I’ve recently made a few changes to this blog, giving it a new name and a new look. The new name is SASVA which is an acronym of the old name ‘Strathclyde and the Anglo-Saxons in the Viking Age’. I felt that a change was necessary because the scope of the blog has been widening in the past couple of years, partly to accommodate posts arising from my 2018 biography of Æthelflæd but also to cover a broader range of Viking-related topics.
Back in 2014, when this blog was launched, I envisaged it as a place for news and information about my book Strathclyde and the Anglo-Saxons in the Viking Age which was published that same year. Hence the older blogposts had a focus on the kingdom of Strathclyde or on my research for the book. In 2017, I started to write a biography of Æthelflæd, the Lady of the Mercians. Since Æthelflæd had already received attention on this blog because of her dealings with the kings of Strathclyde, it seemed a logical place to announce the publication of her biography in June 2018. Studying her life and career had, in any case, rekindled my interest in the Viking period as a whole, sparking several ideas for new blogposts that didn’t really belong at either of my other two blogs.
So this blog, under its new name SASVA, has become my scrapbook for ‘Notes on the Viking Age’. Information on Strathclyde will continue to appear here from time to time, but might just as likely turn up at ‘Heart of the Kingdom’ (where I’ve been blogging about early medieval Govan for a number of years) or at my main blog ‘Senchus: Early Medieval Scotland’. Both ‘Senchus’ and ‘HotK’ have a distinctly Scottish focus, but SASVA’s coverage will be much broader, potentially encompassing any and all lands where the Vikings had a presence. The three most recent SASVA blogposts reflect this geographical shift, two of them having a focus on places in England while the third looks across the North Sea to Denmark.
My fascination with Æthelflæd means that she will continue to receive attention here, this being a useful venue for exploring aspects of her life that I was barely able to skim while writing a book about her. Other topics likely to appear at this blog are Viking Age sculpture (from England, Scandinavia and elsewhere), settlement archaeology (Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Danish), place-names, bibliographical recommendations and anything else that catches my eye.
Comments on recent or older posts are always welcome.
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SASVA: notes on the Viking Age 