The Morrígan: Complete Story of the Goddess of War, Fate and Prophecy | Irish Mythology for Sleep

The Morrígan: Complete Story of the Goddess of War, Fate and Prophecy | Irish Mythology for SleepA slow, quiet retelling of the story of the Morrígan, told from the beginning and made for falling asleep to.The whole story of the goddess of war, fate and prophecy, at a pace that's deliberately too slow to follow properly. That's the point. You're not meant to reach the end.She is difficult to pin down, and that appears to be deliberate. Sometimes she is one figure and sometimes three, sometimes a woman washing armour at a ford and sometimes a crow on a fencepost, and the old texts don't agree with each other about which. What she does is more consistent: she turns up before a battle and tells you how it's going to go, and by telling you, makes it happen. What follows is where she came from, the alliance she made on a riverbank on the eve of a war between two divine peoples, and the long quarrel with the greatest hero in Irish myth — she offered him something, he refused her without much courtesy, and she spent the rest of his life making sure he understood what that had cost. There's the shape-shifting fight in the river, the old woman with the cow, and the crow that lands on his shoulder at the end, which everyone watching immediately understood. She isn't cruel exactly. She just knows the ending already.But the point of this recording isn't really the story. It's the hour or two spent drifting through it. The voice stays low and even the whole way through. No music, no sound effects, nothing that rises or drops or suddenly arrives. Nothing in it is built to frighten you. Every sentence sits at roughly the same level as the one before it, so nothing ever pulls your attention back up to the surface.That's what makes it work on the nights when your head won't switch off. It's just interesting enough to give your thoughts something to hold, and slow enough that they let go of it on their own. You don't have to follow along. You don't have to remember any of it in the morning. If you drift off somewhere before the first battle and wake up much later, in the middle of something you've missed the start of, you've used this exactly the way it's meant to be used. 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, Irish mythology 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.