Duchess megan reports that she has created an album of photos from 12th Night which took place recently in the Kingdom of the West. The photos are available on Flickr.

A devoted collector of J.R.R. Tolkien memorabilia, having spent thirty years accumulating a private collection, wanted an appropriate house to showcase the collection. Architect Peter Archer overcame surprising engineering challenges to bring the house to reality.

Modern people think of an "arms race" as a competition between superpowers to see who can create the biggest and deadliest weapons, but the Middle Ages had an arms race of its own. Mark Teppo of Wired Magazine looks at weapons escalation in the medieval world.

The Lichfield Cathedral and the University of Kentucky have joined forces to create a website presenting online versions of the St Chad Gospels (also known as the Llandeilo Fawr Gospels) and the Wycliffe New Testament, both in scanned images and searchable transciptions.

In the 13th century, Scotland was divided between the Scots on the mainland and the Vikings of the western islands. The struggle that followed brought an end to Viking rule in the country. A  new BBC Two program looks at The Last Battle of the Vikings.

Duchess Megan reports that at Their Court at 12th Night, Their Majesties Roger and Zenobia of the Kingdom of the West offered Peerages to two of Their subjects.

A series of articles on the history of honor has been posted on the Art of Manliness website. The series looks at the concept from a male point of view, and begins with ideas of vertical vs horizontal honor.

Admirers of Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers (Westgate) and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (The Nun's House) will be gratified to know that Eastgate House in High Street in Rochester, Kent, England, is scheduled to be restored. (photo)

The Board of Directors has withdrawn a proposal to prohibit a person from being both a competitor and a prospective consort in a Royal List.

Greetings from Master Raven Mayne, Kingdom of Atenveldt Minister of Arts and Sciences, Pre-registration for Estrella War A&S Competition 2013 is Now Open.

Master Tearlach of the East Kingdom recently lost his home to a fire, and hopes that SCAdians around the Known World can help.

The Society for Creative Anachronism now has an official presence on Facebook. Maintained by the Social Media Director, the website includes a variety of links and contributed content of interest to SCA members.

Magister Riordan MacGregor, editor of the SCA's Tournaments Illuminated, reports that the "quest article" for the Second Quarter 2013 Issue is "Court as Theatre."

In an attempt to lure in potential subscribers, History Today magazine has released a selection of its most popular stories from 2012 on its blog.

On January 30, 2013, Christie’s Auction House will place on sale Agnolo Bronzino’s Portrait of a Young Man With a Book, "a relatively unknown panel depicting a man with a reddish beard in his 20s dressed in black, sitting at a table covered with green cloth." (photo)

A team of archaeologists and academics in Leicester, England have digitally recreated the Blue Boar Inn where Richard III spent the night before the battle of Bosworth, where he met his fate. The inn was demolished in the 19th century and is currently the site of a Travelodge. (video)

A short stretch of Roman road in York, England may  have been a walkway for some of the city's most influential citizens, and "probably even witnessed the very first Christians on their way to worship,” according to the Dean of York, Vivienne Faull.

On display at the Victoria & Albert Museum is a rare "notation knife". Each side is engraved with the music and words for a blessing and a "thanks" for the meal.

Archaeologists in Devon County, England are pondering the remains of a Roman settlement which thrived after the Roman army left the area for northern conquests.

Portraits of two Elizabethan courtiers, it seems, were painted over Catholic religious paintings.

In the 1930s philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. and American sculptor George Grey Barnard collaborated to create “an intellectual Coney Island” in Upper Manhattan. The result was the Cloisters, a complex comprised by elements from five medieval cloisters. Sarah Harrison Smith has written a lengthy feature article for the New York Times on New York's medieval museum.

Tartar warlord Tamerlane may have been the greatest conqueror of all, outshining Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great, but few recognize the fact that the great warrior was severely disabled in his youth. The BBC features Tamerlane in an article for Disability History Month.

The design on a gold earring disc, discovered by a metal detector enthusiast in Keswick, England, has experts stumped. The disc dates to the Roman era and "features a scorpion, phallus, snake and crab." (photo)

A new genetic study published in Current Biology reveals that European Gypsies originated in northwest India and migrated to the Balkan area of Europe in the 6th century. The study was led by David Comas of Spain's Institute of Evolutionary Biology,

Experts are investigating the possibility that a copper-alloy boar mount, discovered near the Thames River in London, might have belonged to King Richard III. (photo)

A tiny piece of cloak depicted in a Roman statue may be the "the first-ever depiction of tartan". The plaid appears on a bronze statue of the Emperor Caracalla with a bound Caledonian warrior wearing what appears to be tartan trews. The statue was found in the Moroccan city of Volubilis. (video)

Their Excellencies Bianca da Ravenna and Thorvald Ulfhednar, Baron and Baroness of Gryphon's Lair in the Kingdom of Artemisia have announced that, upon stepping down, they will be replaced by Master Defender Vilhelm Silberhammer and Mistress Elizabetha (Bethany) of Windermere.

The Public Catalogue Foundation (PCF), together with the BBC, has created a web database of the United Kingdom’s entire collection of oil paintings in public ownership - all 211,861 of them! The works are available on the Your Paintings website.

Hadrian's Wall in northern England has long been a tourist attraction, but souvenirs, highlighted in a new book by Roman expert David Breeze, shows that the wall attracted tourists soon after it was built. (photo)

"Within a few centuries, the Teutonic warriors led a major ecological and cultural transformation that swept the pagan Baltic tribes into the fold of European Christendom," according to a statement by Stanford University regarding an article by researcher Krish Seetah. The article was published in the November 30, 2012 issue of Science.