Three supernatural tales, each told with ornate acoustic music, character voices and vocal effects. Odds Bodkin’s HEARTPOUNDERS: Halloween Tales of Horror.
The performance begins on Zoom at 7 pm EST on Friday, October 29, 2021. Includes an after-show chat with the artist.
Join Odds Bodkin on Zoom to enjoy four rollicking fairy tales for smart girls told with characters, narration and music.
The Wise Little Girl, Prezzemolina, The Tale of the Kittens and The Three Spinning Fairies. These are Bodkin’s best stories for smart girls.
Coming up next week on ZOOM. Get your tickets today!
Absolutely. Odds Bodkin has been doing it for forty years. Many of his current fans are young women in their twenties and thirties who still love his stories. They write to him often about how much his audio tales meant to them when they were growing up. And a good many of them are now young moms who visit his shop to buy these classic tales for their own daughters.
The Three Spinning Fairies is one such tale. Here’s a sample:
The Wise Little Girl is another. Here’s a sample:
Now, if you like, you can hear these tales in full for free on your Amazon Alexa, or, you can experience Odds Bodkin tell these and two other tales for girls live on Sunday March 7th, 2021. The show is at 5 pm EST and no matter where you are, you can tune in, because it’s on ZOOM.
A virtual event to celebrate International Women’s Day.
To learn more, click on the logo:
This is the version that made me absolutely fall in love with the Beowulf story, and really understand why it has become such a classic piece of literature. There is such life and emotion in the way Bodkin tells it, that you just can’t get from reading it alone. He takes it from being a dry, unsentimental piece of curriculum and spins it into a deeply moving journey.
I always find myself crying by the end of it.
Some say Homer was a sightless genius like John Milton. Milton dictated his three massive poems—The Divine Comedy—to an amanuensis who wrote them down. Homer, however, performed his poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, aloud and before live audiences. Scholars guess that Homer used character voices and lyre music during his shows to bring his tales to life. He lived in Ancient Greece circa 700 B.C.
While The Iliad is filled with horrifyingly vivid descriptions of battlefield carnage and details about what swords and spears can do to a human body, The Odyssey is more of a fantastical adventure. It features monsters, cannibals, enchantresses, drugged out Lotus Eaters and many-headed dragons. Much of it takes place out on the open sea as Odysseus wanders from island to island across the Mediterranean. Here, as his fleet is slowly destroyed and all his friends are killed, he becomes the last man standing after ten years of woe. Only he returns to his island of Ithaca alive.
Even then, things aren’t easy. He’s been gone twenty years and the sons of Ithaca have grown into rowdy, fatherless men.
It must have taken Homer many nights to recite his monumental works in their entirety. At some point scribes set down his famous words and what was until that point oral literature held in one man’s mind became written literature for the ages. The two epics have been translated into English, and I used Robert Fitzgerald’s version to map out the best of Odysseus’s adventures for modern listeners.
I’ll be performing my intro to the tale, THE ODYSSEY: BELLY OF THE BEAST in about a month, on ZOOM. The 70-minute show is sponsored by Grendel’s Den in Cambridge, MA. Tickets are $15. The date is Sunday, Sept. 20th at 7 pm EST.
Years ago, when I performed it at Dartmouth College, a professor wrote that my version is the closest thing we have to a Homeric performance.
This is the second in my three-part Greek myths for adults series on ZOOM. If you want to see what a Greek myth like this looks and sounds like, you’re welcome to listen to FALL OF THE TITANS, here on YouTube. I told this tale a couple of weeks ago.
You can feel your immense dragon wings folded flat against your mile-long body as you grind through the dark tunnels of Tartarus, Gaia’s subterranean womb. You, Typhon, are her secret killing machine, her ultimate monster. With your dragon heads and giant claws and your sheer immensity, she’s placed her last hopes for victory in you. Overhead, the war on Earth’s surface against the gods has been going on for ten years now, and Gaia is worried the Titans will soon be defeated. If that moment comes, she will free you through the Earth’s crust with one mission only: to swiftly grasp and kill the god Zeus. Only you, Typhon, are powerful enough to do it.
Zeus’s betrayal is especially bitter for Gaia, because it was she who saved him as a baby from Cronus, his father, who had devoured all Zeus’s siblings up until that point. It was she who had hidden newborn Zeus on Crete, far from Cronus’s seeking gaze. She’d secretly visited the young god and watched him grow up. He’d called her “grandmother dear,” and she’d loved that. In her wildest dreams she’d never imagined he was capable of such treachery.
He’d hidden his true powers from her all along.
Well, Typhon, now it is Gaia’s turn to be treacherous, because she has hidden you from Zeus. He has no idea you exist.
That will be a fatal mistake.
Each day this week Master Storyteller and Musician Odds Bodkin will tell a different music-filled story from his collection of tales for children.
The performances are at 12 noon Eastern Standard Time.
If you’re a mom or dad with kids at home during this scary time and you need a break, then sit the kids down for a story with wild characters, amazing sound effects and a live score on 12-string guitar.
Follow Odds Bodkin at
https://www.facebook.com/oddsbodkin/
and join him on April 2 at 12 noon EST.
Please share with friends and family!
Each day this week Master Storyteller and Musician Odds Bodkin will tell a different music-filled story from his collection of tales for children.
The performances are at 12 noon Eastern Standard Time.
If you’re a mom or dad with kids at home during this scary time and you need a break, then sit the kids down for a half hour of fun characters, amazing sound effects and a live score Celtic harp.
On Wednesday April 1st at 12 noon EST, he’ll perform The Elf of Springtime, a heartwarming Swedish folktale told with Celtic harp.
Follow Odds Bodkin at
https://www.facebook.com/oddsbodkin/
and join him on April 1st at 12 noon EST for this live show!
Please share with friends and family!
Each day this week at 12 noon Eastern Standard Time, Master Storyteller and Musician Odds Bodkin will tell a different music-filled story from his collection of tales for young children.
If you’re a mom or dad with kids at home during this scary time and you need a break, then sit the kids down for a half hour of wild characters, amazing sound effects and a live score on 12-string guitar.
Tomorrow, Monday March 30th , at 12 noon EST, he’ll perform The Little Shepherd, a completely absorbing Italian Fairy Tale.
Follow Odds Bodkin on Facebook.
That’s tomorrow, Monday March 30th at 12 noon EST.
Please share with friends and family!
18 full-length storytelling albums on a single flash drive.
ILIADMATIC: ODDS BODKIN BRINGS BARDIC STORYTELLING TO A TRANSFORMED GRENDEL’S DEN
Odds Bodkin will perform two long Viking myths with live music Friday, January 17, 2020 at 7 pm at Zinger’s in Milford, NH. The Gap Mountain Trio will open for the storyteller.
This follows his sold-out Beowulf show last week at Grendel’s Den in Cambridge, MA.
Bodkin’s show also features a fascinating scholarly exploration of Norse lore.
Come eat, drink and then settle in for an evening of adventure, humor and mythic wonder!
An adult performance; not recommended for children.
In young Danika’s river valley, her friends the deer have always kept the meadows clear of the dangerous brambles. If allowed to grow, these brambles produce long black thorns, like upright knives. But when, to impress Danika, the Duke launches a mass deer hunt and brings back more dead ones than the castle’s denizens can ever eat, all the animals who have survived the hunt escape across the Danube.
The Duke’s forest is now empty.
And the thorns begin to spread. The Duke comes to regret that.
Come listen to Odds Bodkin tell his original adult fairy tale with character voices and sound effects while sopranos Jazimina MacNeil and Sarah Shafer interweave Dvorak’s Moravian Duets throughout.
And hear an astonishing new Bodkin character voice—a bird who speaks in understandable chirps.
