Jeffs ventures to show the reader a way to live upon that cliff’s edge with grace and perhaps even joy, through the celebration of unity that the monks used to create some of the most beautiful art of all ages.

An extraordinarily multidimensional work, moving seamlessly from creative retellings of the stories to explanations of the texts and where they came from, underpinned all the time by sound academic understanding. Taking the Exeter Book as a starting point, Jeffs retells some of the stories from our ancient ancestors. Via being Latin for road or path, meant that avia described the “wayless” flight of the birds around them.I imagine this is the sort of book, Professor Tolkien would have enjoyed reading and I can't wait to read some of the original sources mentioned in it. De har absolut beröringspunkter, men där Robertson vill skapa nya folksagor vill Amy Jeffs ge liv åt de gamla och återinföra deras relevans för en modern läsare - i detta är hon mycket framgångsrik. The first chapter opens with a ghost story, The Lament of Hos, in which a woman rises from her earthy resting place to revisit the site of her violent demise; there she was supposed to meet her lover, Ertae, but instead encountered a group of men, “their breath all drink and eels”, who beat and killed her. I was also interested in how you might extrapolate from that something of his behaviour – thinking how that childhood trauma might have impacted his actions as an adult and his own approach to parenting.

Old poetry and it's import for medieval society vague for modern uninitiated reader is still full of emotive humanity. In Wild, Amy Jeffs journeys – on foot and through medieval texts – from landscapes of desolation to hope, offering the reader an insight into a world at once distant and profoundly close to home.Had an amazing synchronicitous experience of , a day earlier, having been writing of the connections between murmurations and written language when the same odd linkage appeared here, which only made me love the book more.

What is most remarkable about Amy’s reimagining of this particular story is that it is depicted through the eyes of Bladud’s son, Prince Leir – Shakespeare’s King Lear – which adds another layer of complexity to the narrative as we think about what and who ‘Leir’ became in later life. This may result in small marks to the dustjacket and title page, please also bear in mind that each signature will be a little different from the one we show here. For me this gives the poems and tales far more immediacy and a way to relate to them more than reading a translation, no matter how good.There are places in Storyland that when I visited them, I thought ‘I’m so not surprised that this was a setting for a story, for a marvellous event’ in the same way you look at Bath on an autumn morning and you think ‘yeah, I get it’. Helpful commentaries elucidate on meanings and how the old poetry sheds light on a rich artistic culture in Medieval Britain, the medieval perspectives and understandings reflecting how they perceived the world they inhabit.