Once a horsegirl, always a horsegirl

The fact that we had to wait almost a year (9 months to be exact) for only around 15 minutes of quests is very disappointing, but not in the least surprising.

That being said, my excitement over this almost outweighs the disappointment. My 9 year old self is screaming right now.

Today's quests were the most exciting and lore-filled we've had in years. It feels good that something that feels like it belonged in the timeline finally happened, instead of all this dilly-dallying around with witches and leprechauns. This is the closest I've come to getting that feeling old SSO had in a good while, and I recognize that most people probably don't feel the same, but nontheless this was the case for me. The nostalgia of actually focusing on the original big bad instead of all these random side quests was so good.

And it's over now. For the time being, at least. That's the weirdest feeling for me. Years of working towards the end and it finally comes. I can't wait to see how they'll continue this story, even if it's most probably going to take a year or two before we get to that point.

This is all to say that while it was certainly disappointing how short and frankly anticlimactic the update was, it could have been a lot worse in my opinion. Credit where credit is due.

FUCKING ATTACKA U WITH MY HOOVES

WHERE IS JORVIK?

Finding Jorvik’s exact location is actually pretty easy.

”Jorvik, located somewhere between Norway, Iceland, and the British Isles, of which it was once part, is a nexus of worlds.” - Jorvik Calling, Prologue.

This is still a pretty large area, but one that’s significantly narrowed down by reading Four Stories from Jorvik. Anne’s segment Midnight Sun establishes that Jorvik is at the very least partly above the arctic circle, to the point where Anne can see it while riding by Jorvik Stables in the middle of the night. This also puts Jorvik pretty close to the tectonic rift between the European and American continental plates, which handily explains why Jorvik is a volcanic Island.

HOW BIG IS JORVIK?

Jorvik’s size requires a bit more speculation, and I’m relying on two book sources.

1: Jorvik stables is a bus trip from Jorvik city.

Anne lives in Jorvik City but goes to school with the other soul riders in Jarlaheim, and has her horse at Jorvik stables. We know that she goes there by bus, so the distance between Jarlaheim and Jorvik City shouldn’t be too large; I’m capping the max length of the bus ride to about an hour.

2: Valedale is less than a day’s ride from the wineyard.

In The Legend Awakens, Elizabeth and the soul riders are heading to Pi’s Swamp and sleep over at the Wineyard. The soul riders wake up late and leave after having eaten breakfast and lunch. The sun is ”at its highest point in the sky” when they leave, so probably around 1-2PM. It’s twilight when they arrive, and the Baroness comments that they showed up in time for the evening feeding of the horses. Since the days are shorter in late October/early November, which is when this chapter takes place, we can guess that they arrived at around 5-6 PM.

Mapping out the most likely routes for these two trips, the route to the Wineyard is about a third of the bus route from Jorvik City to Jarlaheim. Additionally, the bus would drive on average ~70 km/h because of Jorvik’s smaller roads. The average walking speed of a horse is 6 km/h.

Now, the Valedale-Wineyard trip could take anywhere between 3-5 hours, but I’m inclined to believe that it’s on the lower end of that scale to keep Anne’s commute as short as possible. That leaves us with a 18 km long ride, and a 54 km long bus tour that takes 46 minutes. Pretty reasonable!

RESULTS

With these new measurements, we can figure out the actual distance between different places on Jorvik. Most importantly, we can measure the absolute width from Jorviks westernmost to easternmost point: 92 km, or ~57 miles!

Having figured out an estimate of the island’s size and location, we can now put Jorvik on the map!