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Finish the Forlorn Watchman quest and you'll get your hands on a ship's log describing a mutiny led by a sailor named Gable against a Captain Laughton. That's a wink at Mutiny on the Bounty, where Clark Gable and Charles Laughton played the mutineer and the captain respectively.
Steal Amantius Allectus' diary during May the Best Thief Win and give it a read - it's about a blood-drinking plant he stumbles across during a solar eclipse and eventually has to destroy. It's basically Little Shop of Horrors, just with a happier ending for the humans involved this time.
There's an item you can find simply called Blue Suede Shoes, and it's exactly the tribute it sounds like - a nod to the Carl Perkins rock and roll classic that Elvis, Johnny Cash, and half of music history have covered since. No real gameplay purpose, just a fun name for the collectors to spot.
Ask around Castle Skingrad about the Surilie vineyards and Shum gro-Yarug will tell you he 'helped him drink his wine, and he always has some mighty fine wine.' That's almost word for word from Three Dog Night's 'Joy to the World,' the one about Jeremiah the bullfrog. Slightly odd choice for an Orc, but it works.
Strip the 'Earl of' off Jakben, Earl of Imbel's name and you get JakbenImbel, which reads a lot like 'Jack be nimble' if you squint. Fittingly, he's connected to Springheel Jak - a play on the English folklore figure Spring-Heeled Jack - whose boots give you a hefty Acrobatics boost, perfect for jumping over candlesticks.
The Chorrol quest A Shadow Over Hackdirt has the townsfolk secretly worshipping unseen creatures called the Deep Ones through their own twisted little scripture. That's lifted almost wholesale from H.P. Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth, right down to the isolated town hiding something under the water.
Up at Gnoll Mountain you'll meet a Nord called Havilstein Hoar-Blood travelling with a wolf named Redmaw. Redmaw is a pretty direct English translation of Carcharoth, the monstrous wolf from Tolkien's Silmarillion - one of a few Tolkien nods tucked away in the game for anyone who's read the source material.
Your Dark Brotherhood initiation quest, A Knife in the Dark, shares its title with a chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring - and it's not just the name. Both involve someone very nearly being murdered in their sleep at an inn, which is about as close a callback as you can get without lifting dialogue outright.
Deep in the Ayleid ruin of Vilverin there's a note addressed to a Daggerfall guard captain named Aluc Cardius. Rearrange those letters and you're basically looking at 'Dracula' - which tracks nicely, since the game hints pretty strongly that Cardius is a vampire himself.
During Nature's Fury you'll run into a huge bear called Forest Guardian, and the trick to 'beating' it is simply not attacking it despite the growling and posturing. That's pulled straight from David Gemmell's novel Sword in the Storm, where the hero Connavar earns the same bear's respect by refusing to fight it.
