Trolls, Elves and Draugr: Complete Stories of Norse Mythic Creatures | Norse Folklore for Sleep
A slow, quiet journey through the creatures of the Norse world, made for falling asleep to.
Hours of trolls, elves and the walking dead, told at a pace that's deliberately too slow to follow properly. That's the point. You're not meant to reach the end.
The gods were never the whole population of that world. Most of it was filled with other things, and the people who told these stories lived a great deal closer to those than to any god. There were things in the rock and the mountains that were older than the gods and much less interested in people. There were beings of a different order altogether, beautiful and dangerous and best not bargained with, who could bring illness or luck depending on how they'd been treated. And there were the dead who didn't stay buried — heavy, swollen, still guarding what they'd owned in life, and far harder to deal with than any ghost, because they had a body. What follows is where all of it came from, what people believed about it, and what they did about it: the offerings left out, the ways a grave was built, and the precautions that had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with getting through the winter.
But the point of this recording isn't really the creatures. It's the hour or two spent drifting through them. The voice stays low and even the whole way through. No music, no sound effects, nothing that rises or drops or suddenly arrives. Nothing in it is built to frighten you. 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 out in the mountains and wake up much later, deep in another story entirely, 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.
