I have fallen in love—with a gently curved length of ashwood and a wicked 65 cm long steel blade.
I’ve been intending to buy a scythe for several years now and finally got around to doing so. It’s technically a Christmas present from three years ago. After some searching around, I order it from ScytheWorks in British Columbia. It’s a European-style scythe, quite different from the Anglo-American tool that can be found in old barns and antique shops around New England. The snath is less curved and the handles more offset, and the blade is thinner, lighter, and made of tensioned steel.
In this case, an Italian-made Falci blade. For any scythe enthusiasts out there (this is for you, Jeff!) it is the #128C blade pictured here. ScytheWorks snaths (the handle of the scythe) are made by a family-owned Mennonite wheelwright shop in Ontario.
It gives me great pleasure that my great-grandfather’s (American) scythe is still in the family, still cared for and used, if not by myself. In purchasing a scythe of my own I go the old-country route (so that I’m using the kind of scythe my Austrian immigrant great-grandfather would have used if he had stayed in Europe, while he spent his life using the kind of American scythe I choose not to buy now; there seems a kind of gentle irony in this). The debate rages fiercely as to the respective merits of each, although I think these days the consensus seems to be swinging toward the European scythe. For any who wish to investigate this discussion to an extraordinary degree of detail (to me fascinating, to some perhaps excruciating), check out the commentary by Peter Vido of the Scythe Connection on a pro-European-scythe article by Botan Anderson of One Scythe Revolution, and the pro-American-scythe response to it by Benjamin Bouchard. Vido takes both their positions to pieces and in the process writes the most precise and illuminating piece on scythes I’ve come across.
My scythe comes pre-sharpened, which for a European scythe means peened and honed and ready for use (the American scythe has a thicker, heavier blade that is sharpened with a grinding wheel). Once I’ve assembled it, and my neophyte brain has absorbed a handful of YouTube videos on scything technique, I take it out to the meadow.
It is the most beautiful tool, perfectly designed for its purpose. It’s simple, the movements are economical, and the experience of working one’s way through a stand of waist-high weeds and grasses in the meadow is a profoundly pleasurable experience, engrossing and meditative (as well as an excellent core workout). I now understand why there’s a scythe revolution, why it is returning to use on small farms and homesteads around the world, from America and England to central and Southern Europe to India and Nepal (where it is being introduced as a more efficient alternative to the traditional sickle for harvesting grain—and as I write this, I remember that when Emme visited a farm in Bhutan, the farmer demonstrated cutting grain with a sickle; she doesn’t remember ever seeing a scythe).
Now I understand why there are so many YouTube videos about the beauty and potential of scything:
And others pitting scythes against weed whackers:
And this documentary video, fascinating even if one doesn’t understand a word of the German, about contemporary scything on precariously steep slopes in the Swiss alps, where scythes have never gone out of fashion. (Check out how they get the hay off the mountain at 9:45 and following: it is unexpected and very, very cool.)
I am a rank beginner. It will take time to improve my technique. Even so, scything comes naturally. But now I have a new skill to learn. The hardest thing about using a scythe is not scything, it’s keeping the damned thing sharp. The European scythe is honed in the field, every 5 or 10 minutes, with a stone kept wet in a sheath clipped to one’s belt. And over the course of four or five hours, after repeated sharpening, the bevel on the cutting edge becomes steeper and then the blade has to be peened, or hammered out on an anvil (with the help of a peening jig, if one is, like me, new to the task). That is, the blade has to be cold-hammered to drive more material toward the edge, which then can be re-sharpened by honing with a whetstone. As it’s late fall, and growth in the meadow is tough and fibrous, the beautiful edge with which the blade came is already long gone. My next task is to learn to work with this metal. I have the winter for it.
What connection with the tree, you might ask? Many! Scythe and tree alike lead one to reflections on technology and the use of the hands—on the importance of incorporating some work of the hands into one’s life. Not of course to replace digital, electrical or mechanical technologies with manual technologies; but to retain some of that knowledge, some engagement with the world through our hands and feet. (See the beautiful recent book Craeft by Alexander Langlands, which starts with a chapter on traditional haying techniques: “While [the scythe] may never reach the same elevated status it had in the medieval period, it’s experiencing a renaissance in the west, with many people undergoing the same epiphanic journey as I did on that late April morning.”)
This, for me, is part of the beauty of a daily climbing practice. As I wrote a year or so ago: hands on bark, face to the sun. No, I won’t be cutting our entire meadow with a scythe, or mowing our extensive lawn with it; but there is no better way to clear growth from around the apple trees, or along the edge of the driveway. Or be out in the meadow on a summer morning, scything for the pure joy of it.
But also, the movements of scything have been explicitly compared to those of Tai Chi and other eastern martial arts—and I have talked about climbing the tree in the same terms, about the way that rising up among the branches is like the practice of a kind of vertical Tai Chi.
In a more specifically martial context, it is interesting to note that in Medieval Europe combat techniques were developed for the scythe, as well as other tools farmers might have at hand (check out this illuminated manuscript). As there is an enthusiast for every obscure practice in this marvelous age of YouTube, a reconstruction of these techniques can also be seen. (Certain to be useful if I’m surprised in the field by a rabid, scythe-wielding black bear.)
And to return to the agricultural-spiritual, a kung fu-inspired form has been created for the scythe as well (as far as I can tell, by the aforementioned Peter Vido and his family; the rest of the video is worth watching as well). Maybe something else to work on next summer. (If I’m found in my meadow cut to ribbons, well, at least I’ll have died happy!)
So everything connects to everything else in the end, and in the beginning too. And the tree, like everything else, is a window onto each other thing. And so, climbing every day, I climb through window after window after window through the marvelous interconnected multiplicity of it all. Everything converging like—well, like branches on a tree.
Now if I can just figure out how to sharpen that blade.
