I’ve recently been wondering why Skyrim’s aesthetics are so powerful. The scores, composed by Jeremy Soule—and the Nordic landscapes which make up the topography of the game, are a perfect match. One could get lost in its oddly tranquil realm for hours.
This masterpiece of aesthetics which Skyrim accomplishes could arguably be defined by its attempt harmonize a vast, largely unexplored and unhabituated geography with a score that is peaceful and angelic. It presents elements of pre-civilisation and pre-post-history as containing peace, grace and beauty—and not simply nasty and brutish as the founders of liberalism argued.
For a game primarily centred on combat, rarely does Skyrim’s score break out into urgent, rapid, clattering battle music as so many other games do. (mainly in order to overstimulate their users). Skyrim invites you into a realm which is so untamed that anything from a saber-tooth lion, a Hagraven or a bandit can jump out at you at any moment. This seems like a strange arena for such peacefulness, but it works. At no point does the chaos and harshness seen in its predators, bandits or warfare interfere with the melancholic beauty if the topography.
Given that I’m currently writing something tangentially related to the seeming contradiction between peace and wilderness, I thought Skyrim would be a good opportunity to make some cursory observations. Modernity —of which everything in Skyrim resembles the opposite to—is a time where nature, warfare, adventure and mythology were dis-enchanted. Skyrim’s popularity could be argued to stem from a visual re-enchantment with these dis-enchanted phenomena.
Yet, nothing in the game is ‘glorified’. Life in a pre-modern, precarious, dangerous and wild times is not depicted as somehow joyous, without harm, cruelty or hardship. Yet it still finds a peace within that hardship nonetheless. This is accomplished by enchanting wilderness and coldness with a poetic and particularly Nordic sense of grace and mystery.
Contrarily, historically speaking, since the Victorian era, the world of enchanted spaces has been drawn towards everything domestic. The expanse of middle class housing, private, individual spaces in affluent urban neighbourhoods, entirely insulated and removed from nature and warfare. Hyper-civilised spaces have been bestowed a compensation for the disenchantment of external spaces (which according to Sloterdijk’s Spheres includes the celestial realms, destroyed by the realisation of infinite space and helio-centric orbiting patterns).
According to one of the only studies on the history of domesticity, Coleen McDannel wrote in The Christian Home in Victorian America, that the the home (in its urban protestant middle class form) during the Victorian period, became, ‘connected with larger visions of morality, aesthetics, class and civilization, it ceased to be merely a shelter and assumed greater meaning. Domestic housing reformers constructed a symbol system which linked the everyday need for refuge to a higher, more fundamental, moral order.’
Refuge and sacred tranquillity have always had close relationships in the minds of humans. Yet, is it not odd that humans once lived with a sort of refuge that was of a much greater expanse? The housing arrangements of premodern peoples would strike us today as so bear and exposed. Yet, evidently it was totally normal and even something enjoyable for people of the time—their poetic relation to nature and hardships such as war clearly denotes a higher capacity to co-habitate with externality.
We could assume that domestic progress (urbanization) has atrophied our capacity for co-habitation with the harshness, coldness and sometimes tragedy of the planet we live on. Video games like Skyrim remind us of a persisting longing—not simply for the wild—but for an understanding of refuge which is far sturdier, expansive and finds enchantment and peace, not simply within insulated and comfortable private buildings, but in the world with all of its danger, peculiarity and mystery intact.
There is also an elemental component to this. I was reminded of this somewhat recently when I realized that so many of the new houses being built are so called ‘energy efficient’, meaning that elements of wind are entirely excluded from the interior. This totalitarian interior blocks out so much of the external that one has to wonder if it could resonate with Nietzsche’s regular exclamations of ‘bar air!’; a miasma of over-insulation. In fact, these ‘energy efficient’ homes, usually do not have any fire place or chimney for a woodstove—even the ones built well into the country side in Ireland, who may live within a kilometre of farmland, are built without a chimney!
This urban sterilization of the less insulated housing environments of the past are more than simply practical energy saving tools. They represent an ideological domination which stems from a lack of balance between urban and wild spaces (nature and convention).
It is no longer Prometheus, whom gave humans the element of fire to protect themselves against the cold, and beasts within dark forests—fire is too elemental—but it is now bad air and triple glazed air tight window panes. The air tight Pod which blocks out the very presence of the external and elemental. This history of domesticity could also be argued to be one of a gradual movement from elemental to architectural housing.
The Promethean myth is soon becoming antiquated. Humans should be-friend elemental powers by willing to live somewhat exposed to them; a symbiosis we could say. The warm hearth is only a potential for rest and refuge on account that we allow in the risk of burning. This is something that safety obsessed and energy efficient consumption domestic architects won’t stand for: a relationship to the elements and not merely a consumption of their power.
The post-elemental ethos of housing (in it’s Pod ideological form) is an attempt to build a home in outer space(where there are no elements but the artificial ones calculated, stored and used efficiently inside your Pod). The elemental exteriors are blocked out from phenomenological presence in the world and instead stored up a technologically managed for consumption purposes. Elemental exteriority is no longer felt, in the Pod, but kept in consumption channels far away from a co-habitative symbiosis. In other words, fire no longer aids us against the risk of over exposure—but instead pod-architectural hyper-insulation takes over the role.
Perhaps a longing to feel the wind of our faces might still lurk within those not yet crippled by techno-urban hysteria. Should humans ever find some peace living in the only world they have, they might want to garner some caution regarding the fact they shouldn’t allow such pod-architects to sell them bad air disguised as energy.