What do you think?
Rate this book
Bardskull
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 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 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.
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 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.
379 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 2, 2023
41 people are currently reading
349 people want to read
About the author
Martin Shaw
22 books385 followersDr Martin Shaw is an acclaimed teacher of myth. Author of the award-winning Mythteller trilogy (A Branch from the Lightning Tree, Snowy Tower, Scatterlings), he founded the Oral Tradition and Mythic Life courses at Stanford University, whilst being director of the Westcountry School of Myth in the UK.
He has introduced thousands of people to mythology and how it penetrates modern life. For twenty years Shaw 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.
His translations of Gaelic poetry and folklore (with Tony Hoagland) have been published in Orion Magazine, Poetry International, Kenyon Review, Poetry Magazine and the Mississippi Review.
Shaw’s most recent books include The Night Wages, Cinderbiter, Wolf Milk, Courting the Wild Twin, All Those Barbarians, Wolferland and his Lorca translations, Courting the Dawn (with Stephan Harding). His essay and conversation with Ai Weiwei on myth and migration was released by the Marciano Arts foundation.
For more on Martin Shaw’s work:
cistamystica.com | drmartinshaw.com | schoolofmyth.com | martinshaw.substack.com
He has introduced thousands of people to mythology and how it penetrates modern life. For twenty years Shaw 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.
His translations of Gaelic poetry and folklore (with Tony Hoagland) have been published in Orion Magazine, Poetry International, Kenyon Review, Poetry Magazine and the Mississippi Review.
Shaw’s most recent books include The Night Wages, Cinderbiter, Wolf Milk, Courting the Wild Twin, All Those Barbarians, Wolferland and his Lorca translations, Courting the Dawn (with Stephan Harding). His essay and conversation with Ai Weiwei on myth and migration was released by the Marciano Arts foundation.
For more on Martin Shaw’s work:
cistamystica.com | drmartinshaw.com | schoolofmyth.com | martinshaw.substack.com
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
August 15, 2023
Sometimes, I think I’ll finish a book, less out of the desire to really be done with it than to make a practical concession to the stacks of current and upcoming books threatening my well-being on an increasing basis as they grow taller and more wobbly.
In the case of this book, the annoying thing is that once I’d finished it I wanted to continue to live with it (maybe even to begin again) and so I’ve mostly just made myself sad by now obligating myself to move on to something else, while also not reducing the size of my book stack. There are books that give me a bit of regret as I move on, but only a very short list of books that really, literally cannot leave the bedside, because at least their physical presence mistily re-invokes the experience of reading them, and assures me I can dip back in anytime I like.
This is a very winding path through the woods, winking and slipping half seen, and I was surprised when it came out in a place that was just right, even has a sense of resonance that confirms that this is itself a story of mythic truth.
In the case of this book, the annoying thing is that once I’d finished it I wanted to continue to live with it (maybe even to begin again) and so I’ve mostly just made myself sad by now obligating myself to move on to something else, while also not reducing the size of my book stack. There are books that give me a bit of regret as I move on, but only a very short list of books that really, literally cannot leave the bedside, because at least their physical presence mistily re-invokes the experience of reading them, and assures me I can dip back in anytime I like.
This is a very winding path through the woods, winking and slipping half seen, and I was surprised when it came out in a place that was just right, even has a sense of resonance that confirms that this is itself a story of mythic truth.
January 10, 2025
Shaw is the kind of writer who beckons, Strider-like, from the dark side of the pub because he’s “got somethin’ to tell you”, only to drape his arm over you and have you both disappear into his overcoat of stories. Bardskull’s an expansive, introspective work. I went over to the dark side of the pub, I felt the weight of Shaw’s kind arm, and came up leagues away – and the world seemed a little more magical and greener.
April 17, 2024
good but i dont think i got it
April 24, 2025
Wow. Just wow. This incantatory exploration of how myths act and interact in the natural world and the subconscious mind was a dream-like submergence in the mind of wild wordsmith. A combination of Joseph Campbell, Dylan Thomas, RobertMcFarland, and some rougher beast. So overwhelming that I will have to listen to it repeatedly. It was such a total immersion that I have very little analytical to say about it.
September 6, 2023
What’s in a bard’s skull? A topography of lands and dreams and stories and mythic figures from Martin Shaw’s local Devonian story-hunting ground and across Britain to as far away as Crete, Africa, Scandinavia, Siberia. Courted, incanted, summoned, they come to inspire, converse with and possess the bard.
The book takes the form of three ritual journeys in the Devonian landscape wherein Shaw offers up physical gifts and storytelling to court the land into opening, conversing, to spilling forth the visions he and the world need to hear.
It differs from his previous publications in its recording of raw thoughts and experiences rather than more refined reflections on mythic material. Sometimes this leads to brilliance and at others borders on self indulgent rant. There are a few pokes at ‘pagans’ and ‘eco-hippies’ some might find offensive.
The first journey leads along the river Durius and tales include ‘Vita Merlini’ and ‘Rhiannon of the Horses.’ Merlin comes swimming up his local watercourses ‘good rivers all’ but full of ‘effluent’ he ‘drank sloughed off the fields’ and puked up ‘outside Taunton services’ protesting about being reduced to an ‘archetype’. Shaw agrees he is clearly ‘not fucking Gandalf.’
At the end is a particularly striking scene during which Shaw is called to crawl into the ‘pitch-black belly’ of a ‘butchered horse’ by Childe the Hunter (a character from Dartmoor’s legends who got lost hunting through the snow and slew his horse and climbed inside it to keep warm but no avail).
This drives Shaw into his next journey - a one hundred and one night vigil in a ‘nest’ ‘in a thirty foot circle, perimeter articulated by flour and whisky’ in a Dartmoor grove with a ‘little hazel bush’ in the middle where he sits and calls.
What he seeks are stories not for a ‘horse time’ but for a ‘wolf time’. This leads to his possession by old man Vainamoinen, a dialogue with his great-great uncle Hamer Broadbent, a Christian missionary in Russia, and his ‘big dream’, his ‘great, lumbering fuck of a dream’ of Wolferland - Doggerland in the shape of a wolf (some of this is recorded in his previous book of that name).
This section ends with an Old Testament style vision and nine words that will ever be imprinted on his mind that lead to his conversion to Christianity.
Throughout Shaw is haunted by a rider on a ridge but he does his best not to look. ‘I don’t have time for this… Horseman pass by.’ He appears again talking backwards and is warded off - Shaw isn’t one for courting dark things.
The final journey leads up to Big Rock and singings of the songlines of Devon and Shaw’s final taking of every story he has ever told for a walk and offering them up with myrhh, henna blossoms, a vineyard, his ‘plait, a foot of hair cut away’ as a grand finale resulting in a final vision. And what does he see?
*SPOILER ALERT* ‘A great gathering of humans and animals… all the originals of this place… And suddenly, there he is. The rider. My teacher. The one who has stalked me this whole time. And finally he speaks. And finally I understand. What was dark sound has become new wine.’
This passage gave me goose bumps. It reminded me shiveringly of my first meeting with my patron God, Gwyn ap Nudd, an otherworldly huntsman. Shaw never reveals who this rider, his teacher is, but he is led not to devotion to a pre-Christian deity but to ‘crawling into God’.*
This book is highly recommended to all who are not only lovers of myths and stories but wish to enter into them and be initiated by the figures within on a deeper level. It speaks of the trials and tribulations and triumphs of courting old tales, of holding vigils, of honouring the land, of awakening its songlines.
To me it forms the grand finale of a series of books charting Shaw’s life and work as an animistic mythteller before his conversion to Orthodox Christianity.
*Shaw’s conversion to Orthodox Christianity, like his friend, Paul Kingsnorth’s, came as a big shock to me. Whilst I totally understand their being claimed by Jesus their choosing to convert to a black and white religion with binary theology that has oppressed countless peoples and their traditions and stories and deities is beyond my comprehension.
The book takes the form of three ritual journeys in the Devonian landscape wherein Shaw offers up physical gifts and storytelling to court the land into opening, conversing, to spilling forth the visions he and the world need to hear.
It differs from his previous publications in its recording of raw thoughts and experiences rather than more refined reflections on mythic material. Sometimes this leads to brilliance and at others borders on self indulgent rant. There are a few pokes at ‘pagans’ and ‘eco-hippies’ some might find offensive.
The first journey leads along the river Durius and tales include ‘Vita Merlini’ and ‘Rhiannon of the Horses.’ Merlin comes swimming up his local watercourses ‘good rivers all’ but full of ‘effluent’ he ‘drank sloughed off the fields’ and puked up ‘outside Taunton services’ protesting about being reduced to an ‘archetype’. Shaw agrees he is clearly ‘not fucking Gandalf.’
At the end is a particularly striking scene during which Shaw is called to crawl into the ‘pitch-black belly’ of a ‘butchered horse’ by Childe the Hunter (a character from Dartmoor’s legends who got lost hunting through the snow and slew his horse and climbed inside it to keep warm but no avail).
This drives Shaw into his next journey - a one hundred and one night vigil in a ‘nest’ ‘in a thirty foot circle, perimeter articulated by flour and whisky’ in a Dartmoor grove with a ‘little hazel bush’ in the middle where he sits and calls.
What he seeks are stories not for a ‘horse time’ but for a ‘wolf time’. This leads to his possession by old man Vainamoinen, a dialogue with his great-great uncle Hamer Broadbent, a Christian missionary in Russia, and his ‘big dream’, his ‘great, lumbering fuck of a dream’ of Wolferland - Doggerland in the shape of a wolf (some of this is recorded in his previous book of that name).
This section ends with an Old Testament style vision and nine words that will ever be imprinted on his mind that lead to his conversion to Christianity.
Throughout Shaw is haunted by a rider on a ridge but he does his best not to look. ‘I don’t have time for this… Horseman pass by.’ He appears again talking backwards and is warded off - Shaw isn’t one for courting dark things.
The final journey leads up to Big Rock and singings of the songlines of Devon and Shaw’s final taking of every story he has ever told for a walk and offering them up with myrhh, henna blossoms, a vineyard, his ‘plait, a foot of hair cut away’ as a grand finale resulting in a final vision. And what does he see?
*SPOILER ALERT* ‘A great gathering of humans and animals… all the originals of this place… And suddenly, there he is. The rider. My teacher. The one who has stalked me this whole time. And finally he speaks. And finally I understand. What was dark sound has become new wine.’
This passage gave me goose bumps. It reminded me shiveringly of my first meeting with my patron God, Gwyn ap Nudd, an otherworldly huntsman. Shaw never reveals who this rider, his teacher is, but he is led not to devotion to a pre-Christian deity but to ‘crawling into God’.*
This book is highly recommended to all who are not only lovers of myths and stories but wish to enter into them and be initiated by the figures within on a deeper level. It speaks of the trials and tribulations and triumphs of courting old tales, of holding vigils, of honouring the land, of awakening its songlines.
To me it forms the grand finale of a series of books charting Shaw’s life and work as an animistic mythteller before his conversion to Orthodox Christianity.
*Shaw’s conversion to Orthodox Christianity, like his friend, Paul Kingsnorth’s, came as a big shock to me. Whilst I totally understand their being claimed by Jesus their choosing to convert to a black and white religion with binary theology that has oppressed countless peoples and their traditions and stories and deities is beyond my comprehension.
Read
October 9, 2025I am still listening to this Kobo Audio version, although I reserve that for road trips, or for walking in the woods. This is a book that requires patience, and 10 minutes here or there doesn't help out the reader or allow the author's voice a chance to develop. Dr Martin Shaw is the narrator and I can absolutely picture his being seated in front of a large campfire at night telling us these stories and ponderings.
This book is many things, so many that it's hard to nail down. Fable? Fairy tale? Memoir of a type? Attempt to undomesticate myth (as others have said)? Whatever it is, it is almost impossible to nail down this work of imagination that is simply magnificent. I'm about 70% through and am looking forward to making the appropriate time to complete this.
This book is many things, so many that it's hard to nail down. Fable? Fairy tale? Memoir of a type? Attempt to undomesticate myth (as others have said)? Whatever it is, it is almost impossible to nail down this work of imagination that is simply magnificent. I'm about 70% through and am looking forward to making the appropriate time to complete this.
May 17, 2025
Once again, with Martin Shaw, I am unsure if I "got it" and will need to re-read and re-listen. I found myself crying in places that absolutely shocked me. I felt like the author was gazing into my deepest depths and bringing me to the forefront and saying, "LOOK!" So, for that, I am thankful and perplexed. Also, when I finished, I freely ate an entire baguette with real KerryGold butter on it which being from Los Angeles and a woman in my 50's, is absolute taboo and yet I did it in complete freedom and joy. This, I do attribute to this book, somehow.
August 31, 2024
I thought from the write ups that this sounded interesting. But it is really someone who appears to be on I don't know what writing down the first thing that comes into his head. I could not finish it and remain sane. So I didn't and I did! Probably one star would suffice but I gave it two to recognise that I could be wrong!
November 2, 2024
This is a very unusual and striking book blending the personal, the ancient and mythic. Fantastic storytelling of old folk tales and brought into focus and into rhythm with modern life by framing them with experimental, raw writing, reflections and poetry. It took a moment to get used to it but I loved this book and might need to delve back in to think more about the stories.
June 3, 2025
Martin Shaw is the closest thing to a living Bard! Beautiful and poetic with the weight of a mystic rhythm that's usually only found in children's stories these days. Can't wait for his next book on nature's liturgy. There is some foul language in here and I'm hoping his next is cleaner so that I can show it to more people.
November 17, 2023
An intriguing book, enthralling and riveting. It kept me reading and my mind was full of visions and myths.
Loved it
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine
Loved it
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine
March 29, 2023
Unique. Dreamy. Intimate. Like walking through change with a creative soul.
June 20, 2023
Just can’t get into the writing style.
January 20, 2024
Don't mourn the cut flower where the deep root thrives.
Also found out the ppl of Ireland are overdue morphing into one homogeneous wolf so that's something nice to look forward to
Also found out the ppl of Ireland are overdue morphing into one homogeneous wolf so that's something nice to look forward to
February 2, 2024
I loved this, but it is not for everyone.
February 9, 2024
Fucking fabulous as usual. Delightfully more autobiographical than his other offerings. I ate every single syllable right up and am left craving more.
February 19, 2024
This is one of the most remarkable books I've ever read. Life changing.
July 30, 2024
This book. This book. This book.
December 16, 2024
I really enjoyed this book! It's a bit difficult to follow at times, but it is beautifully written. :) It felt good for the soul.
August 22, 2023
Shuddering, thrilling, soul-biting
I don't know what to do with this. Which is probably as it should be. I feel like I've been gifted a wine-soaked breath from an old shaman, giddy and dark and harsh and bright with something real, so real, tearing me from my carefully riveted tent that is my identity and life.
These stories, falling like a constant cascade of arrows and rain and nutfall from holy trees, bring insights and memories, glimpses of the soul of the Shaw.
I wonder what mine are. Strangely, I'm caught up by the same ghosts, in love with the same yearning, drenched in my own childhood readings of all the same myths. But like a true teacher, Shaw doesn't proselitize from a passive pulpit. He crawls out through the blood and bone of a sacrifical horse in a thunderstorm, bleeding his own libations, and become a flickering icon of the passage of gods through his person. I wish more teachers could be fired, all those stiff and propriety-minded professors who keep ideas carefully trimmed and their philosophies manicured and manacled, so that students can warm but not burn themselves.
Shaw leaps into the fire, and calls us in. We need more shamans, not teachers. We need wild men who are broken and drunk with reality like this, calling us because they truly see us.
Even though this odyssey of standing still lasts a hundred days, the book never stops moving. It races, like the planet blazing past Shaw as he sits on a tump, opening himself. Time bleeds into itself, and becomes kairos again. Time fades and meaning reasserts itself. We can unhook ourselves from all the fakery and vagaries and vagueries of being 'mature' and responsible, and shiver with him in the dark Christmas morning.
This is a modern day sequel to a Christmas Tale, where a young Scrooge is replaced with a young Jim Hawkins, a young prophet who's ear wakes in the night to a canticle of owls and angels, and the ghosts and gods from out of time.
This has been one of the best things I've ever read, and I don't know where it goes in my mind's museum of happy things. I just need to leave it in the middle of the floor.
Right there, where it falls, and walk around it. Over and over again. It's a key. Something is unlocking.
I don't know what to do with this. Which is probably as it should be. I feel like I've been gifted a wine-soaked breath from an old shaman, giddy and dark and harsh and bright with something real, so real, tearing me from my carefully riveted tent that is my identity and life.
These stories, falling like a constant cascade of arrows and rain and nutfall from holy trees, bring insights and memories, glimpses of the soul of the Shaw.
I wonder what mine are. Strangely, I'm caught up by the same ghosts, in love with the same yearning, drenched in my own childhood readings of all the same myths. But like a true teacher, Shaw doesn't proselitize from a passive pulpit. He crawls out through the blood and bone of a sacrifical horse in a thunderstorm, bleeding his own libations, and become a flickering icon of the passage of gods through his person. I wish more teachers could be fired, all those stiff and propriety-minded professors who keep ideas carefully trimmed and their philosophies manicured and manacled, so that students can warm but not burn themselves.
Shaw leaps into the fire, and calls us in. We need more shamans, not teachers. We need wild men who are broken and drunk with reality like this, calling us because they truly see us.
Even though this odyssey of standing still lasts a hundred days, the book never stops moving. It races, like the planet blazing past Shaw as he sits on a tump, opening himself. Time bleeds into itself, and becomes kairos again. Time fades and meaning reasserts itself. We can unhook ourselves from all the fakery and vagaries and vagueries of being 'mature' and responsible, and shiver with him in the dark Christmas morning.
This is a modern day sequel to a Christmas Tale, where a young Scrooge is replaced with a young Jim Hawkins, a young prophet who's ear wakes in the night to a canticle of owls and angels, and the ghosts and gods from out of time.
This has been one of the best things I've ever read, and I don't know where it goes in my mind's museum of happy things. I just need to leave it in the middle of the floor.
Right there, where it falls, and walk around it. Over and over again. It's a key. Something is unlocking.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews