Bardskull - by Martin Shaw

Book Synopsis

Bardskull 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.

Review Quotes

Praise for Martin Shaw

"Martin Shaw's work is so very beautiful. A new animal. His love of images is deep and contagious. In the passion of his search he makes up new words that seem as though we've always known them. His language is tasty and surprising. This elegant combination of very fresh, free verse storytelling, and a deep untangling of myth feels so alive. What will it do next?" -- Coleman Barks, author of The Essential Rumi

"Martin Shaw is a teacher of profound cultural knowledge, and is a master artist at transmitting it. Those transmissions are subtle and profound. We desperately need his work." -- Tony Hoagland, author of Application For Release From The Dream

"Shaw encourages and illuminates the mythic in our own lives. He is a modern-day bard." -- Madeline Miller

"The heart has a true-north, says Martin Shaw. He uses it. His work combines a magnificence of soul with a deft acuity of intellect, portraying a quintessential comprehension of the human spirit in its mythic path. He writes in a rare register of an earthy seer and I am in awe."-- Jay Griffiths, author of Wild: An Elemental Journey

"Martin Shaw's gift is his unsurpassed ability to bring myth past locked doors and into our hearts. He reveals all the glory and terror of the human condition, showing us the deeper story of our own lives." -- Jacob Needleman, author of An Unknown Earth

"Shaw is a writer of rare and fierce beauty." -- Daniel Deardorff, author of The Other Within

"With great skill, agility and elegance Martin Shaw takes us deeply to the mythic life-blood of his beloved Dartmoor - Martin's word-magic will embed you ever more powerfully in the soul of your own land, wherever on Earth you happen to be." -- Stephan Harding, author of Animate Earth

"Martin Shaw is, without exaggeration, the most powerful writer of prose that I have read. A wild light begins to gleam in our eyes, our hair grows long, our language begins to shift, and in some inexplicable way, as humans long ago understood we could, we begin to become old growth ourselves." -- Stephen Harrod Buhner, award winning author of Ensouling Language and Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm

"Martin Shaw is the lost Inkling." -- Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option

"The work of a true and transformative enchanter: this is a chaotic, overwhelming, visionary introduction to the wildness of the sacred world we live in; every story, riddle or song here opens inner depths for the reader (or, better, listener)." -- Rowan Williams

"An intriguing book, enthralling and riveting. It kept me reading and my mind was full of visions and myths. Loved it." -- Anna Maria Giacomasso, Librarian

About the Author

Martin Shaw is a writer, storyteller and teacher who lives on Dartmoor. He founded the Oral Tradition and Mythic Life courses at Stanford University, and is director of the Westcountry School of Myth in the UK.
He is the author of the award-winning Mythteller trilogy: A Branch from the Lightning Tree, Snowy Tower and Scatterlings. Recent books include Smokehole, Courting the Wild Twin (both published by Chelsea Green), All Those Barbarians, Wolf Milk, Cinderbiter (with Tony Hoagland) and his Lorca translations, Courting the Dawn (with Stephan Harding).
Dr Shaw has introduced thousands of people to mythology and how it penetrates modern life. For twenty years, he has been a wilderness rites of passage guide, working with at-risk youth, the sick, returning veterans and many women and men seeking a deeper life.