Story telling
For thousands of years we have clustered around fires and listened enthralled to oral storytellers entertaining us with their tales of long ago, stories handed down from the Gods, from the Elves, Dragons, Wizards and Witches and the Fae. Tales that have terrified, educated, warned and passed along wisdom forgotten by more mainstream education.
One of my great pleasures is to perform some of the traditional tales and stories from across our land, and I have now recorded a favourite selection of these: The Tinker's Tales.
My grandfather's father was a tinker, travelling across Lincolnshire, Leicestershire and Norfolk; making speciality cake tins for parties at the great country houses and mansions, and mending pots and pans and tools for the ordinary folk in the towns and villages and hamlets. The last of the great tradition of travellers and storytellers, the tinkers are all but gone from our modern society. Their spirit remains, channelling the spirit of the travelling minstrels, poets and entertainers back into the mists of time and our earliest histories. Maybe my great grandfather would have recognised some of the stories I've told - I like to think so.
The Tinker's Tales is a new and exciting project. The work has been recorded at Ashgrove Studios in Carmarthenshire: below is a picture taken during the recordings. I'm not sure what i was seeing, but it might have been a wall of sand falling on the Castle at Pennard... There are audio recordings of the collection of stories I regularly perform now. Some of these are available as CD s. Check them out!
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CD s for sale.
Volume 1 : The Tinker's Tales. The Fall of Pennard Castle is a story from Gower, South Wales, and tells what happened when the Lord of Gower refused to invite the Lord of The Elves to his wedding. The Dream of Macsen Wledig is a famous story from the Mabinogion, and both The Fairy Hill and The Farmer's Kitchen are stories from Ceredigion about the perils for mortals of dealing with the Fair Folk, or Fae Volume 2 : The Path to Enchantment. More from the Mabinogion, as the Lady of The Flowers meets her doomed lover, and other stories to cast a spell of enchantment by the fireside |
