Sarah Toler, Viking and Early Medieval English Studies MA

Sarah is an international student and teacher from the USA. She explains why she chose a masters in this area, what she's enjoying, and how she inspires her students using languages.

What is your undergraduate degree in and what made you do an MA in this area?

"My undergraduate is in English literature, so I mostly studied 19th century British literature.

The reason I switched from 19th century literature to Viking and Early Medieval English, was that I developed an interest in runes. I had seen it everywhere in the media. When you watch any type of cartoon, they will usually have some type of runes and I was like, ‘What's that language?!’

I started studying it and I just enjoyed that so much. On this course I’m learning about the culture which is associated with the runes."

What are you enjoying about your course?

"The Old Norse and the Old English classes – those are great.

I also really enjoyed the 'Ice and Fire: Myths and Heroes of the North' module, which is an undergraduate one on Norse mythology. I requested to audit it because of my interest in the subject area. It gave me a lot of the background that I wasn't able to find during my own research online. I could not for the life of me work out where to find the original sources. Everywhere had conflicting information. I just needed to take this module and get straightened out."

Now, I think I'll be confident in going forward. I have the tools to teach myself the things I wasn't able to learn before.

Any staff shout outs?

"Dr Baker, who teaches place names, is super fun. He works us through what we need for each assignment and actually demonstrates by using the computer and using the applications. His are also the most interactive classes. We’ve had a field trip, we built a display for a project, and he helped us learn how to write book reviews – all skills we can use for the other modules, too.

We also have Dr Lee now and she’s very nice. I definitely liked her in the 'Ice and Fire' module. She’s very knowledgeable.

Then there’s Professor Jesch, I like her classes. She's very knowledgeable, too. All the staff are pretty great!"

What’s your dissertation going to be on?

"I've had a couple of ideas. I've got a large background in Greek and Roman and a substantial background in Egyptian and lots of other cultures, like Hebrew, so I would like ideally to do something that brings it all together.

The Norse mythology itself makes reference to all of these different mythologies, and they don't try to hide it. They specifically will invoke the name of a Roman goddess or say we all came from Asia, or we were defeated at Troy. They make it extremely clear that they know about all these other cultures, so I'd like to do something that brings in all of them.

My alternative idea is to look at Egil Saga. I’d do something about landscapes of grief and his opponent poems Sonatorrek, looking at the expression of grief and how it relates to other poems at the time or poems in times after that. So kind of the way that people will express their grief or keep their grief in."

What does success look like to you?

"It's mostly being happy, but also giving other people happiness. I'm a teacher, I’ve been teaching in Vietnam, and this MA is kind of like a break just for me. Then I want to get back into teaching.

One of the things that I bring to my students is inspiration. Whenever I get in front of a class, I write my name in every language that I know and have the students try to guess the languages.

It gives me an opportunity to bring cultures to them that they wouldn't have otherwise discovered. I show them all of the cartoons that inspired me to choose this course, and I show them ‘Look, this cartoon has another language. Can you read it? OK, let's read it together’. I'm looking forward to doing that again."

Anything else to add?

"I like Nottingham. It's definitely a big, really pretty school to be based at. I'm enjoying it."

Top tips for other international students...

“My favourite thing about the city is the transit system! The buses are sometimes like 8 or 10 minutes apart, which is incredible to me. The first thing I did when I got my student ID was get the bus pass for students, which is incredibly affordable.”
“In terms of grocery shops, the Asda supermarkets are like Walmart. There are more Tesco’s than Asda’s, but as Asda is like Walmart I prefer to go there!”