Words and Music

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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

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A journey of discovery, weaving music with poetry and prose read by leading actors.

A weekly journey of discovery, weaving together a range of music with poetry and prose read by leading actors.

Words and Music: Dungeons and Dragons

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Dungeons and Dragons

BBC Radio 3 - Words and Music, Dungeons and Dragons

From George and the Dragon to Puff the Magic Dragon to dungeons in The Pilgrim's Progress.

From George and the Dragon, the Welsh dragon and Puff the Magic Dragon to dungeons in The Pilgrim's Progress, Coleridge and Emily Brontë. With music by Mozart, Wagner and Tan Dun.

The Lambton Worm - a folk song from north east England; part of the score composed by Tan Dun for the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Mozart's serpent in the opera The Magic Flute and Wagner's conjuring of the dragon Fafner in Siegfried form part of the music for today's episode inspired by the title of the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons.  The readings evoking dark dungeons and dastardly dragons range from the dragon Smaug in Tolkien's The Hobbit, to the song Puff the Magic Dragon and the poem by Ogden Nash which inspired that song, to the Welsh dragon in The Mabinogion.  For dungeons we turn to John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and poems by Coleridge, Emily Brontë, and Andrew Marvell's depiction of the soul imprisoned in the dungeon of the body in A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body. We also hear part of Jon Peterson's new book about the game of Dungeons and Dragons. 

Our readers are Manjinder Virk and Colin Tierney. 

The British Library is currently staging an exhibition exploring Fantasy (until 25 Feb 2024) and on the Free Thinking programme website and available on BBC Sounds are many discussions of fantasy literature by Ursula Le Guin, Susanna Clarke, Neil Gaiman, Marlon James, Beowulf, the Odyssey, CS Lewis. 

Producer: Nick Holmes

READINGS:
J. R. R. Tolkien            The Hobbit
U. A. Fanthorpe         Not my Best Side
Siegfried Sassoon     The Dragon and the Undying
William Wordsworth  Even as a Dragon's Eye
John Bunyan              The Pilgrim's Progress
Jon Peterson              Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons
Middle Welsh trans. Lady Charlotte Guest    The Mabinogion: The Story of Lludd and Llevelys
Charles Dickens         The Signal-Man
Emily Brontë              The Prisoner
Chris Wormell            George and the Dragon
Andrew Marvell         A Dialogue between the Soul and the Body
Samuel Taylor Coleridge     The Dungeon
Matthew Gregory Lewis       The Monk
Ogden Nash               The Tale of Custard the Dragon

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

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