How to Establish an Academic Discipline: A Swedish Experience

Sir Winston Churchill was a man of many talents. Not only was he a great orator, author, and politician, he was also a skilled craftsman—especially in bricklaying. No honor was more precious to Churchill than his membership card in the bricklayers’ union. He was also a painter of some renown, preferring to paint in oils rather than watercolors. In his article “Painting as a Pastime,” he wrote that nothing could compare with oil paints—without in any way wanting to belittle those who chose to paint in watercolors: “I write no word in disparagement of watercolours. But there really is nothing like oils. You have a medium at your disposal which offers real power, if you can only find out how to use it. . . . First of all, you can correct mistakes much more easily. One sweep of the palette-knife ‘lifts’ the blood and the tears of a morning from the canvas and enables a fresh start to be made.”¹ Indeed, unlike watercolors, everything can be altered whenever you want it—the paint on the canvas is not there permanently. But once a watercolorist has applied a sable brush to paper, there is no turning back: the paint is absorbed by and diffuses through the paper. This is definite, like working with metal.

If metal represents hard, obdurate reality, then wood—like oil paints—is the material for dreams and imagination. Perhaps that is why I have never enjoyed working with metal, because the material is too cold, hard, and uncompromising; it allows no scope for negotiation—either you have the correct tools or you do not, either the spanner fits or not, either the hacksaw bites or not. There is no middle ground, no possibility of conciliatory negotiation, no desire in the material to meet you halfway—to discuss the whole thing, as it were, in a friendly manner.

Things are different with wood. This is a material that you can talk to, negotiate with, and even persuade. Indeed, with luck you can usually gently coax it to do your bidding, even though it has a life of its own. It is a material that has its own personal characteristics, which depend on the direction of the grain, knots, humidity, and, not least, what kind of wood it is, what tree it comes from. You also have a different kind of freedom when it comes to choosing tools as compared to working with metal. As has been said, “a good carpenter would be able to hammer with a saw and saw with a hammer.”

Can life offer any greater pleasure than walking into your carpentry workshop in the morning and seeing the ready tools hanging in a row, and smelling the aroma of timber and “half & half” (the mixture of 50 percent linseed oil and 50 percent balsamic turpentine used to prime any finished work to be painted), or hanging up your tools in their allotted places at the end of the working day, dusting off the bench, and closing the door behind you, after a day of discussion, compromise, and tacit agreements with the wood—this most complaisant, forgiving, and friendliest of materials? . . . Well, maybe life does offer a greater pleasure: the writing of history. There are, in fact, a lot of similarities between carpentry and the writing of history. I thought of that last summer as I was putting together a collection of previously published papers and conference presentations for a book,² which I worked on in the mornings and did carpentry in the afternoons. A good life.

Although the articles and conference presentations included in this forthcoming volume span a period of more than twenty-five years, they are not to be seen as a defining retrospective—marking a time when the craftsman might contemplate closing the door to his workshop once and for all (having oiled and put his tools back in their proper places and brushed the workbench clean). On the contrary, the aim has been to see what has been built, choose those pieces the carpenter deems worthy of preserving, and arrange them in order...