Skyrim, originally released over seven years ago (11/11/11), is still much-beloved and pretty incredible in many ways. Recently Bethesda re-released it for the Switch (2017) and released the Special Edition in 2016, remastered for the current consoles.
As a fan of Geertz (yes I had to do that), especially his piece Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example about a boy's funeral, how it did not go according to custom, and how ritual is important, I was rather fascinated by a scene in Skyrim I came across (although it is probably not mourning and it is probably slightly bugged, but hey these are games and we have to use our imagination to create the fiction, and we can imagine different things).
A dragon attack in the town of
Falkreath earlier in the game-day had left Lod and another villager dead (as you can see in my slightly lousy photo of my TV screen since I play on the Xbox).
Lod tends to die in dragon attacks, apparently. I came back later in the day (it was night), and although the dragon skeleton had unspawned, Lod and the other villager were still there at the base of his stairs, surrounded by two guards, the graveyard keeper and one other villager. They were all waving their hands over the bodies of their slain townfolk. For good measure, my horse decided to stand on them, it seems to like standing on dead bodies.
So this was kind of creepy, but it wasn't really clear what they were doing, although the presence of the graveyard cleric added some weight to the gathering. I spoke to each of them and as I did, they would stand up and walk away.
It seems like this is just a
bugged corpse investigation animation event, where NPCs get looped/stuck, but it's not clear to me if that's the actual call in the code for NPC behavior or what.
Other players have noted this, and the two I link here to both refer to it as mourning, so clearly it's easy to interpret it as such.
On Skyrim-related mourning, there is
the epic story of the loss of a companion that is worth reading, or even re-reading if it's been a while, and the player's attempt and eventual success at a burial. (It's Lydia, of course.)
But players have cracked open the game on the PC (hooray, modders!) and found all sorts of awesome unfinished and unimplemented code and items, including some
mourning behavior which is now available through a mod. Somewhat tangentially there is apparently
a space for dead bodies, and there's a great page at the UESP with
unused NPCs, some of which were meant to be in the game but others are just for testing, such as
Do Not Delete Me - needed for export to work and also
TestJeffBCarryWaterBucket. The unused NPC page also links to
the Test Cell page, which is fascinating and you should go read it (there is also
a page for unfinished quests).
