In the grim world of The Lands Between, turtles are peaceful and powerful creatures – but that power dooms them to a grim fate.
Turtles are everywhere in Elden Ring. From the first time you encounter a player message telling you there’s a “dog ahead” only to find a shelled creature wandering aimlessly, to the multitude of turtle-themed items you can find, it’s clear that someone in the FromSoftware team has a soft spot for these sweet, docile reptiles. And why shouldn’t they? Turtles (and indeed other adjacent creatures in the ‘testudine’ family, all of which Elden Ring describes as turtles) are universally beloved for a reason. In Elden Ring, that same admiration is readily apparent in a variety of small and large ways: in an abundance of the game’s lore text, in the sheer prominence of the creatures in the open world, and even in the community’s response to them. In a game like Elden Ring that deals less in rigid plot and more in world building by throwing players into a vast, dark, fantasy universe, it can be easy to dismiss the most familiar of the details when there’s already so many overwhelming elements. In the same way that you wouldn’t prioritize asking why there are knights or claymore swords in this world where giant pots with arms and sentient fingers run amok, asking why turtles? feels like too small of a question. Turtles have long been used in storytelling as symbols. The slow pace and resilient nature of the turtle can be used to draw attention to all manner of things – though, most commonly, you’ll see them used to denote stability, perseverance, and peace. You may be familiar with Aesop’s Tortoise And The Hare fable, which positions the tortoise as a creature that succeeds due to its resilience and humble attitude (as opposed to the over-confident bombast of the Hare). Elden Ring isn’t exactly delivering a moral message in the same way, but the turtles of The Lands Between certainly point to some interesting thematic threads that the game itself seems to want you to recognise. FromSoftware is clearly no stranger to incorporating visual symbolism with varying degrees of subtlety (think back to all that cosmic horror in Bloodborne).
