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’.* *SPOILER END*

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.