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The massive stone carving known as Alduin's Wall, which kicks off the hunt for the Dragonrend shout, hides visual references to events from earlier Elder Scrolls games: the Staff of Chaos from Arena, Numidium from Daggerfall, Red Mountain from Morrowind, and an Oblivion Gate from Oblivion, all worked into the carved history of the World-Eater.
Skyrim guards mocking the player with 'let me guess, someone stole your sweetroll' is the punchline to a much older running gag. The sweetroll first appeared as a character-creation question in 1994's The Elder Scrolls: Arena, resurfaced in Daggerfall and Morrowind, and was even asked by Emperor Uriel Septim in Oblivion's tutorial moments before his assassination.
M'aiq the Liar is a wandering Khajiit who appears somewhere in Skyrim, dispensing cryptic, often fourth-wall-breaking commentary on the game itself. He's a recurring series in-joke, having also turned up in Morrowind and Oblivion, always deliberately unreliable about what he tells the player.
There's a body floating in the lake just west of Fort Nikel called Nath Dyer, and on him you'll find a primrose and a love letter he never got round to sending. Dig into the construction set files and his hidden internal name is 'NathanMcDyer' - almost certainly a nod to Nathan McDyer, one of the QA testers who worked on the game. Poor Nath never got the girl, but at least he got a tombstone-worthy in-joke out of it.
Wander into Fort Scinia and you'll find a long-dead skeleton called Gran Struthe. Say it out loud a couple of times and it starts sounding a lot like Grant Struthers, who was part of the seven-person World Art team credited on the game. Bethesda clearly liked hiding little tombstones for their own staff around Cyrodiil.
NPCs will occasionally warn you about land dreugh and call them 'Billies' for no reason the game ever explains. Turns out that was a genuine internal dev nickname - the team apparently referred to the creature as 'Codename: Billy' during production and the name just leaked straight into the finished dialogue.
The Dark Brotherhood's Lucien Lachance shares more than just a similar-sounding name with Lucien Lacroix from the old Canadian vampire show Forever Knight. Both are the ones who drag the hero into their dark little family in the first place, which feels like a very deliberate bit of homage rather than coincidence.
Umbacano's second quest, Nothing You Can Possess, borrows its title straight from Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Belloq tells Indy 'there is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away.' It's not just the name either - the whole setup of someone snatching away the relic you just risked your neck for is lifted from that exact scene.
