In my eyes, Finland has produced three perfect forms: the Finnish woman; our national dog, a small reddish hunting dog called the Finnish Spitz; and the traditional Finnish axe. All of them are sharp, no-nonsense and made for barking: handled properly, they represent the best possible designs for these arctic conditions. (Pardon the pun….)
     My first memory of an axe is from the beginning of the 1960s; at that time, homes in the countryside were still heated with wood. In the late spring our neighbour would bring about eight cubic metres of birch logs for the winter over to our yard using his tractor. So that the firewood would dry before winter, it had to be split and piled under cover. My father assigned the task to me. Standing in the yard on a Saturday night with an axe in my hand, I knew with adolescent certainty that life was elsewhere.

They come in all shapes and sizes: top, a contemporary axe; below, examples of the traditional Finnish, 'Yankee' and 'Rheinische Form' type

I own half a dozen axes, and I couldn't say any longer which of them was my implement for the weekends that followed, but it was a traditional Finnish axe in any case. Its typical features are a certain grace, a tubular part that protects the handle and a bend where the handle connects to the blade. At the junction of the handle and blade there is often a recess, which almost makes it possible to hold the blade directly when the axe is being used for carving, like a knife.
     Finland is still Europe's least densely populated country. We moved almost straight from peasant culture to the age of high technology, and our professions never became differentiated as they were in the heart of Europe. In Finnish 'a carpenter' is kirvesmies, 'axe man', which shows the cultural importance of the axe.
     The forest and forestry also left their mark on the literature of the early 20th century, as romantic or realistic depictions; the most extravagant is Kalle Päätalo's 26-part autobiography. Päätalo starts his 17,014-page work in the northern logging camps of the 1930s, when an underage lumberman was not unique despite the horribly difficult work.
     The same axes were used to raze forests, build house, and carve sledges and skis. Sizes and blades were modified as needed; in old lists you can even find a small axe for schoolchildren. But if you compare, say, the products of the Austrian Leonhard Mueller & Sons factory, where, according to my count, even today you can get 213 'genuine handmade' axe types; in practice there was only one type made in Finland.
     For nearly one hundred years, starting from the end of the 19th century, Finland's export trade was based on wood products; the character of the forest also influenced the form of the axe. The dominant trees in the north are birch, spruce and pine — relatively soft varieties of wood. As you approach the Arctic Circle, the growth rate of the trunks slows; there are no giants in the Finnish forest such as, for example, the oaks of Central Europe. Thus, before the mechanisation of forestry, trees were felled with a lightweight bow saw and limbed with an axe. It didn't need to be sturdy like, for example, in the United States, where the axe long retained its place alongside the saw as a felling tool. An effective felling axe is as thin-bladed as possible and as heavy as the lumberjack's strength will allow. Two main variants developed in the United States: the 'double bit', a double-bladed monster, and a heavy, wedge-shaped felling axe, which was called the Yankee model in the Nordic countries. It spread across the world in the 20th century, and when cheap copies started to flow in from third-party countries, the Finnish axe fell on hard times.
     The only weakness of the Finnish axe was its multiphase forging process: the price of production turned out to be too high. Forestry was mechanised quickly in the middle of the 20th century and demand for axes collapsed. Of the many original producers, only Fiskars remains, a 350-year-old foundry established when Finland still belonged to the Kingdom of Sweden. Fiskars was able to rise to the competition by culling models and simplifying production processes. The result was a good quality, yet strangely limp-shaped axe, which didn't do well commercially either.
     The Finnish axe industry would surely have disappeared had Fiskars's design group, led by Olavi Lindén, not divorced itself completely from tradition. In 1985 the Finnish axe popped in on the Stone Age and then moved into the future; the Fiskars team decided to attach the handle according to a principle dating back to the beginning of time. The handle, made from a fibreglass reinforced composite polymer, is injection-moulded around the blade. The old slogan 'form follows function' must be partially changed to 'form follows production', for the axe blade is part of the casting mould, and the seals have to be precisely polished so the pressure-injected plastic won't escape; the hollow handle is straight for production reasons. The Fiskars axe collection is still futuristic in its shape. The Teflon-coated blade is aggressively angular and the straight handle's yellow and black colouring reminds one of nature's warning colours. In my imagination the emergency kit in a Stealth fighter has a small Fiskars.
     It shames me to admit it, but I am a conservative when it comes to tools — a traditionalist — and I shunned the Fiskars axes until last year when I tested the so-called 'Super Splitting Axe'. My baseline was a Swedish hand-forged hickory handled beauty of an axe, which is advertised as the Rolls Royce of axes — in which case the Fiskars is the Lamborghini of axes in both form and function — but not in philosophy.
     Why was the modern axe born in Finland, of all places? Olavi Lindén reckons the reason is the youthfulness of Finnish design culture, that it isn't restrained by bourgeois mores. According to Lindén, Fiskars axes are tools, not elitist baubles; at Fiskars, design is driven by utility, durability, ease of production and the relationship of price to quality.
     Nowadays Fiskars is a multinational company and the products' nationality is being obliterated. Nevertheless, the axes are still Nordic, Finnish in their pragmatic simplicity and clean lines.
     After chopping the eight cubic meters of logs from my youth yet again last fall, I have with somewhat melancholy feelings put my traditional axes to rest and moved over to the Fiskars.

Translated by Owen Witesman