Elden Ring's world of the Lands Between has a giant golden tree sprouting from its center and dozens of other fantastical monsters and grotesque abominations, but why are the goats always rolling around like that? They're just normal goats, or at least they appear to be, until they get spooked by something (usually a Tarnished), and decide the best evasive maneuver is to curl up in a ball and roll end over end. The Erdtree and the cosmic mysteries of the Elden Ring can wait, players need an in-depth lore explanation on the game's rolling goats.
The disappearance of Elden Ring's Queen Marika the Eternal may have left the Lands Between in ruin, but the grasslands of Limgrave are apparently the perfect habitat for cloven-hoofed mammals with a preference for odd locomotion. If messages left by other Tarnished are to be believed, the rolling goats are actually a breed of dog, but they bear no resemblance to the slow dogs with shells, nor the tall dogs of burden that carry mechants' wares. The problem with conducting a zoological study of the goats is that they're nearly impossible to observe from any meaningfully close distance since they seem incredibly anti-social.
As far as the (ittedly lacking) observations have gone, the goats seem to have no natural predators, except maybe Soulslike veterans who mistakenly believed they were reincarnations of Dark Souls' Bonewheel Skeletons. Easily found just outside of the Cave of Knowledge, the goats are some of Elden Ring's earliest in-game secrets. They're rather harmless, but aren't very hardy, making their survival in the Lands Between all that more impressive. They don't stand up well to a strike from a flail or really any of Elden Ring's sorceries.
Elden Ring's Goats Are A Zoological Marvel
The rolling goats in Elden Ring should logically not exist, much like some of the other harmless fauna FromSoftware cruelly programmed into the game solely to be hunted for their various materials. From a square footage perspective, the Lands Between exist on a relatively small island, inhabited by unspeakable horrors like the tentacle-ridden Land Octopuses and giant crabs capable of crushing both a Tarnished and their spectral steed with a big, meaty claw. With all of these deadly creatures and Godrick's mad soldiers about, it's a miracle the goats haven't gone extinct.
The Erdtree is clearly magical, what with the glowing and unnatural size, but some magical source must power the goats as well. Elden Ring keeps Dark Souls' themes alive through the inclusion of persistently rolling creatures, but the goats' unstoppable tumbling seems a physical impossibility. They can begin from a standstill, and hills mean nothing to their apparently boundless kinetic energy. FromSoftware is usually so diligent about leaving clues to the nature of its worlds, but there are no items descriptions nor half-crazed ramblings of an NPC to shed light on the utterly unexplainable phenomenon of Elden Ring's rolling goats.
