Skyrim - Rice University Offers Course on Skyrim

Skyrim hit the west like a thu'um, and it made a huge impact here in America, where I live.  But why was it so huge?  Rice University attempts to examine that in a new course.

In a fantastic refutation of the snobby derisiveness most of academia levels at video games, Professor Donna Ellard is offering a course in Skyrim to her students at Rice University. It isn’t a development or game design class, either. “Scandinavian Fantasy Worlds: Old Norse Sagas and Skyrim,” which first hit the course catalogue in 2012, is interdisciplinary but leans towards the humanities–students play the game, of course, but they  also read Norse mythology and Freudian psychoanalysis to try and determine why Skyrim holds such appeal for American audiences. “We have no historical relationship to the British mediaeval past, and, even further afield than that, we’ve got no cultural kinship with Scandinavia…so the class is really interrogating why we have such strong cathexis to a medieval period that is not our own and also to a medieval period that is markedly Viking,” Ellard told the New Statesman.

Professor Ellard believes that connections can be drawn between the setting of Skyrim and the current state of American politics–not the jazzy fantasy bits where the dragons are returning, but the tensions between empires and their unhappy subjects.  “[Skyrim] comes in a world post-9/11. [This] was a moment in which the US started to realise it was an empire on the rocks and its popularity through the beginning of the 2000s very much corresponded both to its insecurities as a nation and as an empire that recognised itself as no longer the tour de force that it thought it was,” said Ellard.

Odds are, most Americans bought the game so that they could hack wizards to death with a battle axe, and that’s fine. Ellard does have a point, though: the stories that a culture chooses to tell are good indicators for what that culture cares about. So for America, that’s the murky morality of an imperial system of government, and dragons. Sounds about right.

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