Bardskull
By Martin Shaw
A powerful fusion of memoir and myth by one of the great modern storytellers.
Publication date: February 2023
Pre-orderSigned First Edition Hardback
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Uncorrected Proof
Get to read Martin's groundbreaking book before everyone else – receive a signed, numbered proof copy six months pre-publication (followed by a signed first edition on publication).
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Bardskull Postcards
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Ciderskull Tankard
A first edition hardback signed by Martin plus a limited edition glass cider tankard engraved with the Bardskull image and six x 500 ml bottles of specially fermented Bardskull cider! (NB: Cider supplied within UK only)
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Manuscript Page
A first edition hardback signed by Martin, plus a handwritten page of the manuscript, which will include both text and illustration. A one-off original art work, produced on 150 gsm A4 art paper, signed and numbered by Martin.
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First Edition Hardback
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Two Skulls
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Audiobook
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Skull T-shirt
A first edition hardback signed by Martin, plus a limited edition black 100% cotton t-shirt, featuring Martin’s ‘Bardskull’ drawing, available exclusively from Unbound. Available in S, M, L, XL (size to be specified in post check-out email closer to the time of dispatch).
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Bardskull Prints
A first edition hardback signed by Martin plus your choice of one of four signed A4 machine prints – 'Bardskull Man'; 'Become the Tale of Your Name'; 'Seven Swans'; 'Old Kytna'. (Print to be specified in post check-out email closer to the time of dispatch).
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Bardskull Merch Bundle
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Dartmoor Launch Party
Two first edition hardbacks signed by Martin, plus two tickets to a real life launch featuring readings, music and cider in a Dartmoor venue. Date and address TBC (does not include travel).
LIMITED TO 30
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- 2 x Ebooks
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Patron
Your name on a dedicated page at the front of the book, personally thanked by Martin.
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- 10 x E-books
- 10 x First Edition Hardbacks, signed by Martin
- 10 x Bookmarks
- 1 x Manuscript page
- 4 x Launch party tickets
- 1 x Bardskull merch bundle

Sold out!
Story Divining
Martin will curate a story just for you and tell it. Nothing pre-planned or selected by Google but through the improvisational magic of conversation. You and he talk for a few minutes and he'll locate the fairy tale hidden within the chat. When the moment is right he'll tell it for you. 45 mins to an hour.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where can I get my book delivered to?
How do supporter names work?
Will the book and rewards that I receive look the same as the images shown on the Unbound website?
I defy you to look at a river and not see your fast escaping life.
Bardskull is the record of three journeys made by Martin Shaw, the celebrated storyteller and interpreter of myth, in the year before he turned fifty.
It is unlike anything he has written before. This is not a book about myth or story. It is a sequence of incantations and a series of battles.
For each of the three journeys, he walks alone into a forest in the heart of Dartmoor and waits.
I will sit under the hazel and sing my calling songs and see what comes. I am not gambling for crescendo, climax, coda. I’m just going to keep turning up.
No dreamcatchers, no showy wafts of Tibetan scents. No Green Man figurines. There’s just a middle-aged guy visiting a place, over and over. Shuffling in and out.
What arrives are stories – fragments of myth and folk tale that he has carried within him for decades: the deep myths of Dartmoor itself, tales from distant family members, Arthurian legend, folk tales from India, Persia, Lapland, the Caucasus and Siberia.
But these stories and their tellers don’t arrive as the bearers of solace or easy wisdom. They come to challenge, to undermine, to sow doubt.
There are so few handrails when we really get into the spirit-forest, so few. All the furies just bang into one another.
But gradually, the nighttime pummellings of his dreams and the daytime wrestling with memories and stories resolve themselves. By the end of the book, he has crawled back into deep time when Devon was an ocean floor, when the places we call England, Europe and Ireland were one. He has arrived at a place before and after story.
Underneath every single person in the world is a cave filled with unimaginable wonder.
Bardskull can be read as a fable, as a memoir, as autofiction, as an attempt to undomesticate myth.
It is all those things, but it doesn’t come from nowhere. It takes its place inside a tradition that connects Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell to D.H. Lawrence’s Apocalypse; Ted Hughes’s Moortown Diary to Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns; Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber to Sharon Olds’ Stag’s Leap and Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica to Nick Cave’s Sick Bag Songs.
It is a magnificent, unclassifiable work of the imagination.
Wonder is the world, without compare
Through feral tales and poetic exegesis, Martin Shaw makes you re-see the world.
DAVID KEENAN (author of Monument Maker)
Shaw encourages and illuminates the mythic in our own lives. He is a modern-day bard. MADELINE MILLER (author of The Song of Achilles)
In his hands language works as it is supposed to do and almost never does. His words seep straight out of the hill. CHARLES FOSTER (author of Being a Human)
Terrifically strange and thrilling. MELISSA HARRISON (author of All Among the Barley)
Shaw is a one off: his work is urgent and necessary PAUL KINGSNORTH (author of The Wake)
A true master. Martin Shaw is one of the very greatest storytellers we have.
ROBERT BLY (author of Iron John)
His work combines a magnificence of soul with a deft acuity of intellect… I am in awe.
JAY GRIFFITHS (author of Wild: An Elemental Journey)
Quick select rewards
Signed First Edition Hardback
PLUS:
- E-book
- Your name listed as a subscriber at the back of the book

Uncorrected Proof
Get to read Martin's groundbreaking book before everyone else – receive a signed, numbered proof copy six months pre-publication (followed by a signed first edition on publication).
LIMITED TO 60
PLUS:
- Ebook
- Bookmark
- Your name listed as a subscriber at the back of the book

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Martin Shaw
Martin Shaw is a writer, storyteller and teacher who lives on Dartmoor. He founded the Oral Tradition and Mythic Life courses at Stanford University, and is director of the Westcountry School of Myth in the UK.
He is the author of the award-winning Mythteller trilogy: A Branch from the Lightning Tree, Snowy Tower and Scatterlings. Recent books include Smokehole, Courting the Wild Twin (both published by Chelsea Green), All Those Barbarians, Wolf Milk, Cinderbiter (with Tony Hoagland) and his Lorca translations, Courting the Dawn (with Stephan Harding).
Dr Shaw has introduced thousands of people to mythology and how it penetrates modern life. For twenty years, he has been a wilderness rites of passage guide, working with at-risk youth, the sick, returning veterans and many women and men seeking a deeper life.
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BARDSKULL
The uproar in your hand I could never have predicted. Never corralled, sweet talked or defended myself against. I walked out one summer morning and barely ceased till St Georges Day of the next year. These accounts come from a place, Holne Chase, on Dartmoor in the far west of Britain.
It would be chicanery to tell you this has been crafted for your pleasure. It hasn’t. It would be a fiction to tell you I have absolute purchase on the encounter. When I dare pick the book up it seems like an extended incantation, at other times a series of battles. It often frightens me.
These are words from the rough, from the stomp. Things hurtled through me, old things,
And I tried to be convivial to such a battering of séance. I am not the same.
- 31st October 2021 A reading for All Hallow's Eve
I wanted you to have a first glimpse into what is - with your help - becoming Bardskull.
Here we find a hare hidden in the saddlebags of Gawain telling the tale of his encounter with the Green Knight. When the story is told, odd brooding's take over...
Martin These people are helping to fund Bardskull.
Catherine Keough
Monique Gaboury
Heather Blankenship
Francis Barton
Al Overton
Joseph Nutman
Nick Neame
Aoife Cragg
N P Ladkin
Troy Ivey
Helen Miller
Fiona de Wolfe
Neil Harrison
Stephen Ward
Liane Maitland
Faye Sharpe
Hugo Perks
Kathy Jones
Jonathan Seaman
John Hawley
James Roper
Robert Berry
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