I’m giving them a chance to take ownership of their thought process and scholarship in ways that aren’t just writing another paper. ... I’m hoping to teach my students not just literature, but the excitement about the literature.
Dr. John Sexton had his students in mind when he recorded his first podcast episode about Icelandic sagas. A dozen years and more than 3 million downloads later, it’s safe to say the “Saga Thing” show has an audience far beyond the classroom.
The series is a collaboration between the BSU English professor and his graduate school classmate, Dr. Andy Pfrenger of the University of Mississippi. They planned to have students listen to episodes as homework in order to focus class meetings on discussions rather than lectures.
“We didn’t realize at first that anyone else would be listening,” said Sexton, who still uses the podcast as originally intended despite its much broader reach. “A few months in, we first started getting comments on the episodes and it just rolled from there.”
Sexton and Pfrenger are working through 40 Icelandic sagas. The narratives chronicle the lives of Icelanders mostly in the ninth through 11th centuries. The sagas share the struggles of early Icelandic settlers and include adventures in foreign lands. They provide detailed histories of specific regions and families.
Each saga spans multiple podcast episodes as Sexton and Pfrenger review major characters and offer their thoughts on topics such as the best bloodshed, best section of dialogue and most creative nicknames. They sometimes touch on archeological findings, sailing techniques, cooking and a host of other topics. Listeners offer their own insights through a Discord community. Sexton has scholarly focus on disability studies while Pfrenger investigates topographical data of the sagas.
Sexton traces his interest in sagas to his childhood when he received a book of Norse mythology as a gift and became enthralled by the tales. He continued to pursue ancient writings by exploring medieval literature in graduate school and now podcasting.
“This very much reoriented the way I think about scholarship. The point of scholarship is about communication,” Sexton said. “The podcast became a much more public-facing way to produce scholarship.”
Sexton offers his Bridgewater State students the same opportunity to express their academic work in unconventional ways. In an upper-level English class about the sagas, students even produce their own podcasts.
“I’m giving them a chance to take ownership of their thought process and scholarship in ways that aren’t just writing another paper,” he said, adding, “I’m hoping to teach my students not just literature, but the excitement about the literature.”
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