‘What do you do?’
‘I’m a storyteller.’
‘Oh.’ Pause. ‘So, what’s that then, eh?’
‘Well, what does it sound like?’
‘Dunno, really. Do you tell stories or something?’

This is the kind of conversation I often have with strangers, friends of friends, or taxi drivers, who generally go on to say: ‘I could tell you some stories about the people I’ve had in the back of my cab…’

Of course, we are all storytellers, doing our best to make sense out of the weird, wonderful and banal things that happen in our lives, by shaping them into stories and telling them, until they have coherence and meaning.

Children know the power of a good story, and usually brim with confidence about their own skills as tellers and listeners. But adults too are rediscovering the joys of simply listening to a story. Which brings me to my job .. or is it a craft? … or even a vocation?

One thing I do know is that when I had to stop telling stories while doing a ‘proper job’ when I moved back to Wales, I got really depressed. It seems that I have to tell stories, for my own sanity - whether anyone wants to hear them or not!

They aren’t stories I’ve made up, or from my own life. I share my own stories with friends and family, laughing with - and sometimes at - the people who know me best. But I wouldn’t expect strangers to listen. Telling one’s own stories can be cathartic, revelatory, therapeutic: but it isn’t a spectator sport, in my humble opinion.

No, I tell stories from the oral tradition: folk tales, fairy tales, myths and legends, stories that begin:’ Once upon a time…’ and end: ‘they all lived happily ever after.’ Stories that have been licked into shape by the tongues of thousands of tellers, spat on and polished, perhaps over hundreds of years, till they are patterned, rhythmic and memorable.

Storytellers in the storytelling revival in Wales and England often acknowledge ‘the teller's standing behind me as I speak’ when they retell an old tale: a long chain of invisible ancestors, wordsmiths, bards and poets, connecting past and present. The craft is so ancient that it had almost been forgotten, at least in these small islands. Neither in Welsh nor English do we have a word to describe the great oral masterpieces of the world, an equivalent to ‘literature’. In fact the old stories that have survived and been remembered in the Western world have generally done so because they have passed from the spoken word into literature: The Odyssey, the Norse Myths, the Arabian Nights. And, closer to home: The Mabinogion.

I’m engaged in a kind of personal crusade to awaken more people in Wales to the marvels of The Mabinogion. It never ceases to amaze me that these fantastic stories are not better known.

They still carry echoes of the lost myths of these islands, in spite of the ministrations of the Christian scribes who recorded them in the 14th century. Two ancient copies from that time still exist: The Red Book of Hergest, now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the White Book of Rhydderch, in the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. One contains eleven tales, including stories of the ancient royal families of North and South Wales, the Romans in Wales, and the earliest references to King Arthur anywhere in Europe. The other additionally includes the Tale of Taliesin. These were stories made for telling long before they were written down, and they are still told today.

One of their most extraordinary features is the way in which the world of the stories is precise and recognisable, made so by very specific links between what happened in the stories and real places in the actual landscape.

Do you travel along the A494 between Ruthin and Corwen? You go through Bryn Saith Marchog, a small, undistinguished village with a garage on a crossroads. How did it get its unusual name, which means Hill of Seven Knights? The Second Branch of the Mabinogion tells us that when the giant king Bran the Blessed invaded Ireland to bring help to his sister Branwen, he left ‘seven men behind as leaders … those men were left in Edeirnion, and because of that the name Saith Marchog was given to the township’. (Sioned Davies’ translation, 2007, p. 28)

Have you walked the track called Sarn Elen above Conwy on the pass at Dwygyfylchi, or from the Roman amphitheatre at Tomen y Mur near Trawsfynydd to Brithdir above Dolgellau, or uphill from the Miners’ Bridge in Betws y Coed? The track follows a Roman road, and the story ‘The Dream of Maxen Wledig’ in the Mabinogion explains that this path was made on the orders of Elen of the Hosts at her marriage to the Roman Emperor who dreamed of her beside the Tiber, and found her in Snowdonia.

You may have visited Wales’ largest natural lake, especially if you went to this year’s National Eisteddfod in Bala: it is called Bala Lake in English, Llyn Tegid in Welsh. Did you know that it is named for Tegid Foel (Tegid the Bald, presumably on account of his hairdo), who was husband to the woman of power, Ceridwen? She brewed up a Cauldron of Wisdom and Inspiration, and as a result, according to The Mabinogion, the great poet Taliesin came into the world.

The world of the stories lies just under the skin of our world, where I sit and type, and you walk to work, or to the shop, or to collect the children. Only a few heartbeats separate us from the place of myth and legend, the realm of The Mabinogion. A storyteller can bring this world to life. All you have to do is listen. If you do, you may see things differently.