BEOWULF VIKING ADVENTURE MYTH & LORE at 7 p.m. Sunday in Nashua, NH

With Celtic harp and 12-string guitar modern bard Odds Bodkin will perform BEOWULF: THE ONLY ONE at 7 p.m. on Sunday, March 4th at The Riverwalk Cafe and Music Bar in Nashua, NH. Told in modern language, the tale is the storyteller’s version of the oldest-known story in English literature.

Voices for Beowulf, Grendel the Beast and other characters combine to make a feature film for the imagination.

An adult storytelling; not appropriate for children.

Tickets: $10 and $13 at the door.

HAUNTED BY THE MUSIC

Mostly the music haunts me. I still recall sitting out on my back porch under the sun umbrella one summer day trying to stitch the heartbreak together. “What can get at this tragic mood?” I kept asking myself, conducting experiments up and down the 12-string’s fingerboard. New chords I’d never played slowly revealed the sculpture-in-the-stone moment, the “ah ha!” release, when I finally said, “Wow. That’s it. That is beautiful. That has the dignity, the elemental loneliness and the magnificence I need.”

I was searching for a leitmotif for Beowulf the Viking hero. Having composed them for Odysseus in The Odyssey, David in David and Goliath, young Percival the knight in The Hidden Grail and other of my long-form bardic tales, musically it was a familiar creative process, but not emotionally.

You can get a flavor of Beowulf’s theme at 3:27 in this live recording of the tale.

 

I’ll be performing Beowulf: The Only One twice in the next weeks, and will be playing Beowulf’s theme and others as I do my best to enact him, King Hrothgar, Grendel the Beast and his vengeful monster mother. I still remember how when I recorded this tale live, the music worked. Two women in the audience felt the way I felt. Right there, in the middle of all those people, so loudly I heard it from the stage, they burst into tears.

 

Tickets and information:

Sunday, March 4 at 7 p.m. at the Riverwalk Music Bar, Nashua, N

Sunday, March 11 at 5:30 p.m. at Grendel’s Den, Cambridge, MA

 

 

“No blades will kill it. Iron. Bronze. Silver. Gold. We have tried them all. If you wish to kill Grendel, you must do it with your hands.”

As Beowulf stands before him, King Hrothgar further describes the giant man-devouring beast that kills his people every night. Stunned, a thane whispers, “Beowulf. No blades? Then how…”

“Shhh,” Beowulf replies in low tones. “Fate often saves an undoomed man if his courage holds.”

Beowulf: The Only One is an hour and twenty minutes long. Unlike movies about Beowulf, this storyteller’s version honors the original classic tale. Shot through with surging 12-string guitar music mapped precisely onto the story’s battle action in real time, it’s Odds Bodkin’s latest spoken-word tale. The character voices created by this master storyteller bring you close to every hope and fear.

Experience it today. Grab the download here and enter the dark, windy world of the Vikings.

Or get it as part of the Mythic Adventure Collection of Odds Bodkin’s epics along with The Odyssey, The Myth of Hercules, David and Goliath, The Hidden Grail and Viking Myths. Save over $50 on hours of imagination entertainment for teens and adults.

Listening samples for every tale.

“I Cannot Stop Listening”

Simon Brooks is an Englishman and fellow professional storyteller. He recently wrote a review of my latest epic audio story, Beowulf: The Only One. I’ve excerpted it below.

“Like all of his work, Odds Bodkin’s ‘Beowulf’is deep, funny, and brilliantly told. Odds’ version is entertaining and pulls you in so you cannot back away from it… I have listened to it several times. In fact I am at the point where I cannot start it unless I have the time to finish it all. I cannot stop listening to the words and music which flow so wonderfully throughout the hour and twenty minutes or so it lasts.”

Want a good story to listen to? Told for adults? You can listen to a sample and buy it here.

Happy Summer! And thanks, Mr. Brooks.

Beowulf: The Only One/Listening Sample

Beowulf: The Only One, an Odds Bodkin epic storytelling audio with music, will be published at https://www.oddsbodkin.net/shop/ Thanksgiving Day 2016. The 65-minute audio is a new bardic telling of the ancient Viking tale, the oldest known piece of literature in English.

With character voices for Beowulf, King Hrothgar of the Danes, Unferth, Wyglaf and Grendel the monster and his mother, the tale is scored throughout with original music on 12-string guitar.

The download is priced at $14.95.

Enjoy this audio sample! 3:25 minutes.

THE MONSTER’S VOICE/Beowulf:The Only One

Beowulf, the oldest known work of English literature, is about a man fighting monsters. Beowulf fights three of them over the course of the story. The first is Grendel, an ancient demon who is terrorizing the Viking Danes. Since he has no powers of speech, to create a character voice for Grendel took some experimenting, but in this prototype recording of Beowulf: The Only One, my hour-long audio story coming out later this fall, you can hear Grendel growl a few times and catch a whiff of his theme music. He’s a beast.
Enjoy.

 

BEOWULF: THE ONLY ONE/12-string guitar music

For Beowulf: The Only One, I play a 12-string guitar with a pick in a modified open E flat tuning. I’ve been devising music in this rare tuning for years now, and if you play the guitar, six or twelve, you’ll find that if you play a C chord in concert tuning (regular tuning) on my guitar, you’ll get a horrible sound. Same thing with every other regular chord. That’s because the fingerings in this tuning are unique to it, and the only way to find them is through exploration.

 
I’ve always thought of 12-string guitars as starships. For storytelling at least, they’re like a vehicle you can get in and take off with, traveling through interstellar clouds of moods. For Beowulf: The Only One, I’ve developed themes that I hope convey the scary beauty of this story. The Beowulf Theme, for instance, embodies the pathos of both the hero and his war-ravaged world. But it also contains hope, at least in Beowulf’s presence, otherwise the story is a pretty dark vision. Hope springs eternal. Still, nothing in human affairs has changed much since the times of Beowulf, other than technology, at least in this storyteller’s opinion.

 
Here’s rough-cut of Beowulf’s Theme:

 

 

 

I hope you enjoy it.

 

To find out about all my storytelling recordings with music, visit www.oddsbodkin.net.

Odds Bodkin

Music for BEOWULF: THE ONLY ONE, a bardic audio story

Want to hear some nice 12-string guitar music? Just a minute or so, but it’s in the play bar. It’s called Heorot, and it’s the theme I play while describing King Hrothgar’s mead hall in my upcoming audio story, Beowulf: The Only One. Heorot is the name of the Danish king’s hall, and it’s a happy place (this music is contented and happy) until Grendel the Demon shows up and starts eating people.

See if you like it.

There are plenty of other themes in the tale, and I’ll put up a few more as time permits. Enjoy.

Odds Bodkin

You can find other themes that accompany my stories at www.oddsbodkin.net.