<p class="western"><span style="color: #4a4a4a;"><span style="font-family: Poppins, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">his is the tiniest bit embarrassing. I have been reading stories since I was three and telling them since I was thirty-three. I read the Bible twice when I was thirteen and fourteen and a decent translation of the Koran when I was sixteen. Most of the Grimm&rsquo;s stories, the Hans Cristian Andersons and the French romances are familiar to me as are nearly all of the Sufi Nasrudin tales and the 1001 Nights. Katherine Briggs&rsquo; two heavy volumes of A Dictionary of British Folk Tales have been my bedside reading for years.<br /><br />Yet our own local Mabinogion, on which Hugh&rsquo;s Assembly of the Severed Head is based, had passed me by. In the same way that I responded if someone mentioned the Panchatantra I would murmur, &ldquo;Oh yes, I know of it, of course&hellip;..&rdquo; and gently steer the conversation in another direction. It could have been the problems with the translations or the complexities of the Welsh or Hindi names that deterred me from studying them but there were so many other tales from which to choose that I lazily ignored these classic and venerable tomes. The Mabinogion? I could hardly pronounce it let alone spell it.<br /><br />Hugh sent me a copy of The Assembly of the Severed Head to review and I read it. From the moment that Dafydd found the first severed head I was spellbound. The discovery of the massacre at the Bardic School and the demands of the invading English King John set the tensions and conflicts for this frame of the ancient Welsh fables. When Cian Brydydd Mawr, the chief Bard, was discovered badly wounded he was nursed back to health although the wound and his age would take him soon. Before the killings at the school he had been telling and passing on &lsquo;the Matters&rsquo;; The Four Branches of the Mabinogi. With the deaths of his students and his own health failing it is now time to have the old tales written down for the first time.<br /><br />A Christian scribe is supplied by a local chief; vellum and an audience (including a woman at Cian&rsquo;s request) are found. So begins the telling and transcribing of the old stories and the voice with which Cian speaks will be familiar to anyone who has witnessed Hugh Lupton telling in action. It is lyrical and poetic, simple and engaging, sweet and romantic, commanding attention by being both visceral and humorous.<br /><br />Not knowing where or how to start a book review can be due to a number of widely differing factors. The work may not be to your taste or be badly written. It may be that the subject is of no interest to you or written in a style that you find incomprehensible. But the most difficult book to review is the one with which you have fallen in love. Critical faculties fade away and the review takes on the gushing flowery prose of a romantic author of a chic-lit. So what to do? Simple. Just get in my trusty Skoda and footle up the motorways for about two hundred miles on October the thirty-first and I will be able to hear Hugh in action in the town hall in Aylsham. Which I did.<br /><br />It was there during the after show talk that I realised several important facts about this work and storytelling in general. That one of the favourite techniques of the best stories in the world is &lsquo;framing&rsquo; and that by putting one tale inside another the listener or reader is lead gently but inexorably further away from the real world. And not simply one tale encased in another; sometimes there are as many as four or five layers of frames rather like the endless mirrors at Versailles. An early example is, of course, the One Thousand and One Nights in which the character Scheherazade narrates a set of tales (most often fairy tales) to the Sultan Shahriyar over many nights. And many of Scheherazade's tales are also frame stories, such as the Tale of Sindbad the Seaman and Sindbad the Landsman being a collection of adventures related by Sindbad the Seaman to Sindbad the Landsman. The most frames I have ever heard in one story was &lsquo;The Saragossa Manuscript&rsquo; from Micheal Dacre.</span></span></span></p>