The Sleeping Almanac

A slow, calm Egyptian mythology sleep story to help you fall asleep and stay asleep. Tonight, the tale of the Eye of Ra, the lioness Sekhmet whose fury was calmed at last not by force but by a field flooded the color of dawn. This is a bedtime story for adults, made for sleep, insomnia, and quiet nights when the mind will not switch off. The pacing is slow, the voice is soft, and the music never s...

A slow, calm Egyptian mythology sleep story to help you fall asleep and stay asleep. Tonight, the patient tale of how the goddess Isis won the secret name of Ra, the one hidden word that held all his power. This is a bedtime story for adults, made for sleep, insomnia, and quiet nights when the mind will not switch off. The pacing is slow, the voice is soft, and the music never spikes. You do not h...

A slow, calm Egyptian mythology sleep story to help you fall asleep and stay asleep. Tonight, the gentle tale of Ra and the very first sunrise, from the dark still waters before the world began. This is a bedtime story for adults, made for sleep, insomnia, and quiet nights when the mind will not switch off. The pacing is slow, the voice is soft, and the music never spikes. You do not have to follo...

Tonight, on the very last night of the old world, you walk with the gods toward their own ending. The wolf slips his chain. The serpent rises from the sea. The horn sounds. The fire comes. And then, very softly, a green earth at dawn, and a few gold chess pieces lying in the new grass. This is the season finale of The Sleeping Almanac — twelve nights inside Norse myth, ending exactly where the see...

Tonight, a giantess walks down out of the cold mountains to demand the gods make right what they have broken. She comes alone. She comes armed. And she will not leave until she has chosen a husband by his feet. This is the story of Skadi, the goddess of winter, of skis, of bows, of the high cold country. The story of her father killed by the gods. The story of her quiet impossible bargain. The sto...

Tonight: how poetry came into the worlds. Of Kvasir, the wisest being ever made, brewed from the breath of every god in Asgard. Of his murder by two clever dwarves who poured his blood into three vessels and hid them. Of Suttungr the giant, who took the vessels into a hollow mountain and set his daughter Gunnlǫð to guard them. And of Odin, who walked east in disguise as Bǫlverkr the worker, drille...

Tonight, the strongest of the gods wakes to an empty bed and an empty hand. Mjǫllnir, the hammer that holds the sky together, has been stolen in the night. Loki borrows Freyja's falcon cloak and flies east to Jǫtunheimr, where the giant king Þrymr is waiting on his high mound with a price for its return. The price is Freyja herself. Freyja refuses, the gods sit in council, and the only road forwar...

Tonight, the strongest of the gods goes fishing for the end of the world. Þórr travels east to a giant's hall for a cauldron large enough to brew the sea, and before dawn he rows a small boat out past every fishing bank a man has ever known, into the deep water where the Serpent waits. He baits a line with the head of an ox and lets it down, and far below, the thing that circles the world takes th...

Tonight, the feast in Ægir's hall by the sea, where the gods gathered to drink and one uninvited guest spoke every cruel and true thing he had ever held back. Of Bragi and Iðunn. Of Óðinn lowering his cup. Of Frigg, who heard at the table the name of the one responsible for her son's death. Then the flight to the high mountain. The hall with four doors. The salmon in the dark pool below the waterf...

Tonight, the brightest of the gods begins to dream of his own ending. Baldr, the most loved and the most gentle, wakes from dreams of death, and his mother Frigg walks the whole world asking every living thing to swear it will never harm him. Everything swears, except one small plant she passes by. A slow, sorrowful story of love, an overlooked thing, and a grief that even the gods cannot undo. Le...

Tonight, the gods discover they can grow old. Iðunn keeps the apples that hold age away, and when Loki, cornered by a giant in eagle feathers, gives her up, the halls of the gods begin to gray and stiffen and slow. To undo it, Loki must fly north as a falcon and carry her home before the oldest of them forgets how to stand. A gentle story about time, and the quiet panic of losing it, told slowly e...

Tonight, the gods try to hold back the future. A wolf is growing among them, larger and stronger each day, and the gods know how the story is meant to end. They bring him chains, and call it a game, and he breaks them. Then they bring a ribbon made of impossible things, and a single god is brave enough, or honest enough, to pay the price of the lie. A calm, sad story about fate beginning to set. L...

Tonight, a wager in the dark under the mountains. Loki, having cut the golden hair from Thor's wife while she slept, must replace it, and to do so he sets the finest dwarven smiths against one another. Out of their forge come a ship that folds into a pocket, a spear that never misses, a ring that makes more of itself, and a short handled hammer that will become the most famous object in all the ni...

Tonight, the Allfather goes looking for what he does not yet know. He comes to the well at the root of the world, where Mímir keeps the water of wisdom, and he pays for a single drink with an eye. Later he hangs nine nights on the windswept tree, wounded and alone, until the runes rise to him out of the dark. A quiet story about how much a god will give to understand the world. Let it carry you do...

Tonight, the shape of everything. Before the gods have names you know, there is a tree, and from its branches and roots hang nine worlds. We move slowly through each one, from the fire of Muspelheim to the mist of Niflheim, the halls of the gods, the home of giants, and the dark below, until the whole map of Norse reality is laid out quietly around you. This is the orientation episode of the seaso...

A slow, calm place for the world's oldest stories, told for the listener who cannot quite turn off. Season 1 is Norse mythology, narrated across a single season long arc, from the nine worlds to Ragnarǫk. How to use the show: press play, close your eyes, and let it drift over you. The pacing is slow and the music never spikes. You are not meant to stay awake. New episodes every Wednesday and Sunda...