Robin Harford meets storyteller Clare Viner beneath a flowering hawthorn tree in Devon to explore the living tradition of oral storytelling.

Clare shares how stories belong to everyone - not fixed texts handed down by celibate monks, but breathing, evolving things shaped by the teller's felt sense and relationship with land.

They discuss how patriarchy silenced women's stories, how rivers and plants carry their own narratives, and why giving yourself permission to tell an imperfect story is a radical act.

The episode closes with Clare's spellbinding retelling of Merlin and the Lady Nimue - a love story rooted in hawthorn, heart medicine, and the dreaming earth.

About Clare Viner

Clare Viner has been a storyteller for 26 years.

Her roots are personal. As a child, her grandfather wove fairy tales for her. That inheritance stuck, and eventually became a vocation.

She has told to audiences of every age and disposition: toddlers, teenagers, the elderly, festival goers. Clare has performed in the children’s tent at WOMAD for the last 15 years. She works without books or props, and no two tellings of a story are ever the same.

Her book, The Emerald Dragon and Other Magical Tales of the Blackdown and Quantock Hills, reimagines the folklore of two beloved British landscapes from the perspective of someone who trusts and loves the earth. It was funded by a DEFRA grant.

She was writer in residence for Connecting the Culm, a river conservation project that culminated in a four-day River Story Pilgrimage, walking and camping along the water's edge.

She runs workshops exploring the folklore of British wild animals and trees, including Spirit of Hare, Spirit of Deer, and others. Having once been terrified herself, she takes particular pleasure in guiding the terrified through the process of finding their own storytelling voice.

She takes old stories and dreams them new, again and again.

This Episode Is Brought To You By

- Robin Harford

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