I really enjoyed Skyrim and as I walked from place to place (eventually needed up using quick travel all the time) I wondered what the true size of the world was. It’s a good thing that people who are good at math wonder the same thing, over at Quora someone figured out large Skyrim actually is.
From this measurement:
To this one:
There is more math involved that further refined and increased the accuracy of the measurements, but the short of it is that Skyrim is about 5km wide.
We can compare that to other ways to measure the land of the game, in fact on Stack Exchange the answer is an area of about 37.1 km². The way that number was figured out was using the “game cells” and comparing them to previous games in the series. Of course, if we do that we mustn’t ignore Daggerfall which is 161600 square kilometres.
For more video game context here’s an old but good land area comparison between some games:
Click here for even bigger game worlds.
Edit:
There is also an article at GameSpot about the geology of Skyrim. The author of the article invites people interested in this idea to join in at Dark Creations.