The Ashgrove Reading Room

Old myths read slowly from the book, for sleep.

The Ashgrove Reading Room is a channel for listening and falling asleep. Each episode reads one section of an old text in order, slowly, from the primary sources: Gylfaginning chapter by chapter, the Iliad and the Odyssey book by book, Hesiod's Theogony, Malory, the Mabinogion branch by branch, the Kalevala rune by rune, Gilgamesh tablet by tablet, and the gods and places of Dungeons and Dragons lore in sourcebook order. Every section begins from a quoted line of the text, names the translation it comes from, says where other versions differ, and marks what is not known. Episodes run forty to sixty minutes and are later gathered into compilations of several hours. You do not need to follow along, and nothing depends on what came before. Scripts, images and the narrating voice are made with software, working from named public sources, and each script is checked against those sources before it is published. The voice is synthetic and is the same in every episode. Every episode description lists its sources with title, translator, a link to read the text free online, and licence links for any Wikipedia text used, including https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ for text under that licence.

Pieces