1. ODYSSEUS - 40'42"

2. BEOWULF - 30'19"

Recorded & edited by Peter Kennedy & first published on Folktrax cassettes 1975.

These are both stories that I have enjoyed in my own childhood and have carried for years, half remembered, but to jog my memory I read through the Penguin classic translations: HOMER THE ODYSSEY translated by E.V.Rieu (1946) and BEOWULF translated by Michael Alexander (Penguin 1973). Then I left the texts and let the stories ferment, the newly clear narrative line with the old associations, and out of this mixture came the stories as they're told here. I make no apology for my wanderings from the original - that is he right of all story-tellers. I have tried to keep certain qualities: the vigour and momentum of "a good yarn" in Odysseus and the density of language in BEOWULF with its alliterations and internal rhymes.

For Children there are fine re-tellings of the stories from the Odyssey by James Reeves, Roger Lancelyn-Green, Philippa Pearce and Robert Graves. And of Beowulf by Rosemary Sutchiffe (DRAGON-SLAYER), Robert Nye (BEE HUNTER), Ian Seraillier & Kevin Crossley-Holland.

HUGH LUPTON was born in 1952, and grew up in Cambridgeshire. Since the early seventies he has lived 'n Norfolk. - "I became interested in storytelling as a result of other interests gradually drawing together and overlapping. I've always (or nearly always) been a writer - of both prose and poetry - and, especially, I've always been intrigued by the sound of words, by the power of evocation, inherent in the spoken word. Then, when I was about eighteen, I discovered folk music - a revelation - and I realised that there was a whole heritage of music and poetry that had depended for its survival, not on the written word or musical notation, but on the mouth, the ear and the memory. A heritage which, in its passage through the generations, had come refined, had been made universal. 1 wanted to make myself part of the process of folk song. Then, later again, I got involved with the theatre - street theatre, pub theatre, puppet theatre - and increasingly I found myself moving towards a fundamental theatre, a primary theatre, where someone with something to tell meets those who will listen to him. These three strands converged and merged and, since the late seventies, story-telling has been my main occupation. Some books that I have found useful, either directly or indirectly, in relation to these stories are:

THE WHITE GODDESS Robert Graves (Faber 1961); THE PENGUIN BOOK OF ORAL POETRY ed.Ruth Finnegan (Penguin I 978); ORAL POETRY Ruth Finnegan (Cambridge Univ.Press 1977); STORY-TELLING Eileen Colwell (Bodley Hlead 1980); LEAF AND GRASS J.R.R.Tolkien (Unwin 1964); THE HERO Lord Raglan (Methuen 1936); THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES Joseph Campbell (Secker & Warburg); FOUR AGES OF MAN Jay Macpherson (Macmillan 1963); THE GOD BENEATH THE SEA & GOLDEN SHADOW Leon Garfield, Edward Blishen (Corgi 1977); THE LOST GODS OF ENGLAND Brian Branston (Thames & Hudson 1957); THE LITERATURE OF THE ANGLO SAXONS George Anderson (Princetown Univ.Press 1966)

See also from HUGH LUPTON:

FTX- 304 FEE FIE FO FUM: JACK AND THE THREE GIANTS; PIRICHAN PICH & PIRICHAN MOR; THE OLD WITCH; APRIL AND THE SNOWMAN

FTX-306 THE HERO RETURNS (TWO MYTHIC STORIES)