In 2011 a Norwegian novelist published a book about firewood, and it stayed on his country's bestseller lists for more than a year. Hel ved found readers who already split their own wood and wanted to argue about how, and readers who had never held an axe but recognized something they had lost. The English translation, Norwegian Wood, went on to win Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the 2016 British Book Industry Awards.
What is inside. Lars Mytting follows the wood from the standing tree to the coals: the cold that makes the work necessary, the forest and which species to fell, the saw and the axe, the chopping block, the woodpile, the long patience of seasoning, the stove, and the fire itself. Along the way he gathers the opinions of Norwegian woodsmen, who disagree with one another in the way that only people who have tested their own methods for decades can. Whether to stack bark up or bark down is a real dispute, and the book takes it seriously, as it does the old notion that a man's woodpile tells you his character.
The case for shelving it here. We read Belloc and Chesterton for the argument that a free society rests on families who own productive property and can provide for themselves. A woodlot, a saw, a splitting maul and a dry stack are about as plain an example of such property as exists. A household that heats with its own wood has removed one more dependency on a distant utility and the prices it sets. Unlike the theoretical case for distributism, this book shows what the practice looks like in a cold country, one cord at a time. It belongs beside The Servile State, The Third Way, Small Is Beautiful and The Land Was Everything, as the manual the theory leaves you wanting. For the wider argument, read our essay Agrarianism and Distributism as an alternative to Socialism and Crony Capitalism.
It is also personal. Our founder really does heat with a wood stove, and the cat claims the warmth of the firebox as its own; you can read about it in Our Founder's Good Brew Keto Drink. A northern winter asks the same discipline of us that it asks of Norwegians: cut early, stack well, and let the wood dry a full season before it goes into the stove.
This edition. The original English edition, published by MacLehose Press in London in October 2015 in Robert Ferguson's translation. It is a 192-page hardcover illustrated in full color throughout. A separate American edition from Abrams Image, adapted with U.S. resources, appeared the same autumn.
