The NPC Erik The Slayer is named after Erik West, who's online alias was "Immok The Slayer". Bethesda was so impressed with his knowledge of Oblivion that they gave him an in depth tour of Bethesda studios and decided to create a character based on Erik. Erik died of cancer in May 2011, and never got to see the release of Skyrim. The Tour of Bethesda's workspace was set-up by the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

The guards in Skyrim will more often than not say "Let me guess, somebody stole your sweetroll" to the player, this is a gag that Bethesda Softworks have been running since the very first Elder Scrolls game.

The quest "Mind of Madness" has parallels with the story "Alice in Wonderland", where Alice is instructed by The Mad Hatter to do several menial tasks while he has a tea party. When you do finish the quest, you get the staff of "Wabbajack", a reference to the poem "Jabberwocky".

There is a room in Skyrim that holds the corpses of all deceased, unique NPCs. The room can only be accessed through the use of console commands, and has four exits that lead to a black void. Should the dead character be resurrected through console commands, most NPCs will be hostile towards the player.

By using console commands and editing the game's files to disable the game's boundaries, it is possible to travel outside of Skyrim's map. Going out far enough south, it's possible to find an untextured place-holder for the White-Gold Tower where the Imperial City should be, as well as the overall landscape of Cyrodiil around it.

The quest "A Night to Remember" may be a reference to the movie The Hangover, as both involve characters getting hungover and retracing their steps to find out what happened during the previous night.

According to pre-production concept art, Chaurus were originally planned to be mounts for Falmer riders.

While a dragon corpse is burning, the effect can be seen from the world map.

The appearance of Draugr is randomized and not gender specific. This means that a Draugr can spawn with a female body and a beard.

Bethesda was approached to make a game based on George R.R. Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice, from which the TV series Game of Thrones is also derived. Although they wanted to do it, they turned down the offer to focus on Skyrim.

Just south of the shrine to Peryite, you can find a skeleton about halfway up the mountain. If you look just to the side of the skeleton you will see a sabre cat stuck between two rocks with a weapon lodged in its head. This is a reference to a scene in the movie "300" where Leonidas leads a wolf to a narrow passage, and then stabs it in the head with a spear.

The armbands of the game's Dragonplate Armor read "Jonahlobe" in the dragon language. Jonah Lobe is a character artist at Bethesda.

The Inn/Tavern called "The Bee and Barb" found in Riften possibly has a less-than-innocent origin, which can be found in Daggerfall's version of the book The Real Barenziah, Part III. Barenziah, who would later became both Queen of Waycrest and Queen Mother of Morrowind, finds herself trying to join the Thieves Guild while in Riften. She gains sponsorship by bedding with a Khajiit member of the guild inside a local tavern. It is explicitly stated it was painful, as male Khajiits, much like real-life felines, have barbed penises. This particular part of the story has been omitted in the later The Elder Scrolls games, stating (This passage has been censored by order of the Temple.)

In Swindler's Den is an archery Dummy with an apple on its head. This is a reference to William Tell, the real life master Crossbowman who was forced to shoot an Apple off of his son's head.

By ignoring the first dragon encounter after leaving Helgen, it is actually possible to play through a vast portion of Skyrim without bringing the dragons back to life. This can be particularly useful, as random dragon encounters can kill quest-giving NPCs and otherwise disrupt missions the player might be undertaking.

If you ask how the Retching Netch got it's name in the Dragonborn DLC, you hear a story similar to a drunken outburst in the film Twister.

It is possible that the note with a black hand from the Dark brotherhood could be a reference to the real world "Black Hand" organization, who are most notorious for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which was one of the factors which started WW1.

There are two scrapped features found in the game's files that would've occurred if you killed an NPC. The first was if you killed a unique NPC that has a family, then later you would see the ghost of that NPC follow any of their relatives, however only NPCs with generic voice files could do this, and only a single NPC in the whole game could turn into a ghost.

The second feature was after you killed a unique NPC who had a family, later talking to any of the NPC's family members will have them comment to you about their death in their hello conversation.

Inside of Skuldafn, Spoiler:which is normally inaccessible except for near the end of the main quest, one of the fireplaces contains a well-hidden potato with a Boiled Creme Treat and 5 charcoal sticks on top of it. The specific way the items are assembled on top of the potato makes this a reference to GLaDOS from Portal 2, specifically when Spoiler:GLaDOS is forced to inhabit a potato as a temporary power source.

From 2014 to 2016, The Game Awards featured a "Best Fan Creation" category. The 2014 winner was "Twitch Plays Pokémon" (a social experiment featuring a crowdsourced attempt to play through various Pokémon games), and the 2015 winner was "Portal Stories: Mel" (a modification of Portal 2). During 2016, however, two of the nominees for the category were removed prior to the show's airing: AM2R (an unofficial remake of Metroid II: Return of Samus) and Pokémon Uranium (a fan-made video game based on the Pokémon series). During a stream prior to the event, host Geoff Keighley explained that this was due to the fangames not being legally cleared by Nintendo, who owned the rights to the games they were based on. Additionally, "Best Fan Creation" would end up being the only category to not have its winner (Enderal: The Shards of Order, a conversion mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim) announced during the ceremony itself.