About SagasTube

SagasTube is a history channel built around one idea: virtually travel through the world, one country at a time, and tell each place’s story as well as the format allows. The films live on YouTube. This site holds the companion essays, shorter articles, and the map.

Why this exists

I work as a university lecturer and have previously worked as a researcher. I spend several hours reading history each week, and for a long time much of what I read never seemed to go anywhere useful. That was part of what pushed me to start making these videos back in 2017 — a way to put the reading to work.

I was also motivated by how many history videos on YouTube contained clear mistakes. I set out to do better. What I found along the way is that even when I likely spend too much time researching a single film, I still make mistakes myself. So much for that ambition — but the effort remains. When errors are found in a published film, corrections are added in a pinned comment on that video.

Each film takes about a year to make. I work on them after my day job, and I hope that over time I can improve the process. For now, it is slow, deliberate, and done properly or not at all.

The route on the map

The plan is to move across the map country by country, usually taking a bordering country next — a virtual journey rather than a random list.

How the research works

For each part of a country’s story, I use a straightforward triangulation approach: three or more sources, checked against each other. These are mostly encyclopedias — a practical way to establish what is commonly taken to be that country’s history among mainstream historians, rather than one idiosyncratic reading.

For some topics, peer-reviewed research articles are used as well. I hope to publish full source lists on this site in future, but keeping track of everything is time-consuming and has not been feasible yet.

If you spot an error or have a better source, the best place to reach out is through the YouTube channel.

A note on what “the history of a country” means

The conventional shape of a national history — where it begins, who counts as its people, which events define it — is often shaped by modern nationalism as much as by the past itself. That is not always the truest historic account, but it is the account most people expect when they ask for “the history of Norway” or “the history of Finland.”

These films and essays work within that frame. Given their length, it is not possible to give a fully true count of any country’s past, nor to do full justice to every historian’s perspective on every disputed point. There have to be simplifications — sometimes real ones — when explaining how scholars disagree, or when choosing which narrative thread to follow.

This is popular history, not a peer-reviewed journal. The aim is clarity and curiosity in equal measure: enough rigour that you trust the telling, enough honesty about its limits that you know what kind of story you are getting.