Elden Ring and its tough-as-nails Shadow of the Erdtree expansion take heavy inspiration from English folklore, including a few terms that have utterly baffled gamers who aren’t familiar with them. You may have been staring up at the Scadutree for hours, but odds are you’re also mispronouncing its name.
To say that the Scadutree dominates the DLC isn’t an overstatement. Much like the Erdtree of the base game, it can be seen from nearly anywhere in the Land of Shadow, its gnarled form serving as a constant landmark. As if that’s not enough, collecting the Scadutree Fragments chipped from its trunk is necessary to make any real progress in the DLC, and you even eventually get to fight the tree itself, in a sense. Crucially, however, nobody ever says the word Scadutree out loud, leading to some understandable confusion on how exactly it’s meant to be pronounced.
Although streamers and gamers alike who’ve played Shadow of the Erdtree have consistently pronounced Scadutree as “skad-oo-tree,” likely due to its spelling, this is incorrect. The term is in actuality just pronounced “Shadowtree,” as “scadu” is, in fact, an archaic English spelling of the word shadow. In retrospect, it’s easy to see, as the Scadutree is the eponymous Shadow of the Erdtree both in a literal and figurative sense. Even if you aren’t a medieval scholar, there’s a hint to this in the very title of the DLC.
Naturally, this rule also goes for similar-sounding terms in the DLC, like the Scaduview area and the formidable Scadutree Avatar boss.
This isn’t the first time Elden Ring has tripped up its audience by employing an archaic term. Remember your trusty companion Blaidd from the base game? Despite the impression his giant greatsword would give, his name isn’t pronounced “blade,” an understandable mistake that much of the massive Elden Ring community made. Rather, it’s “blithe”—Blaidd is a Welsh term meaning “wolf,” which fits the canine-headed warrior perfectly, but does unfortunately mean his full title is literally Wolf the Half-Wolf.
With Shadow of the Erdtree serving as a richly detailed microcosm of the larger Elden Ring experience, it’s only natural that nearly everything players loved from the base game should make a return…. linguistic confusion included, evidently. Just keep the correct pronunciation of the Scadutree in mind, and whatever unknowable eldritch will drives it may seem fit to grant you its blessing.
