The Art of Misdirection
Sunday Stories: The Sorcerer and the Orphan
Free to register: Trailing Beauty with Martin Shaw
Hello friends, another new – to me – folk tale this week. I would have heard a version of this years ago by the mighty Robin Williamson and gusts of it around various storytelling festivals at the beginning of this century. See what you think. I recount the tale then add a few thoughts at the end. It’s one of those stories you find all over the place, and many-named. Keep an eye out for the moment you keep returning to. There’s a lot going on just packed into a few sentences. The way we read these stories in books is often a kind of shorthand: a traditional storyteller would often wheeze and expand and twist and turn to make the tale as chewy as was needed on that particular night, and audience, and the positioning of the moon in the sky.
It’s fun and a little wild to present something barely glimpsed by me-myself as the teller of the thing. The next stage would be to find a backroom of a tavern somewhere and put the story to work in front of a gaggle of folks. That may well be exactly what is about to happen, but you heard it here first – this telling at least! Good cheer to you on this very Sunday.
I am delighted to say Bardskull is just out in paperback! We will soon have copies to sell at my small press, Cista Mystica – so watch this space for a soon-to-be-live link.
Listen to Sunday Stories, The Sorcerer and the Orphan: