My Love Affair with Telling THE ODYSSEY

Posted on March 1, 2024March 1, 2024 by Odds Bodkin

My Love Affair with Telling THE ODYSSEY

“I can tell the whole thing,” I lied rather boldly, and a week later, I got the job. Strange but true. The only problem was, I had to deliver a 3-hour storyteller’s version of Homer’s epic in 90 days. At a school in Vermont.

Another problem was, I didn’t yet know the story. And so I read the Fitzgerald translation and wrote down all my favorite characters and scenes.

Suffice it to say that here, decades later, I’ve performed this story with my 12-string guitar at least a thousand times, if not more. Festivals. Universities. Private and public schools. Across America and abroad. And I still love it.

I love playing the haunting score I created so long ago. I love doing the voice of Odysseus, wishing I were a guy like him. I love becoming the giant cannibal Cyclops, relieved that I’m not a guy like him. I love entering the visual dream of this tale, one that is always a little different each time I go inside and peer around my version of an ancient world.

It’s a curious alchemy of music and the narrative muse.

You can witness this alchemy live. My performance is coming up:

Sunday March 10

Doors open at 5 pm

Grendel’s Den, Harvard Square

Odds Bodkin

THE ODYSSEY: Belly of the Beast

A full evening’s entertainment.

Tickets: $35

I LOVE THIS STORY. SOON I’LL TELL IT.

Posted on January 18, 2024 by Odds Bodkin

I LOVE THIS STORY. SOON I’LL TELL IT.

Which story is this?

Well, it’s a challenging one.

It’s my storyteller’s version of Beowulf, the old Viking story about a hero who kills a monster who can’t be killed. Spears and blades don’t work against the towering beast, Grendel, a beast who can sweep strong fighters away like tiny birds. And who takes them home to his cave to eat them afterwards.

Horrible, I know. Yet this ancient tale has fascinated generations. I admit, it fascinates me as well, and I’m looking forward to performing it again. Why would I spend years perfecting an old Viking story? Years developing character voices and a lush, compelling 12-string guitar score? At first glance there’s not much to it: big strong guy who’s braver than everyone else kills monster and becomes legendary hero. There are dozens of such stories. But in a careful reading long ago I found a reason beyond those outer trappings for Beowulf to journey to the Mark of the Danes–Denmark in modern parlance–to help old King Hrothgar. A reason beyond a simple lust for glory and riches. Although Beowulf is brave and craves renown, in my version, it is gratitude that drives him. It turns out that as a boy, Beowulf sailed to Denmark with his father, who had killed a Wylfing warrior. As it often was in those ancient clan times, the Wylfings had put a blood price on his father’s head. Sounds like John Wick, I know.

Pay us, said the Wylfings, and we won’t hunt down and kill Edgtheo. Or pay others to do it. A common thane like Beowulf’s father could never pay so much gold, and so he’d sailed to ask King Hrothgar–the richest man along the Baltic–to help him. Generously the Danish king paid the blood price for his father and in so doing saved his life.

The little boy, Beowulf, never forgot it.

And so here, years later, Beowulf is willing to die for old Hrothgar by killing his Grendel beast, who for twelve years has decimated the Danes.

This heartfelt detail is in the original text, although usually not brought to the forefront. To my way of thinking, it humanizes an otherwise dark warrior tale while still honoring the original epic narrative.

I’ll be telling Beowulf: The Only One on Sunday, February 4th at Grendel’s Den on Harvard Square in Cambridge, MA. Doors open at 5 pm. You can drink, eat Viking food, and then sit back for this feature-length evening of adult storytelling. Tickets are $35.

BEOWULF: THE ONLY ONE

Sunday, Feb. 4 at 5 pm

Grendel’s Den, Cambridge MA

Tickets: $35

Adult Storytelling and Feasting Tomorrow Night in Cambridge

Posted on April 2, 2022 by Odds Bodkin

Adult Storytelling and Feasting Tomorrow Night in Cambridge

For a total immersion into an ancient mythic world, join Master Storyteller and Musician Odds Bodkin for a storytelling concert: ODIN AND THOR BATTLE THE FROST GIANTS. A full 90 minutes of imagination entertainment.

Grab a table with friends, eat heartily, and then sit back for Thor’s Journey to Utgard and The Mead of Poetry, two Viking myths performed with character voices, sound effects and music on two different 12-string guitars. Plus a Viking lore introduction told with Celtic harp.

Children over 12 are welcome.

“Bodkin’s enchanting voice, musical prowess, and larger-than-life persona have earned him an illustrious career as a master storyteller.” — The Harvard Crimson

“a consummate storyteller”—The New York Times

“a modern-day Orpheus”—Billboard

ODIN AND THOR BATTLE THE FROST GIANTS

Odds Bodkin

Sunday, April 3, 2022 at 5 pm

Grendel’s Den on Harvard Square

Tickets: $25

If You’re in Boston…

Posted on February 7, 2022February 7, 2022 by Odds Bodkin

If you’re in Boston this February 27th, make your way to Harvard Square. There, tucked away down a set of brick stairs, you’ll find Grendel’s Den, a legendary watering hole. You’ll see a small stage beneath lights that sports a lectern and a microphone. Be sure you’re vaccinated (they won’t let you in otherwise) and find your table. You might even be given a free test kit, new from MIT.

Music will be playing over the sound system, but it won’t be long before I’ll appear onstage and the music will fade. I won’t have my usual 12-string guitars or harp; instead, I’ll open a simple manuscript.

“Voyage of the Waistgold: An Untrue Tale in Doggerel Rhyme by Odds Bodkin,” I’ll begin in my ordinary American English, the one I use to talk to people in the real world. “Chapter One: The Builderguilder’s Boat.”

Ah, but then, Captain Phineas Krull will begin to speak. He’s a terrible, murderous pirate on a fantastical sea, my narrator and the one who lives my 90-minute adventure. His voice is rough and gritty. He even sounds dangerous.

“So I hires me a crew o’ drug suckin’ thieves/To help me to steal ‘er, that fine filly ship./With one goodly mast, like Priapus himself,/Buried deep in ‘er hold ‘neath a parquetry deck/And a gem-crusted wheel fer the high dudgeon winds/ The Waistgold, we seen ‘er, my silver sea slipper/Tied placid ‘twixt other and far lesser boats.”

So begins the saga of how Krull murders the local Builderguilder and escapes with the salvaged Waistgold, only to discover that the gem-laden ship has a mind of its own. A dark magician himself, he’s baffled by his new boat’s powers. And he’s worried, because he doesn’t know how to control them. It makes more sense when he finds a dead scribe’s book, written in blood. In it, Krull reads about Queen Ood, the enchantress who built the boat, who or may not be alive.

This story reads somewhere between William Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

According to Wikipedia, Swift claimed that he wrote Gulliver’s Travels “to vex the world rather than divert it”. Voyage of the Waistgold is much the same.

For Adults Only.

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My Love Affair with Telling THE ODYSSEY