Episode 67 - Special Edition Táin - Part 1

Part 1 of 3 of our special edition birthday telling of the Táin. This episode focuses on the build up of the army of Ireland, led by Queen Medbh, as they march on Ulster to get the Brown Bull of Cooley. Sorcha read somewhere once upon a time, that ‘An Táin Bó Culaigne’ was the tale that should be told after dark and in the dark half of the year. So, six years ago, in a small pub in Dublin we started telling the Táin. There were about 10 people there at the time. Each week the numbers grew and grew, and at the end of the tale, there were people crammed in, and listening from the stairwell outside the room. This year we are 6 years old as a group. And every year we celebrated by telling the Táin again, and each year we found a new way to tell it, or more details to enhance, or aspects to leave out as the case may be. It’s an epic, so it was possibly told in the winter to last the entire winter. We worked on a number of versions of this story, and ‘The Shadows of the Táin’ was the final script we came up with and premiered in Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin in collaboration with the Shadow Puppetry of ‘Flight of Fancy’. We toured this show over the years, and have had plans of performing it live again and again… but without live venues open, we decided to do something different with this script. This is something different. Sorcha is narrating this on her own this time, and Rurai O'Shea (the first musician we ever collaborated with) took this reading and added the soundscape and music to it as his lockdown project. And aren't we lucky to be able to collaborate with such an artist. Story by Aron and Sorcha Heagrty Narrated by Sorcha Hegarty Music and soundscape by Ruairi O’Shea Produced and edited by Ruairi O’Shea and Oisin Ryan Support for this podcast comes from our patrons. Find out more, or become a patron by going to: https://www.patreon.com/candlelittales http://candlelittales.ie/ https://open.spotify.com/show/2102WuUUe9Jl6cGXNwQEKf https://soundcloud.com/candlelittales https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/candlelit-tales-irish-mythology-podcast/ https://twitter.com/candlelit_tales?lang=en https://www.facebook.com/candlelittales/ https://www.instagram.com/candlelittales/ https://vimeo.com/user52850249 https://www.youtube.com/candlelittales #keepherlit #keephercandlelit #candlelittales #storytelling #livemusic #mythology #irishmythology #candlelittalespodcast #podcast