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25 hours of storytelling for all ages. Original music. Plus Odds’ 555-page epic work of high fantasy in verse, The Water Mage’s Daughter.
HAPPY FATHER’S DAY!
Great for long drives, bedtime for kids, and epic excitement for adults!
Educational, fun listening. Builds literacy by building natural imagination.
What a night I had Sunday evening at Grendel’s Den in Cambridge, MA. ODIN AND THOR BATTLE THE FROST GIANTS, my adult show of Viking myths, was sold out, which was great, of course, but the highlight was when the audience sang with me.
For the second long tale, The Mead of Poetry, I wrote a song that the lonely but deadly giantess, Gunlod, sings in her cave in the heart of a mountain. Her father has commanded her to guard the magical mead, an elixir brewed from Odin’s best friend’s blood. His friend has been murdered for it, and Odin is on a quest to return it to Asgard where it belongs.
As he approaches Gunlod’s cave, he hears
One soul, lost in loneliness/Down in the dark where nobody dares to go
One soul, none will ever see/My father’s will has now imprisoned me
Guard it, he says/Guard it, he says/Guard it. Let no one touch it at all.
I sang this in Gunlod’s voice, but then invited the audience to sing it with me. What a moment! In natural voice I sang, and lo, all those nice people joined in on the haunting tune. The room rang with men’s and women’s voices. They learned it almost immediately. Nice moment, along with all the laughs I heard throughout the two stories.
For New Hampshire audiences, I’ll be reprising this show this coming Sunday, Jan. 21 at 6:00 pm at Schoodacs Coffeehouse in Warner, NH. Intimate setting. Tickets are $15.
The show begins with little-known Viking lore, accompanied by Celtic harp music, then moves to Thor’s Journey to Utgard, a hilarious and magical adventure that Thor and Loki experience with Frost Giants (12-string guitar score), and then The Mead of Poetry (with a second 12-string). It’s fine for older kids, but is essentially an adult show.
So if you’d like to immerse in some adult storytelling, and even learn about the Medieval Climate Optimum and how we got our days of the week, come!
An unsophisticated youth out in the world for the first time, Percival comes upon a young woman in a knight’s pavilion. His mother’s words come into the country boy’s mind, “If a lady gives you a kiss, ‘tis a great honor. If she gives you a ring, ‘tis a double honor.”
Stupidly, he forces her to kiss him and pulls off her wedding ring, thinking he’s now been honored. Instead, he’s ruined her life, although he does not know it. Not until much later in the epic, when he meets her again with her angry husband (he thinks she’s been unfaithful), does Percival return the ring and confess what he’s done.
If modern boys do not know how to treat women with courtesy, perhaps they haven’t yet heard The Hidden Grail: Sir Percival and the Fisher King, Odds Bodkin’s 90-minute Arthurian tale about chivalry.
Billboard writes “one of the best spoken-word stories we’ve ever heard.” The reviewers were a mother/daughter team.
Get it here or as part of the $99 download special at Odds Bodkin’s Shop.
Who’s buying Odds Bodkin downloads? Our last nine delightful customers ordered from…
Knoxville, Tennessee
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They purchased these mp3s…
The Takeover Before Christmas: A Rock and Rock Story
Beowulf: The Only One
The Little Proto Trilogy
Gentle Tales of Nature
The Crane Wife: A Tale from Japan
Paul Bunyan Tales
The Little Proto Trilogy
The Mythic Adventure Collection
Gentle Tales of Nature
Visit Odds Bodkin’s Shop. Grab some bardic storytelling. It’s amazing stuff. One man, a thousand voices. Just ask these nice people from all over the world.
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Lord Duksha is immensely fat and has the head of an Ibex, with huge curving horns. As a powerful mantra-wielding sage and deity, he’s convinced that there simply aren’t enough women in the world, and so has sixty-two daughters in all. As a doting father, he jealously guards their well-being, especially once they’re married. He wants them all to be happy. And so when Soma, the Lord of the Moon, shows up and asks to marry twenty-seven of Duksha’s daughters, the sage thinks he’s crazy.
“That is a great many wives,” he cautions. “How will you keep up with that?”
“Don’t worry,” Soma replies confidently, “I will pay equal attention to every single one. I’m quite the fellow.”
Of course, Duksha’s doubts prove true. Soma ends up spending all his time with just one wife, Rohini. Duksha’s fury and resulting death-curse upon the Lord of the Moon is at the heart of this hilarious adult story from India I’ll be telling this coming Sunday night, April 9 at 8 pm at Grendel’s Den in Cambridge, MA. It’s called The Twenty-Seven Wives of the Moon.
I’ll also be telling other tales as part of India’s Ancients: Tales from the Mahabharata and Beyond.
The musical accompaniment is on a 12-string guitar, played with sitar scales. I hope you can make it!
Tickets are $20 and $10 and are available here.
This coming Sunday January 22nd at 5:30 pm I’ll return to Grendel’s Den in Cambridge, MA to tell Fall of the Titans: The Original Game of Thrones, an ancient Greek myth. The 90-minute show, told with narration, character voices and a score on 12-string guitar, is prefaced, believe it or not, with modern science, Gaia Theory in particular. Gaia Theory isn’t a belief, it’s a bundle of sciences. Biology. Chemistry. Physics. Ecology. Plate tectonics. Climatology. Paleo-geology. Vulcanology. Glaciology. On and on. It combines these and other disciplines into the grand notion that Earth is a giant, self-regulating organism, creating and sloughing off complex life forms for many hundreds of millions of years.
Pangea (“all-Earth”) is the name scientists have given the ancient super-landmass that fused the continents 300 million years ago but which drifted apart into what we’ve got today. In certain places, rock layers along the west coast of Africa are identical to rock layers along the east coast of South America, after all. Now the Atlantic Ocean separates them, but at one point they were in the same spot on Pangea. Continents drift about an inch a year.
So what’s the link to my storyteller’s version of Hesiod’s Theogony, a poem from 700 B.C. about the ancient Greek gods we see in the movies all the time? The link is paleo-seas, the waters that surrounded Pangea’s break-up. Scientists have given them names. The Tethys Sea. The Iapetus Ocean. The Pontus Ocean. The Rheic Ocean. Where did these strange names come from?
Well, the scientists who named them were obviously familiar with Hesiod’s creation myth, because Tethys, Iapetus, Pontus and Rhea were Titans, children of Gaia, the Earth itself, all of whom are characters in the Theogony (“birth of the gods”). Think of them as the Earth-Makers. The Bronze Age Greeks looked around and saw mountains, sky and seas and had no idea where they’d come from, so they dreamt up a Titan who created each one of them. Tethys, a Titaness, created the streams and rivers. Pontus created the sea. Iapetus created death to make room for new life. Rhea was the mother of the Olympian gods––Zeus, Hera, Hades, Demeter and so on. They were all part of a family that tore itself apart because of imperfection.
At least that’s the story.
So learning about ancient seas made me curious about the names, the names led me to the story, and now Fall of the Titans is a full-blown performance piece. It’s lots of fun with some pretty cosmic music on 12-string guitar and voices for Gaia, Ouranus, Cronus, Rhea, baby cyclopses, Zeus and others. It is an adult story and is definitely not recommended for children.
I’ll have my Celtic harp to help introduce the science part.
Tickets are $15 for tables and $10 bar seating. I hope to see you there!
My text of Hesiod’s Theogony reads like this:
Great Ouranos came, bringing the night,
and spread out around Gaia, desiring philotês,
and was extended. His son reached out from ambush
with his left hand, and in his right he held the sickle,
long and serrated and the genitals of his father
he quickly reaped and threw them behind his back
to be carried away.
“Philotês” means a few things in ancient Greek––friendship, love and sexual intercourse. In this case, it’s definitely intercourse and I’m sure you see where I’m going with this. In this scene, Cronus, the last-born of Gaia’s Titan children, un-kings his father Ouranos to become king himself. Gaia, who’s at the center of my Fall of the Titans tale, is furious with Ouranos for having imprisoned her six latest babies. Ouranos is the Sky (Mother Earth/Father Sky) and has been her husband for eons. Gaia is the Earth. All along he’s been a proud father, having watched Gaia produce 12 perfect Titan children after having philotês with her.
But now that she’s given birth to three Cyclopses and three Hecatonchires (scary beasts with fifty heads) and Ouranos fears what they will become when they grow up, he’s made her angry for the first time. He’s dragged the baby monsters in chains down into Tartarus and locked them in giant prison cells. After this, Gaia decides she is done with Ouranos and wants him de-throned. Since kingliness and fertility were one and the same in the Bronze Age when this tale was set down, castration is the solution. Her ambitious son Cronus agrees to do it. Soon he becomes a paranoid king and since Phoebe, one of his older sisters and a prophetess, foresees that one of Cronus’ children will overthrow him, he eats them one by one as they’re born. Baby Hera, baby Poseidon, baby Demeter, baby Hades and others.
I have two Fall of the Titans shows coming up. I’ve told this story to young audiences in a sanitized, PG version (“Wound your father, so that he may no longer be king” is how I phrase it) but these two shows are for adults, one in Nashua, NH and the other in Cambridge, MA (see below for details). Of course, this is just one small moment in the epic tale itself, but a crucial one. It sets up all kinds of wild events, including the appearance of the Goddess of Love Aphrodite––the first of the Olympians––and a poignant moment later in the tale when Gaia is forced to visit her emasculated ex-husband and beg for his help.
So I’m still wrestling with this Lorena Bobbitt moment. Still not sure what I’ll do.
This coming Sunday night (Jan. 15) at 7:00 p.m. at the Riverwalk Cafe and Music Bar in Nashua, New Hampshire I’ll be telling this tale (tickets here) and once again at Grendel’s Den in Cambridge, MA at 5:30 p.m. on January 22nd. Tickets here.
Wish me luck in telling FALL OF THE TITANS: THE ORIGINAL GAME OF THRONES.
Along with Homer, the ancient Greek poet Hesiod essentially codified old spoken tales of the Olympian gods into the wondrously complex mythology we know today as the Greek myths. It’s good to bear in mind that in their day, these were deeply religious stories and the Greeks believed them as fact. Where had the Earth come from? What caused day and night? Who created the stars? How did the sea become salty? How did memory and prophecy enter the world? Why did weather change? What caused volcanoes to erupt?
Religions do this, each in their own way, even fossil religions like Greek pantheism, and so all these questions Hesiod tried to answer in his poem, The Theogony. “Theo” means deity and “gony” means “the birth of,” and so Hesiod’s “Birth of the Gods” covers all these topics and many more, all filtered, of course, through the mind of a brilliant man who lived circa 700 B.C.
Most folks know about the antics of Zeus, Hera, Athena, Aphrodite, Apollo and the other gods as grownups, but far fewer know the tale of how they were born into a Game of Thrones-style family feud among their parents and grandparents–the Titans.
This coming Sunday, January 15th at 7:00 pm at the Riverwalk Music Bar in Nashua, NH, I’ll be telling my storyteller’s version of this wild old yarn. I call it FALL OF THE TITANS because after they created the Earth, the Titans did indeed fall. It has echoes of Moses in the reeds (Zeus is the hidden baby) and features gorgeous scenes of creation as well as sordid adult moments. If you don’t know this story, you’ll learn how the goddess of love, Aphrodite, was born. Be warned: it’s fairly chilling for most guys. Ambition, lust for power and child-devouring also play significant parts in this Bronze Age narrative.
This is an adult performance and not recommended for children under 13.
As usual, I’ll have my Celtic harp for background lore and my 12-string guitar for scoring the tale itself. I last told this tale in Boulder, CO to an adult audience and they had a great time, so I hope you’ll consider coming to the show. Tickets are $10 here.
Rapunzel’s Window is the title of a haunting new composition of mine that features air flute and strings. If you know a teenage girl who’s feeling overwhelmed, buy her this 3:09 piece of music to listen to. It’s a whopping $.99 at my online store and is guaranteed to let her know she’s not the only one who’s ever felt that way.
It’s subtitled “Lonely Music for Air Flute and Strings” and so isn’t supposed to make anybody happy. Just reflective.
In preparing to publish this and a few other instrumental pieces, I sent Rapunzel’s Window to a dynamic young woman mover-and-shaker here in the town where I live. I don’t know her very well but together with her husband and others she was part of funding a project here at my home this past fall, so the symphonic songs were a thank you.
About a month later I got a card back, having wondered for a while if she’d ever downloaded them from Dropbox. Turns out she had, and that of all of them, Rapunzel’s Window moved her the most. That was nice to hear. I think of this tune and the others I’ve composed as “anti-pop” or something like that. No thudding rhythms. No sampling of other people’s loops. No obscenities that cheapen love. Just music made by hand on a synth keyboard or with real instruments, or both.
The full tune is available here.
I just put up a new tune, SOFT-HEARTED MEN IN THE GOOD OLD USA, at my online shop. It’s a sweet, relaxing piece of music featuring 12-string guitar, duo mandolins, bass and drums. Makes me think of the heartland when I listen to it. Here’s a sample:
$.99. While you’re at my shop, check out the other instrumental pieces and, of course, the stories. For adults, my latest is BEOWULF: THE ONLY ONE, a 65-minute tale.
Happy Holidays!
Odds Bodkin