A slow, quiet retelling of the story of Sleipnir, the horse with eight legs, made for falling asleep to.
The whole story of the strangest animal in Norse myth, told at a pace that's deliberately too slow to follow properly. That's the point. You're not meant to reach the end.
He exists because of a bad bargain. The gods had agreed to something they didn't want to pay for, and one of them — the one who was never entirely trustworthy and never entirely on anyone's side — went out to sabotage the work before the deadline arrived. What he did to stop it involved changing shape, and disappearing for a season, and coming back with a foal. That foal grew into the fastest thing in any of the nine worlds, grey, eight-legged, and the only animal that could carry a rider down into the land of the dead and back up again. What follows is where he came from, who rode him and where, the long journey made on his back to ask the dead for something they wouldn't give, and the fact that he turns up carved on stones a thousand years old, still with all eight legs, as though everyone simply agreed that this was how it was.
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. 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 near the beginning and wake up much later, on a road between two worlds, 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 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.
