Description
Book SynopsisBardskull is the record of three journeys made by Martin Shaw, the celebrated storyteller and interpreter of myth, in the year before he turned fifty. It is unlike anything he has written before. This is not a book about myth or narrative: rather, it is a sequence of incantations, a series of battles.
Each of the three journeys sees Shaw walk alone into a Dartmoor forest and wait. What arrive are stories – fragments of myth that he has carried within him for decades: the deep history of Dartmoor itself; the lives of distant family members; Arthurian legend; and tales from India, Persia, Lapland, the Caucasus and Siberia. But these stories and their tellers don’t arrive as the bearers of solace or easy wisdom. As with all quests, Shaw is entering a domain of traps and tests.
Bardskull can be read as a fable, as memoir, as auto-fiction or as an attempt to undomesticate myth. It is a magnificent, unclassifiable work of the imagination.
Trade Review
- 'A mystical voyage ... a deep descent into Shaw’s inner self' Guardian
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'This is the real, hard stuff, brewed from oak, grief, the breath of crows and the blood of God. Drink it if you dare and know that the throb of your own heart is the pulse of a mountain and the clatter in the road the hoofs of Gawain’s horse. Shaw is an alchemist of unique power, vision and downright goodness. There is Shaw and there is everyone else’ Charles Foster, author of The Cry of the Wild, Being a Human and Being a Beast
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'Bardskull is not so much a book as an incantation. If you try to follow the story you will end up lost in the forest. Instead you should enter it respectfully, like a cave in an ancient English wood that is reputed to lead to the underworld. Draw your sword: courage is required. But the wodwose and the wyverns that curl out of these pages have come not to destroy but to transfigure. Shockingly, this pagan storyteller entered the dark woods in search of England’s dreaming, and came out having met the one King he did not expect. Like its author, this book is entirely unlike anything else around' Paul Kingsnorth
- ‘The pleasures it offers are deep indeed … This is a book that gives permission. In a world that, increasingly, looks to set rigid boundaries around what it is acceptable to think and feel, Shaw’s work comes as relief, like cold clear water from a rushing spring’ Erica Wagner, Sunday Times
