How to inspire and enchant with magical words! Ever wanted to be a storyteller? To stand up and perform one of your own poems? To use magical words to bless, honour, heal or celebrate? The Bardic Handbook contains all you need to know to start you on the path of the Bard. An easy-to-follow, 12-month self-study program, with week-by-week exercises and mini-lessons about bardic lore, will lead you along the Way of Awen. The book is divided into 5 parts, corresponding to the elements of the Western Magical Tradition: Air, Fire, Water & Earth--with Spirit at the center. With an experienced bard as guide, you will learn * practical techniques and exercises * Bardic terminology * The Bardic Chair * on Being a 21st Century Bard * preparing for performance * how to run a Bardic Circle * also includes a Certificate of Initiation

The Bardic Book of Becoming is a warm, user-friendly, eclectic introduction to modern Druidry that invites you to take the first steps into the realms of magic and mystery. In this book you will be introduced to the various techniques and practices of a Druid in training. Written by Ivan McBeth, the cofounder of Vermont's Green Mountain School of Druidry, with Fearn Lickfield, the book incorporates lessons, visualizations, rituals, and magical stories. Many different activities and exercises are included that provide the reader with hands-on learning. Ivan also provides personal stories that demonstrate his own journey from spiritual seeker to Druid.

Original songs by "Hugin the Bard" accompanied by story, tale, or lore; each song with lyrics, chord charts, and lead sheets. Also includes a version of the Mabinogion, in English, translated from the Welsh.

Taliesin, Chief Bard of Britain and Celtic shaman, was a historical figure who lived in Wales during the latter half of the sixth century. His verse is established as a direct precursor to the Arthurian Legends--and Taliesin himself, is said to be the direct forebear to Merlin. The author presents completely new translations of Taliesin's major poems in their entirety, uncovering the meanings behind these great works for the first time.

This magisterial work links the literary and intellectual history of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Britain's overseas colonies during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to redraw our picture of the origins of cultural nationalism, the lineages of the novel, and the literary history of the English-speaking world. Katie Trumpener recovers and recontextualizes a vast body of fiction to describe the history of the novel during a period of formal experimentation and political engagement, between its eighteenth-century "rise" and its Victorian "heyday." During the late eighteenth century, antiquaries in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales answered modernization and anglicization initiatives with nationalist arguments for cultural preservation. Responding in particular to Enlightenment dismissals of Gaelic oral traditions, they reconceived national and literary history under the sign of the bard. Their pathbreaking models of national and literary history, their new way of reading national landscapes, and their debates about tradition and cultural transmission shaped a succession of new novelistic genres, from Gothic and sentimental fiction to the national tale and the historical novel. In Ireland and Scotland, these genres were used to mount nationalist arguments for cultural specificity and against "internal colonization." Yet once exported throughout the nascent British empire, they also formed the basis of the first colonial fiction of Canada, Australia, and British India, used not only to attack imperialism but to justify the imperial project. Literary forms intended to shore up national memory paradoxically become the means of buttressing imperial ideology and enforcing imperial amnesia.

Awaken the bard within in this inspiring journey into your creative potential. Expanding upon the foundation of The Bardic Handbook, this volume explores the transformations the bardic initiate must go through to become a fully-fledged Bard. This originally took 12 years of study in the Bardic Colleges - but communities need bards right now, bringing healing and hope with their words and music and so the training process is accelerated over 12 months, echoing the 12 years of Taliesin's journey from Gwion Bach to the Shining Brow. Extracts from the author's notebooks and journals over 20 years illustrate his own journey - showing how this ancient wisdom has been gleaned and validated by powerful personal experience. The Way of Awen is a way of living creatively.