So you want to visit Valenwood.

So you want to visit Valenwood – A Nords Guide to Valenwood.

Tired of the cold winters winds, unrelenting snow and rain, has the tough Skyrim weather got you down? Well suck it up our ancestors didn't exterminate a whole race of Elves just for you snowbacks to moan about losing a couple of fingers to frostbite. However if you are a milk drinker than you could visit the province of Valenwood .

First a word of warning. Valenwood is absolutely swarming with Elves and not just the tall, pompous ones also the short ones, while Wood Elves are no where near as annoying as their lanky cousins , it can be harmful to your neck to speak to people much shorter than yourself, so consider squatting down to ease conversation with the locals.

Getting to Valenwood

The only sensible way to get to Valenwood is to go by sea, leaving from Solitude you'll have a couple of stops in High Rock and Hammerfell. You will most likely arrive in the port of Woodhearth. It's important to remember that in these lands you are the foreigner, so be careful who you punch or you may quickly find yourself swarmed by Justiciars. Assuming you idiots don't fall off the boat on the way there then I will give you some ideas of what you can do before you realise that you miss Skyrim and rush back to the only decent province in Tamriel.

Locals

I won't mince my words here, Wood Elves are very weird. They drink well enough and are good hunters but almost everything else they do is weird. As far as I can understand they worship trees and it is a crime to harm any plant. For this reason they only eat meat, but they can't even do this right as they insist on eating each other. If it's dead they will eat it, so make sure you don't die or else you may find yourself eaten by an Elf and that will surely stop you from reaching Sovngarde. Some Wood Elves aren't quite as crazy and only eat more sensible meats. On a positive note the Wood Elves make a drink called Rotmeth, while it's got nothing on a good mead, it's much better than Elvish wine. They say the drink is made of meat but they must be joking as if there was a way to make alcohol out of meat then us Nords would’ve found it by now.

What to see.

I hope you like trees because you'll be seeing a lot of them. Apart from the ludicrous amount of trees there isn't much to see. The Elves speak highly of Graht-Oaks which they claim are the tallest trees in Tamriel, but none of the trees I saw are as big as the Eldergleam. There are some Ayleid ruins around, but why anyone cares about some old Elvish buildings is beyond me. There is quite good fishing along the Strid River and there are all sorts of weird animals you can hunt but beyond that this place is pretty boring, I heard some talk about walking trees but I assume they just mean Spriggans so I didn't bother to investigate that any further. My advice is get off the ship have a bit of Rotmeth, punch an Elf or two then get back on the ship. If you can stand to be around knife-ears any longer then maybe pick up a Bosmer Composite bow before getting back on the ship. Honestly if you want to see loads of trees just come to the Rift, we have plenty of trees and not many Elves.

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