All his life he’d chopped his own firewood… He enjoyed the feel of each log in his hand, the smell that made him feel he was at work inside a poem, the sense of security in his stack, the pleasing thought of the winter that lay ahead, with all those hours of sitting contentedly in front of his woodburning stove.”

“Was it just the activity and the summer warmth that made him better? I don’t think so. “I’ve never seen a man change quite the way he did. Mytting wrote about Ottar and his ritual of chopping wood during the warm months to get it ready for the winter months: “Ottar spent a month on his woodpile,” writes Mytting. These people know that without it man would never have been able to inhabit land so far north in the first place. The book is a paean to all Norwegians who revere wood. Ottar, retired with poor lungs, treats the annual arrival of his logs in spring and the subsequent time spent chopping, seasoning and stacking as a life-giving ritual. In Elverum, winter temperatures hang around the -30C mark. He is a likeable, stoic neighbour in the small town of Elverum in south-eastern Norway, where Mytting had moved to, and the man who taught Mytting that “a wood fire is about so much more than heat”. We meet Ottar at the beginning of the book. The Independent, in a November 2015 article, said: In the foreword you are introduced to Mytting’s neighbor Ottar who, inspired the book. The book begins, even before the Table of Contents, with a poem by Hans Børli: Norwegian Wood is a non-fiction work that is part text book about how to chop and store wood, a history book about how important it was (and still is) in Scandinavia, but also a book that embraces the beauty of wood and how it affects people. But there’s a new “Norwegian Wood” in town – it’s a best-selling book by Lars Mytting called “Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking, and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way.” (The title of the book in its original Norwegian is Hel Ved, which literally translates as “solid wood.” The phrase has a two meanings because it also means a person you can trust, someone who is honest.)

When you hear the words “Norwegian Wood” you probably think of the song by the Beatles.

Norwegian wood book