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Bones and Keeps

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Bones and Keeps

By: Dena Bain Taylor
Narrated by: Dena Bain Taylor
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About this listen

The year is 542 and the great king Beowulf is midway in life between slaying the monster Grendel and his fatal battle with a dragon. He rules his kingdom on the west coast of Sweden wisely and gives rich gifts to his thanes, defends his keep and fills it with treasure.

But then his sister Skuld, the most powerful witch-queen of the Gautar people, pronounces his doom, just as a foreign woman arrives from the far south, escaping an Alexandria gripped in the plague that is destroying the Byzantine Empire.

Suddenly Beowulf is propelled into a battle for his life and kingdom, and into the wars of the gods where acts of love and betrayal shape the destiny of the worlds. Meticulously researched, the historical fantasy of Bones and Keeps immerses the listener in a time when gods and monsters walk the living world, when survival depends on the strength of a king’s arm, and the inscrutable forces of weird threaten the fall of gods and humanity alike.

©2020 Dena Bain Taylor (P)2023 Dena Bain Taylor Fiction Science Fiction Royalty Fantasy Dragons
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Bones and Keeps by Dena Bain Taylor is a tour de force of narrative control, compelling storytelling and imaginative vitality and power. It is intertextually based on the anonymous Old English epic poem, Beowulf, of which the eponymous royal hero is the main protagonist. It is beautifully, evocatively and engagingly read by the author herself.

She dramatically and convincingly brings to life the early medieval world of Scandia (Scandinavia) - while also historically contextualising it on the margins of the late Roman Empire in the West - with considerable literary skill, comprehensive descriptive detail, and a sensory, even cinematic, immediacy which endows her work with a felt verisimilitude. While she renders Bones and Keeps very listenable for 21st century readers, she still succeeds in preserving the (unsurprising) strangeness of the world it so imaginatively resurrects and reinvigorates.

This is a world and realm of gods and goddesses, of transfusing spirits, of magic, of witches, of the shades of the dead, and significantly of the Anglo-Saxon concept of Wyrd, which approximates to fate or destiny. It is also a macho, patriarchal world of frequent violence and war, of courage and heroism, of internecine strife, and of vengeance in pursuit of justice and the vindication of personal and familial honour, where enforceable state laws are nonexistent.

James Hanley.

Beowulf Reimagined.

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