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A Modern Map of the Known World

There are many lovely maps showing the boundaries of the kingdoms of the Known World, but sadly most of them are out of date, with only a few properly reflecting the creation of Avacal in 2015.

Recently this gap was ably filled by Reddit user and avid YouTuber Emperor Tigerstar, who cut his teeth drawing animated maps of historical military campaigns.

Continue reading “A Modern Map of the Known World”

Mapping the Changing Cantons

Back in 2017 I drew a map of the Crown Province and its neighbors, which I updated a few years later to reflect subsequent changes.

Unsurprisingly, with the passage of time, that version too is on the edge of becoming obsolete, and so I have refreshed it one more time to show the anticipated name change of the Canton of Whyt Whey to the Canton of Appleholm, and the reinstatement of the Canton of Northpass, both of which are expected to occur in the coming months.

It will be interesting to revisit this in a few years and see what else has changed!

A Parochial New Yorker’s Map of the Current Middle Ages

This illustration is a play on SCA geography shown as a medieval T-and-O map crossed with the classic New Yorker cover.

Manhattan is in the center of the world (rightly so), with the West at the top, Long Island in the bottom left, and New England in bottom right.

(Hat tip to Þorfinn for the original idea, Angelica for the New Yorker tie-in, Brían for a great first round of Latin corrections, and Maral for a Canadian vocabulary suggestion.)

Continue reading “A Parochial New Yorker’s Map of the Current Middle Ages”

An Updated Map of Østgarðr

Back in 2017, I put together a map of the Crown Province of Østgarðr and its cantons, as well as our neighboring shires and baronies.

Over the winter I updated the map to reflect a few changes in status the have accumulated in the intervening years — the Incipient Shire of Nordfjord has been promoted to the Shire of Old Stonebridges, while the Canton of Northpass and the Shire of Frosted Hills have been dissolved — but I forgot to post the new version to this site, which error I’m now rectifying.

(Click the map for a much-larger version.)

A Geographic History Of The East Kingdom

In AS XXIV (early 1990), Lord Richard the Poor assembled a collection of maps setting forth the growth and evolution of the SCA branches that make up the East Kingdom. Covering two decades, the maps provide a visual reference for the kingdom’s growth from a few isolated groups in New York and Boston to dozens of baronies, cantons, and shires covering the region.

Originally hand-drawn and typeset in the days of dot-matrix printers, the book had fallen out of circulation with only a single copy available online, on the Æthelmark history web site. With Lord Richard’s permission, I am making the original work available for download here (45 MB PDF) and have converted it to a more web-accessible form.

The Lost Cantons of Østgarðr

The Crown Province of Østgarðr currently contains four cantons:

  • Northpass (established as Viking’s Hall 1983/12, renamed 1984/12, name registered 1985/05, full status 1985/08),
  • Lions End (established 1988/02, name registered 1988/10, full status 1989/03),
  • Whyt Whey (established 1989/08, name registered 1990/01),
  • Brokenbridge (name registered 2006/09).

But over the course of its nearly fifty-year history, it turns out there have been nine other affiliated branches, eight of them founded in a two-year period from 1979 through 1981. Continue reading “The Lost Cantons of Østgarðr”

A Map of Østgarðr

I have no particular cartographic skills, but have been meaning to try my hand at a map of the Crown Province and its cantons.

Attached is a halting first step in that direction — not totally wretched, but it leaves a lot to be desired. Perhaps some day I’ll set aside the time to come back to this and try to further beautify it.

(Updated following discussion on Facebook. Thanks to Jeff Morton to pointing out that I had left out the newly-formed Shire of Midland Vale — an omission which has now been corrected. And thanks to the numerous people who hashed out the status of the Bronx, which isn’t formally part of Northpass as had been indicated in the first version of this map. The new version also has “swamp” markings in Settmour, which I think turned out nicely, but I’m not as happy with the modern “forest” indications in Northpass and Midland Vale — maybe someday I’ll get a chance to replace those with little tree markers like the ones from John Speed’s map of 1605.)