#68: King Lir, with J.W. Surface

The Cru welcome writer J.W. Surface to the WriteLab Studios for this episode.  Stories feature a classic fantasy; a classic fairy tale; an imagined mythology; a true crime tale; and some limericks.  I guess it's a genre fiction evening?  Oh, and there are apples. So many apples. From The Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend, 1949 ed. Lir, King. The earliest known original of the king in Shakespeare’s King LEAR (1605), an ocean-god of early Irish and British legend. He figures in the romance The Fate of the Children of Lir as the father of FIONNUALA. On the death of Fingula, the mother of his daughter, he married the wicked Aoife, who, through spite, transformed the children of Lir into swans. Lir appears in the MABINOGION as Llyr and in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (c.1136) as Leir, the supposed founder of Leicester, from which later source Shakespeare derived his plot. Stories begin around the 15:30 mark.Like this weeks episode and wish you could read as well as listen? Subscribe to our Substack for a summary of our opening discussion, a story from the episode, and a writing prompt!  Be sure to follow us on Instagram (if that's your sort of thing). Please do send us an email with your story if you write along, which we hope you will do. Episodes of Radio FreeWrite are protected by a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0) license. All Stories remain the property of their respective authors.