do enemies in Skyrim level up with you?

I'm getting my face kicked in at Bleak Falls Barrow. Is there any way I can go somewhere else and train to make it easier, or will the monsters just level up as well?

It works like this: Certain things in the game world scale with your character linearly, like they did in Oblivion, and certain things are "semi-static" and "semi-scaling", meaning that they scale to a certain extent, but the scaling has limits.

The latter one consists mostly of dungeons. All of the various dungeons in the World have a static, pre-determined difficulty which is described in terms of a range of the players level.

For example, there are a lot of dungeons early on which have the difficulty level "1-10", and that's where they'll always be, they won't scale beyond that, and similarly, dungeons of higher difficulty level will not be manageable by you until you level up some more.

This is also the reason why the game still feels very leveled despite having a different scaling system. A lot of the dungeons and areas that you encounter around the part where you start (southwest near the mountains) and north towards and around Whiterun are in this level 1-10 area, only slowly progressing more upwards around the edges of that area. For example, the first dungeon with a higher difficulty which can be reached with ease is, for example, a dwemer (practically the "tinkering dwarfen" race of the Elder Scrolls games) ruin that is accessed via two levels of caves just to the north-east of Whiterun, embedded into a small mountain. And once you start visiting the other places, you will usually have leveled beyond level 10 and the game world will scale fairly well with you.

An exception to that is the case of "cleared" dungeons and possibly areas. When you have previously cleared a dungeon, it will say so on the map when you hover the cursor over the location's legend. These cleared dungeons will eventually get repopulated after a long time (it's longer than just a couple of days, but I don't know the exact number), and when they do, they repopulate with mobs in a level-range that corresponds to the players level.

The actual level of the monsters inside those dungeons is determined by your first entry into the dungeon. When you first enter the dungeon, the level of all monsters inside it is "locked" to your level. For example, if you enter a dungeon of difficulty "10-20" with level 14, all enemies will be set to level 14 and will be locked there, so that if you find it too hard when you first enter it, you can come back later and try again with level 18, at which point they will still be level 14.

The difficulties in that case are clamped, which means that if you enter a 10-20 dungeon with level 5, all enemies will be set to level 10, and if you enter it with level 25, all enemies will be set to 20.

Also, the areas in Skyrim work roughly that way, too. In general, you will find more difficult monsters the higher you get in the world (near the mountains). But as opposed to dungeons, monsters won't be locked into a level once you enter the area. Instead, the game randomly sometimes spawns monsters that are a couple of levels below or above you, or equal to your level.

One of the things which has "linear scaling", almost exactly like in Oblivion, should be dragons. Todd Howard has said a couple of times that he wants every player (no matter how good or bad) to be able to experience at least all of the main storyline. Although even with those, it will probably be an advantage to have better equipment or perks which give you some kind of resistance to something (for example, there are frost and fire-dragons, and a couple of other types).

An example of monsters who are probably completely static in level are giants and mammoths. Ever fought a giant with Level 1?

Source: http://gaming.stackexchange.com/question...s-level-up

A tl;dr version is this:

Enemies are generally whatever level you are when you enter the area/dungeon, BUT if the dungeon is relatively low level it's possible the enemies will cap at a certain level. Exceptions are random spawns in outside areas, and dragons.