Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: The Complete Story of the Round Table’s Strangest Quest | Arthurian Legend for Sleep

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: The Complete Story of the Round Table’s Strangest Quest | Arthurian Legend for SleepA slow, quiet retelling of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, made for falling asleep to.It opens with the best entrance in English literature. A court in the middle of a Christmas feast, and a man rides straight into the hall on horseback — enormous, entirely green, holding an axe in one hand and a branch of holly in the other — and proposes a game. He'll take one blow from anyone brave enough, on the condition that he gets to return it in a year's time. Somebody accepts. And then the green man picks his own head up off the floor, tucks it under his arm, reminds the room where to find him, and rides out.What follows is not what you'd expect from a set-up like that. Most of the poem is not about the axe at all. It's about the year of dread in between, a long winter ride north through country that gets emptier as it goes, and then three days in a warm castle with a host who leaves each morning to hunt and a wife who comes to Gawain's room while he's gone. Three hunts, three visits, an agreement to exchange whatever each of them gains during the day. That's where the real test is, and the axe at the end is only the accounting.It survives in one manuscript, by a poet whose name nobody knows, and it's the only Arthurian story where the hero fails at something small and spends the rest of his life wearing a reminder of it.The recording itself is the usual thing. A low, even voice, no music, no sound effects, nothing that rises or drops or suddenly arrives. Slow enough that following along stops feeling necessary somewhere in the first twenty minutes. If you drift off at the Christmas feast and surface somewhere on the road north, that's the intended use. Most people don't make it past the first half hour, and the rest will still be here tomorrow night.Put it on, turn the volume down, and let it go on without you.Mythology & Folklore for Sleep — long, calm retellings of Greek myths, Norse legends, Egyptian tales, Hindu epics, Chinese classics, Arthurian legend and old folklore from around the world, made for insomnia and the hours when you can't sleep. Bedtime stories for adults, told in a slow, quiet voice. New episodes every day.