Discovering Parallel Blogs: A Search Story

Today’s WordPress journal prompt asked: What was the last thing you searched for online? Why were you looking for it?

The answer was straightforward for me. this afternoon I searched my own blog, An Itinerant Scribe, for a post about an upcoming Arts and Sciences event. I invited my granddaughter to attend Calontir’s coming Kingdom Arts and Sciences event with me. I thought it would be fun for her to see a write-up of what the event is like.

I found exactly the post I wanted. Mission accomplished. ✅

But here’s the surprise—I also stumbled across another blog with almost the same name: The Itinerant Scribe. His blog is part of a larger project site called The Word in the Wilderness. Its first post was published on December 5, 2019. The post is titled “From The Rosenbach’s Bookshelf: Arnold Bennett’s How to Become an Author*.” The author is Alexander Lawrence Ames, a historian, curator, material culture scholar, and bibliophile.

So here we are—two blogs with nearly the same title, but different roots and paths. Mine began on December 13, 2015. It started with a cheerful post about Kris Kinder in Calontir. It’s been weaving through the world of the SCA ever since. His began four years later, rooted in scholarship and the history of books. Two Scribes, two journeys, both wandering through words.

It’s a reminder that sometimes when we search for one thing, we find something unexpected—maybe even a parallel path.