAISE ASE AZURA PRAISE AZURA PRAISE ASE AZUR PRAISE AZURAPRAISE AZURA PRAISE AZURA PRAISE A

...what on earth are these doing in Cheesehollow? Does Sheogorath have a crush on Azura?

Then there's this chest, as found in various places such as Crow's Wood in Stonefalls:

This reads (Front and back):

HEHUNGER REGNUHEH

(second word is first, flipped)
Sides read:

HEHUNGE

The last one is some pillars, found in Cheesehollow and other places. This one, they've actually made a full phrase, with no missing letters!

It reads (twice, around the base of the pillar):

LOVE THE GAUNTLET

...anyone know what this is a reference to? The '77 Clint Eastwood movie? Or something more lore-appropriate? Wraithguard, perhaps?

Have you found any runes? Share them here!
How lore-appropriate do you feel these are?

On Bleakrock Isle there are gravestones near the tomb that use different runes, snaking up and down the stone, with a lot of repetition in the verticals. Has anyone been able to decipher these?

DewiMorgan · April 2014

So the server's down and my screenshots folder has reached 1.39 gigs. It's time to decode some of these, and make another post.

Let us first return to LOVE THE GAUNTLET.

Here we see the same text used along the base of corridor kit pieces, all the words lining up nicely and repeating properly. Astonishing! Whoever worked on these kit pieces, actually *cared* enough to make the runes tile right, even between separate kit pieces! This is some really good work, for something really quite subtle. You see this skirtingboard text peeking out from between piles of dust in many places, but it doesn't leap out at you. It's just there, being correct, and slightly puzzling... what does this phrase *mean*?

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Next, there's Abnur Tharn.

It's in these ghosts and projections that we can really appreciate the quality of the bump-mapping they have for the textures. Every rune and buckle is embossed. Surely, with all this attention to detail, they've paid attention to what the runes mean?

He has four diagonal texts on his chest. As best I can make out, they read (left and right are our left, not his):

Upper left: CAMNO (not sure, only last two letters are clear)
Upper right: ZSNYE or TSNYE (S appears mirrored)
Lower left: ?GNZE or ?GNTE (unknown is an english Z-shape: no Daedric rune I know of.)
Lower right: ?TEO? (first unknown is like a katakana 'e', or English I: no Daedric rune I know of).
His skirt bears three vertical columns, each with three letters.
Left: ?RE or ?HE (? is English capital F. No Daedric rune I know of. If the second is H, it's mirrored).
Center: OXQ or OCQ (More like a vertically flipped C than an X)
Right: Mirrored from left column.

So they've covered his clothes in runes, but they are meaningless, at least three apparently aren't even runes, and at least one column is very obviously just flipped.

That's disappointing. Tharn deserved better than that. In fact, presented with such an outfit, he'd have had the maker flogged rather than wear it, I'm sure.

http://www.imperial-library.info/content/daedric-alphabet has a good description of some of the acceptable changes in the alphabet (D and J can be flipped, H can have an extra vertical stroke, U can be angular or rounded...) but these are not those changes.

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What then, for that very epitome of letters and learning? The bookshelf!

These are, in Daedric places, generally on pedestals with runes on. I had to go to some pains to get pictures from all sides of these things, squeezing in behinsd the ones in corners, then using the brief flash of light from summoning a clannfear to view the runes... assuming the blasted thing didn't appear in the way! Thankfully, Almalexia has just granted me a boon that should make such antics unnecessary in future.

On the sides, which are flat, the runes read:

S THE CUT| DEEP IS THE CUT | DEE

Wow! Words again! I suspect this was by the same artist as the LOVE THE GAUNTLET pedestals and walls.
On the front and back of the pedestal, you see:
b8kubit2h

CUT| DEEP IS THE CUT | DEEP IS THE C

This text is used on many pedestals, in fact. Here's a round one. See how the text tiles correctly around it: great work, unknown artist!

In this one, on the nearest corner, you can see a bit of tiling fail: THECUTHECUT.
But you can't make that texture tile perfectly to any length, so they did a sneaky thing there: they made the discontinuity happen at the edge, in the middle of a T - which renders it almost completely unnoticeable in most situations. You'll only spot that discontinuity if you're actually reading the words around the corner: most people, even if they read the words, would see at a glance that it's a repeating phrase and look no further. So, I can't call this a bug: it's a skilful hiding of the fact that the tiling couldn't be perfect. That's skill, right there.

====

the jars look similar and had a similar problem to the bookshelves: since they are non-movable, and tend to be stuck in dark corners, taking a picture all around one of them is really tricky.

So I took lots of pics of lots of jars, and spliced them together into this nice collage:

This contains 20 jars, which read (in no particular order):

UNGN HUNGN EHUNG THEH NGER NGERT ER THE E THE NGER UNGER UNGE HEHU THE HE RTHE RTH

So it's obviously "THEHUNGER" again, and from the first two(UNGN, HUNGN), it's obvious that the larger jar diameters can't work with that string, so it's more like "THEHUNGNGER" on them. Given they needed two extra letters, they would have been better off skinning those ones with THEGAUNTLET, perhaps...

Thinking about it, they have most string-lengths if they want them:

CUT
DEEP
THECUT
HUNGER
CUTDEEP
GAUNTLET
THEHUNGER
THEGAUNTLET
DEEPISTHECUT
LOVETHEGAUNTLET

I wonder if this was by design...

Lots more to come. Next up: single-sigil pics!

[edit: dang, image links not working...]

Pseudonym · April 2014

Mere mortals trying to understand and make sense of the inner minds of the Daedra. I remember Sheogorath saying something along the lines of;

"You mortals, always trying to make sense of things!"

I'm paraphrasing of course... and Sheogorath is mad, but he does have a point... for once.

wookiefriseur · March 2015

Saw this thread when it was first created but then I forgot about it again.
Remembered it after visiting Banished Cells a while ago, where I made some screenshots in the final boss room:

Exit

Quite sure about the big slogan, but less sure about the smaller characters.

Main Wall

ALL HAIL MOLAG BAL. That's what the wall said.

Main Wall - left side

Not sure about some characters. Also not sure if the letters are supposed to be some kind of initials or part of a word with missing letters.

Main Wall - right side

AL HAIL MOLAG BAL "symbol" at the top, not sure about the rest.

Main Wall - centre

Very unsure, I believe to have seen a "THIS" somewhere in there and recognised some other characters, but it's very hard to read at this resolution (my game settings are high). Don't know my way around image filters to make it more readable. Maybe it's easier to extract it from game files. ^^

WhiteCoatSyndrome · March 2015

Fantastic work deciphering all this both of you.

wookiefriseur · April 2015

Found some more on the island Stirk.

Main View

Image with Translation

As you can see it says: COLD HARBOUR CALLS, NIRN OBEYS
From the British English in that slogan you can see that the Daedra are very serious this time!

Broken Pieces:

The broken pieces are just engraved with Daedric letters in alphabetical order. The daedric stone sculptor must have copied their reference material by mistake.

Mataata · April 2015

The Mages Guild fire rune says "FIRESONG".

The ring around the global map lists the names of the provinces (I forget what order it's in, I didn't write it down) and the ring around Coldharbour labels it as the realm of Molag Bal (Again, I forget exactly what it said).

Also, phrases like "THE HUNGER" and "LOVE THE GAUNTLET" appear in the Deadlands in Oblivion. Apparently they're just popular phrases with Daedra.

wookiefriseur · May 2015

Seen another one in Craglorn main quest recently. Did not notice it before. Sadly it seems to be just random letters. I might have gotten it wrong though, because there are 2 different fonts being used in this:

Outer ring:

SPMWLJKQYAOKLERSFHVWWTXBYUQVID

Inner ring:

BABLLAECKBKF

If you shuffle the letters of the inner ring a bit you see, that this is obviously just some kind of product placement:
"KFC KEBAB BALL"

As for the outer ring..there is only one anagram that would make sense:
"Wow, kewl Yak-Squid myths.... XBLVRPJVQF!?!?!"
(stroke after reading the fantastic yak squid myths, it was a trap laid by Hermaeus Mora)

DewiMorgan · July 2015

Ow WOW! @Patros, THANK YOU! I've been gathering screenshots in my adventures for a year now, but really, not had the heart to bother translating and posting them given the underwhelming response to my first few posts. Now I feel all motivated again!

Pseudonym wrote: »

Mere mortals trying to understand and make sense of the inner minds of the Daedra. I remember Sheogorath saying something along the lines of;
"You mortals, always trying to make sense of things!"
I'm paraphrasing of course... and Sheogorath is mad, but he does have a point... for once.

He has a point that humans will always investigate things. We're a curious lot, and find both delights and sadness that way. If you put runes in a game, we'll translate them, to our delight, or our sadness. So, it pays to do them right

So far, the uses of these runes in Coldharbor and other Daedric places tend to make the most sense:
"Molag Bal", "Coldharbor", "Love the gauntlet", "The Hunger", "Deep is the Cut"...

"ROBRAH RULES" is the fault of artists, not Daedra.

On the other hand, the craftsmanship of the artist who, unable to make "Deep is the cut" tile properly, made it instead read perfectly correctly as "Deep is the cut he cut"... that is the kind of unexpected delight that you only find through poking into these things. It may've just been serendipity, but that it lined up perfectly in the middle of a letter, and was well-concealed on a corner, makes me believe it was a deliberate, masterful flourish.

Ascribing poor texture alignment to Daedric inscrutability is fine, but though I call them "Daedric Runes" because it's the most common term for them, in truth they're neither runes, nor restricted to Daedric use. The mess of runes on Abnur Tharn's armor are entirely mortal. Perhaps this is deliberate: showing him as an unlearned pompous oaf, blithely wearing these runes like people wear foreign tattoos, not realizing they're gibberish. And I'd buy that, since he's been poked fun of by his Daedric guards... if it weren't that the artists had messed up in similar ways elsewhere, so that sadly seems the simpler answer.

Deep is the cut of Occam's razor

vaidotas · March 2017

I recall that in tesIV oblivion, every daedric rune had meaning it was realy fun to look for them, but some of them are just giberish in eso. never the less wonderful job guys.

Rouven · March 2017

For once I have to say thanks for the necro, absolutely worth it - made my morning!

wookiefriseur · April 2017

But wait, there's more!

LOVE THE GAUNTLET and TASKMASTER in Rivenspire.

A "COLDHARBOUR CALLS NIRN OBEYS" in Wrothgar

A wild VIVEC spotted in MSA?

"VERY SL"ow? in loading Screen