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Introduction to 'Letters and Legends'
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Letters and Legends. I'm your host, Trevor Malouf. This show is about history, literature, mythology, and everything in between, with a comedic twist. Here's a preview from our first upcoming episode.
Discussing 'The Brendan Voyage'
00:00:18
Speaker
OK, we're here for a nice conversation about Tim Severin's The Brendan Voyage. We're joined by Zab Gerard.
00:00:30
Speaker
And Andy Hughes. Hello. And Andy, I'd like to hear how we first as a crew discovered the Severn story. It was our own voyage of discovery, wasn't it?
Discovering Tim Severin
00:00:48
Speaker
You had a book that was called The Sinbad Voyage, and on the cover was this unbelievable picture of a sailing ship in the sunset. And I just remember thinking, what is this? And I think you and I were both fascinated with this book, and it had all these pictures. And we read about it, and we read that it was made by this guy, Tim Severin. There were these pictures of him with a beard. He kind of looked like Phil Collins in the 70s.
00:01:16
Speaker
And he was under the deck of his ship, pouring over his maps. And I had this book on loan from you, I want to say, for like five years before I actually read it. At least a couple years, because it was just so amazing just to have. And I just was like, I don't know if I've ever actually read this. And then I finally did read it, and we talked about it. And then over the years, you and I both just got really into him.
Severin's Historical Recreations
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Speaker
And The Sinbad Voyage had, if you like,
00:01:44
Speaker
Tim Severn look at these other books and we're like there are other books there are other voyages and it opened this whole world and one of the things I really want to mention is that like nobody really talks about this about Tim Severn like in modern life you don't really hear it that much but I'm just like so amazed that he's not more well known considering what he did and we can
00:02:09
Speaker
certainly talk about the absurdity of some of this. But like, yeah, he was an explorer and he would, or adventurer, I guess, and he would make recreations of famous or mythological ships and go on these different voyages. And yeah, Trevor's doing a boat sign with his hand.
Impact on Historical Scholarship
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Speaker
And
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Speaker
As we were reading more about him, the one that kept coming up and sort of his big claim to fame, and I think his breakout sort of voyage and book was the Brendan voyage. And I actually had not known about St. Brendan before that. We can talk more about this. Finally, Trevor, you had seen the documentary, you'd gotten us all into this, and I finally read the book. And yeah, I could see why this was kind of a phenomenon at the time, because it is,
00:03:00
Speaker
like just such a like wild thing to even attempt to do and I think it also has made a huge impact on uh the scholarship of that time in a way like if you look up St. Brendan or any of the names like associated with him you will eventually find Tim Severn like he is connected to this
00:03:19
Speaker
So I think, you know, this has had a bigger impact, arguably the biggest impact of anything. It's like the thing he's most famous for doing. So that's kind of just a little background on Tim Severn and these
Exploring Severin's Work
00:03:31
Speaker
books. And I would recommend, even if you listening to this don't want to read them, like pick them up and look at them and like look at the pictures in them. And because it's like, you'll see this and you'll be like, this guy really does this. He really makes these giant sailing ships. And yeah, so it is pretty astounding.
00:03:49
Speaker
That was our preview for the upcoming episode about Tim Severn's book, The Brendan Voyage. Hopefully you'll tune in for the whole episode. See you then!