Snowy Tower

The Mythteller trilogy, vol. 2 Foreword by Coleman Barks. In Snowy Tower Shaw gives a highly original telling of the grail epic Parzival. Dr Shaw claims the story as a great trickster tale of medieval Europe, offering a commentary that ranges from climate change to the notion of soul, erotic consciousness, what he calls “the hallucination of empire”, and a revisioning of the speech of the ancient bards. A daring work, Snowy Tower is the second in Shaw’s the Mythteller trilogy. It offers a connection to “the genius of the margins”; that the big questions of today will not be met by big answers but by a myriad of mythic associations. After the eclecticism of A Branch from the Lightning Tree, Snowy Tower is deepened by one central narrative. Praise for Snowy Tower: “Martin Shaw’s a conjurer, a thirteenth-century troubadour dropped into our midst. Snowy Tower animates a tale from a far-off place and far-off time into vibrant, immediate life. He breathes into his characters a beating pulse, agile speech, and bedazzling with. Catch him any way you can.” –Eric Utne, founder of The Utne Reader “Martin Shaw has hung around a great deal in the Otherworld. There is woodsmoke and fox fur in his thinking, and a wild mix of courage, stories and troubling ideas – Snowy Tower is a kind of outlaw language.” –Robert Bly, author of Iron John