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WORK TITLE: Craeft
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1978
WEBSITE: https://alexlanglands.wordpress.com/
CITY: Swansea
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
Agent: Sophie Laurimore, Tel: 020 3735 9470, jamie@factualmanagement.com; married with two children.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2007067947
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2007067947
HEADING: Langlands, Alex
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670 __ |a People and space in the Middle Ages, 300-1300, 2006: |b t.p. (Alex Langlands)
670 __ |a Craeft, 2018: |b ECIP t.p. (Alexander Langlands) data view (British archaeologist and medieval historian. He is a regular presenter for the BBC and teaches medieval history at Swansea University. He currently resides in Swansea, Wales)
NOTE: BOOK TITLE is not Craeft as thus written but rather: Cræft. I left as former because I’m not sure how you want to handle that. — DP
THE æ IS ACTUALLY A SYMBOL IN THE SYSTEM, SO I CHANGED ALL THE “ae” TO “æ” — AC
PERSONAL
Born 1978, Oxford, England; married; children: two.
EDUCATION:Attended the Institute of Archaeology, University College London; University of Winchester, doctorate.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Archaeologist, historian, writer, broadcaster, and educator. Swansea University, Swansea, Wales, United Kingdom, teaches medieval history. Also regular presenter for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), beginning c. 2003, including working for the broadcast media for BBC Two, BBC One, as well as Channel 4, History Channel, and the Discovery channel.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Alexander Langlands grew up in Sussex, a rural county in southwest England. An historian, archaeologist, writer, and broadcaster, Langlands also lectures college studies in Medieval history, archaeology, and issues connected with heritage and heritage crafts. His work as a research and commercial archaeologist has led him to work on excavating sites throughout Europe, ranging from sites connected with the prehistoric era to industrial age sites. He also has extensive experience working in British broadcast media and has appeared on historical reenactment shows.
In his first book, Cræft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts, Langlands takes readers into the ancient world of traditional crafts. Langlands is primarily interested in what he says has been the transformation of society’s understanding of craft following industrialization, proclaiming that modern understanding of craft is relatively simplistic. Langlands explains early on that the book’s title word “cræft” appeared in Old English. It meant something very different from the modern day concept of the word craft. Rather, cræft referred not to certain objects but rather to a hard to define type of knowledge wisdom, and resourcefulness.
After an initial chapter focusing on defining craft, Langlands takes readers on an historical journey from his home in Wales on through Europe and even Iceland. In the process, he combines history, scientific analysis, and personal anecdotes to provide a deeper understanding of what craft is and represents. “For Langlands, the only way to understand it is through firsthand experience,” wrote New York Times Online contributor Michael Bierut. As a result, Langlands recounts his personal experiences along the way, which include spending time herding sheep, keeping bees, spinning wool, and making a thatched roof. “Exploring this unfamiliar territory requires navigating a deliciously unfamiliar vocabulary: hafting (attaching an arrowhead to the tip of a spear); laying, pleaching and plashing (all required to nurture a hedgerow); carding, retting, scotching (for textile production); … flushing (for sheep farming); puddling (for cisterns); and pugging and wedging (for pottery)” wrote Bierut for the New York Times Online article.
Langlands concludes his book with a postscript on the relationship between cræft and contemplation. “His idealism and his love of the natural world and what we can learn to make of it are contagious,” wrote Shelf Awareness website contributor Sara Catterall, going on later to call Cræft “an illuminating book on the pleasures of traditional work, and how we can rediscover that tactile world of skillful creation.” Sarah Archer, writing for the Atlantic Online, remarked: “Langlands calls for living and working with awareness of our environments, materials, and challenges in real time.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, December 1, 2017, Andie Paloutzian, review of Cræft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts, p. 14.
BookPage, January, 2018, Deborah Mason, review of Cræft, p. 23.
Publishers Weekly, October 30, 2017, review of Cræft, p. 69.
ONLINE
Alex Langlands Website, https://alexlanglands.wordpress.com (March 20, 2018).
Atlantic Online, https://www.theatlantic.com/ (February 25, 2018), Sarah Archer, “The Forgotten Everyday Origins of ‘Craft.'”
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (November 19, 2017), Ben East, “Cræft Review–Not Just a Load of Old Corn Dollies….”
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (January 8, 2018), Michael Beirut, “Before Glitter and Glue Sticks, Cræft.”
Shelf Awareness, http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ (January 2, 2018), Sara Catterall, review of Cræft.
ALEX LANGLANDS
Archaeologist, Historian, Writer & Broadcaster
ABOUT
Alex Langlands lectures in Medieval History, Archaeology and Heritage at Swansea University and is a patron of the Heritage Crafts Association. He gained his first two degrees at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London and his Doctorate at the University of Winchester.
He has worked as a research and commercial archaeologist all over Europe excavating sites ranging from the prehistoric period through to the industrial age.
He has fifteen years of experience working in the broadcast media for BBC Two, BBC One, Channel 4, History Channel and Discovery. He was instrumental in the making of BBC Two’s hit TV series Victorian Farm which garnered weekly audiences of nearly 6 million viewers. The follow-up series Edwardian Farm and Wartime Farm were equally as popular. He has worked on Time Team, recently appeared in the successful Full Steam Ahead for BBC Two and co-presented Victorian Bakers, the Christmas special for which aired on Christmas Day 2016.
Born in Oxford, at the tender age of five his family moved him to rural Sussex where Alex played out his childhood between the woods of the Weald, the marshes of Pevensey and the beaches of Bexhill-on-Sea. He studied and worked in London for twelve years before moving to a remote cottage in the depths of the Wiltshire countryside for ten years. He now lives in Swansea with his wife and two children.
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Print Marked Items
CRAFT
Deborah Mason
BookPage.
(Jan. 2018): p23.
COPYRIGHT 2018 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
CRAFT
By Alexander Langlands
Norton $26.95, 352 pages ISBN 9780393635904 eBook available
HISTORY
To be clear, the title of this book by Alexander Langlands is CrAft, not "craft." When we think of craft, we
tend to think of expensive handmade objects, often considered anachronisms in a world of mass production
and mass consumption. CrAft (pronounced "creft") is the Anglo-Saxon root for the modern word "craft,"
and it includes both the product and the process of crafting. But crAft has a more profound meaning: It is
the wisdom, handed down from previous generations, that enables the crafter to create a perfectly useful
object.
Langlands is an experimental archaeologist; he replicates ancient artifacts and processes to gain greater
insights into the cultures that produced them. In CrAft, he explains how ancient craftsmen used their skill,
available natural resources and especially crAft to solve the problems that life threw at them. Need
temporary sheep pens? Use your weaving skills to create portable wicker fencing. Want a permanent
solution for keeping sheep out of your grain fields? Forge tools that help you prune and manipulate trees to
form hedgerows. No trees around? Use rocks to create dry stone walls of such cunning manufacture that
they last for generations--without mortar.
Langlands is not merely describing the past; crAft has shaped our present and can enhance our future.
Anyone who has walked in the English countryside can see how crAft molded the natural environment:
Ancient burial mounds, weirs and dikes, even the barren moorlands that inspired the Bronte sisters testify to
the human knack for devising ingenious solutions to difficult problems. The importance of crAft is
demonstrated by the devastating effects its absence can have: The modern tendency to favor mechanization
over crAft, Langlands posits, has resulted in flooding, soil degradation and global warming. In a world with
diminishing resources, it might be wise to tap into crAft to ensure a sustainable future. Langlands has
written an excellent introduction to guide us.
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Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Mason, Deborah. "CRAFT." BookPage, Jan. 2018, p. 23. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A520055910/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=322fc55a.
Accessed 2 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A520055910
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Craft: An Inquiry into the Origins and
True Meaning of Traditional Crafts
Andie Paloutzian
Booklist.
114.7 (Dec. 1, 2017): p14.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Craft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts.
By Alexander Langlands.
Jan. 2018. 336p. illus. Norton, $26.95 (9780393635904). 745.5.
What starts with a scythe becomes a research quest for archaeologist and medieval historian Langlands.
Like the would-be homesteaders of the 1970s back-to-the-land movement, who eschewed urban
industrialization, Langlands fled the city for a quiet country cottage. His personal adventure became a
professional pursuit of craft, or craft, a word and its meanings Langlands explores through a succession of
micro histories. Before you can wrap your mind around the expansive definition for craft as it's broadly
applied today, you must reach back 1,000 years. The Old English craft was used to describe an individual's
specialized knowledge, rather than the item crafted, implying more reliable functionality over today's
obsessive detail or uniqueness. Why are we so dazzled by craft? Handmade goods, locally produced in
small quantities, do trump mass-market offerings when it comes to both hearts and wallets of buyers.
Whether it's the small-batch hot sauce or the rage for craft beer, today's consumer wants tradition, quality,
and artisan everything. Langlands offers a fascinating history of what's setting trends today.--Andie
Paloutzian
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Paloutzian, Andie. "Craft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts." Booklist, 1
Dec. 2017, p. 14. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A519036131/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7855537d. Accessed 2 Mar. 2018.
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Craeft: An Inquiry into the Origins and
True Meaning of Traditional Crafts
Publishers Weekly.
264.44 (Oct. 30, 2017): p69.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Craeft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts
Alexander Langlands. Norton, $26.95 (336p) ISBN 978-0-393-63590-4
Archeologist and BBC presenter Langlands brings his approachable voice and unique firsthand experience
to this exploration of the history behind traditional crafts. Despite its modern usage, craft--or craeft, in Old
English--is about more than just making; it also connotes the knowledge and resourcefulness needed to
adapt in the face of changing materials and circumstances. Through a series of short histories focused on
such crafts as thatching, weaving, and leather making, Langlands recovers craft as a model for a more
engaged, resilient, and sustainable way of life. Interlacing each history with accounts of his own attempts to
practice traditional crafts, Langlands reveals the intricate balancing acts required by craft processes while
also reflecting broadly on human interactions with landscapes. Langlands makes a strong, if sometimes
unnuanced, argument against the mindlessness of modern consumption, urging readers to prioritize longterm
use over profitability and disposability. In the ingenuity of craft, he sees not dead tradition but rather a
way forward for an uncertain, unstable world. Sustained by Langlands clear yet lyrical prose, this book is
sure to interest readers concerned with history, human knowhow, and the future of this Earth. Illus. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Craeft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts." Publishers Weekly, 30 Oct.
2017, p. 69. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A514357788/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=34184d38. Accessed 2 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A514357788
BOOK REVIEW | NONFICTION
Before Glitter and Glue Sticks, ‘Craeft’
By MICHAEL BIERUTJAN. 8, 2018
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CRAEFT
An Inquiry Into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts
By Alexander Langlands
344 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $26.95.
As daily life becomes increasingly virtual, it might seem like a paradox that making things by hand is suddenly big business. Stores like Michaels and Hobby Lobby feature aisle after crowded aisle of sequins, tassels, imported papers, chenille stems and pompoms. Etsy, the e-commerce platform for selling homemade goods, features nearly two million active sellers serving 30 million eager buyers. Busy creators produce one-offs using 3-D printers in “maker spaces” at major research universities as well as your neighborhood’s progressive elementary school. All this activity was worth $44 billion last year, according to the Association for Creative Industries, a group that was once, in cozier times, known as the Craft and Hobby Association. Part therapy, part self-expression, our homely obsession with crafts is poised to take over the world.
Into this unstoppable consumerist success story steps the British archaeologist and medieval historian Alexander Langlands. In “Craeft: An Inquiry Into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts,” Langlands neither jumps aboard the homemade bandwagon nor stands athwart it. Instead he simply and serenely declines to acknowledge its existence.
The unusual spelling in the book’s title is the first clue that Langlands intends to go deeper. The familiar term associated today with glue sticks and glitter has its roots in an Old English word more than 1,000 years old. According to Langlands, “craeft” is nearly untranslatable, “a form of knowledge, not just a knowledge of making but a knowledge of being.” It combines in some ineffable way skill, intelligence and virtue. For Langlands, the only way to understand it is through firsthand experience. He embarks on a series of forays into past worlds: cutting hay, building a drystone wall, making a skep for beekeeping. These are not mere academic exercises. Langlands is known to BBC audiences from his roles on shows like “Victorian Farm,” “Edwardian Farm” and “Wartime Farm,” where he and other participants lived and worked in historic settings for months at a time. He is a sort of method archaeologist, understanding ancient processes through a kind of performative osmosis.
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Craeft: An Inquiry Into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts
Alexander Langlands
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Consider his description of the making of the traditional wooden fence called a wattle hurdle. It starts not as you’d expect with the assembly of the required materials, but with the planting and tending of the hazel trees that will eventually provide the timber necessary for the process to begin 10 or so years later. His subsequent account of the (literally) Neolithic process by which horizontal branches are woven together with upright rods into a lattice goes on for a half-dozen painstakingly detailed pages. If Langlands were providing instructions for how you too could make your own wattle, the effect would be unendurably boring, not to mention borderline incomprehensible. Instead, his genuine passion for the activity at hand makes his account hypnotic. To watch a hurdle maker at work, he says, is “almost like watching a concert pianist at one with her instrument.” He is clearly addicted to that place where labor is transformed through mastery into art.
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Exploring this unfamiliar territory requires navigating a deliciously unfamiliar vocabulary: hafting (attaching an arrowhead to the tip of a spear); laying, pleaching and plashing (all required to nurture a hedgerow); carding, retting, scotching (for textile production); stooking (for thatched roofs); stocking and scudding (for leather); panning, marling and mattocking (for working the earth); flushing (for sheep farming); puddling (for cisterns); and pugging and wedging (for pottery). Of course, we no longer need these words, because most of us no longer participate in the activities these words describe. For Langlands, this loss is tragic. His obsession with successfully learning to make a thatched roof, he says, “proved to me most forcefully that it’s not that we have lost these ancient skills, it’s worse than that. It’s that we have lost the conception of those skills and what they can do for us.” Ironically, the residue of these lost skills persists today in turns of phrase like “make hay while the sun shines,” “by hook or by crook,” or having “been through the mill.” Once operating instructions, these are used by people who will never clear a field, tend a herd of sheep or qualify as a master weaver.
Given Langlands’s background, it’s no surprise that he consistently locates true craeft in the years — the millenniums, really — before the Industrial Revolution. Is it really gone? As a first-year student in design school, I remember the endless hours spent doing something as simple as drawing a capital letter A, the attention to detail that blurs and vanishes before your eyes, that moment when you lose track of time. Langlands describes the sensation as being “tamed into the work.” “You resign yourself to it. Your breathing moderates as you become methodical, more controlled. This is a marathon, not a sprint.” Practicing craeft is an experience so universal there’s even a song about it, Stephen Sondheim’s “Finishing the Hat.” Making things is hard but satisfying. Langlands is talking about digging a hole in the ground, but is it so very different from staying up all night writing code?
But perhaps I’m giving us too much credit. Beyond the mastery of specialized skills, Langlands is talking about something more holistic: a way of looking at the world. In reconnecting with craeft, he begins to see not just the beauty of an object or a building or a landscape, but the deeper purpose for which each has been created. And he understands, too, the environment they shape and upon which they depend. “Archaeology became so much more than just stuff in the ground,” he says about his own journey. “It became an exploration of what it was to be human, not only because we are makers but because we are resourcers, gatherers with an inveterate knowledge of the natural world around us.” How comparatively helpless are the rest of us as we contemplate the featureless mirror of the computer screen or the smooth sheen of the smartphone.
Photo
Credit Nicole Natri
It is a deflating irony, of course, that in a marketplace dominated by mass production, it is the handcrafted item that commands a premium. Wicker baskets, made by our ancestors the same way since 5,000 B.C., are beautiful, versatile and resilient. Langlands cites a 1926 survey that listed more than 200 varieties of them in production in England and Wales.
Today, it’s far easier and cheaper to find an ugly plastic container that will be filthy in a year, cracked a year after that and interred in a landfill a year after that, presumably for eternity. The same species that made that first basket eventually invented the machine that cranks out the plastic one today. That is progress, and it has brought our fragile world nearly to the brink.
Langlands, surprisingly unsentimental for someone who made his fame doing historical re-enactments, resists the pull of nostalgia. Yet he makes a persuasive case that the surrender of our lives to machines represents a regression. “Factory manufacture,” he writes, “robs us of a special something: contemplation.” He’s not talking about the big questions of human existence, but of the hundreds of small ones that go into something as simple — or as complex — as building a stone wall: “Which to use? How to work it? Where to strike it?” In the end, this is the case he makes for craeft. At a time where our disconnection from the world around us is not just tragic but downright dangerous, recovering our status as Homo faber, the species that makes things, may be our salvation.
Michael Bierut is a partner in the design firm Pentagram and the author, most recently, of “Now You See It and Other Essays on Design.”
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A version of this review appears in print on January 14, 2018, on Page BR1 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Some Assembly Required. Today's Paper|Subscribe
Craeft review – not just a load of old corn dollies…
Alexander Langlands’s enjoyable personal history of craft argues that we have much to learn from the ways of the past
Ben East
Sun 19 Nov 2017 05.00 EST Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 09.17 EST
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alexander langlands sitting on a doorstep and making a skep
Alexander Langlands: a bit of hard craft does you good… Photograph: Russell Sach Photographer
As one of Britain’s cooler television historians and archaeologists, you’d probably expect Alexander Langlands to suggest that spending time converting raw materials into useful objects might make us happier. But Craeft, his celebration of how traditional crafts are about so much more than making – the old English meaning being an amalgam of “knowledge, power, skill” – isn’t simply man-v-machine polemic, nor does it wallow in nostalgia.
Instead, using a combination of memoir, history and cultural commentary – in the first chapter Langlands has his own Poldark moment with a scythe – Langlands makes a coherent and enjoyable argument for “not just a knowledge of making but a knowledge of being”. Along the way he makes hay, fashions a skep (and its shelter) to keep bees and thatches a roof for a cattle shed – and it’s work as hard as it is rewarding. But his conclusion is that with a little craeft in our lives we can all be a bit more resourceful, ingenious and contemplative – and it’ll do us good to be so.
• Craeft by Alexander Langlands is published by Faber (£20). To order a copy for £13.99 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
Since you’re here …
Book Review
Review: Craeft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts
Craeft: An Inquiry Into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts by Alexander Langlands (W.W. Norton, $26.95 hardcover, 352p., 9780393635904, January 2, 2018)
The Old English word "craeft" meant much more than the modern word "craft" usually does. Mental skill and virtue could be implied by it, and a sense of "power or skill in the context of knowledge, ability and a kind of learning." In Craeft, British archeologist and medieval historian Alexander Langlands (Henry Stephen's Book of the Farm) offers an entertaining and inspirational look at traditional skills that were part of ordinary English life for thousands of years, but were broadly abandoned with the advent of fossil fuels, mass production, plastics, pesticides and even cement. In the process, he says, we have literally lost touch with the world around us, and with the power and complex abilities of our own bodies.
Langlands has been part of several historical TV series on rural British life in various time periods. In Craeft, he performs many practical experiments on his rural English property, trying to replicate the results that field archeology and research pose in theory. His idealism and his love of the natural world and what we can learn to make of it are contagious. He deftly combines his hands-on experiences with historical knowledge in chapters on the skills of haymaking, pond making, pottery, dry stone wall building, spinning and weaving, tanning and leather work, draft animals, effective digging, and the many tools derived from stick and stones, among others. He learns to use a scythe, burns lime, grows long-stem straw to weave basket hives for keeping bees, and describes what he calls a life-altering experience of helping to thatch an ancient roof, which also meant identifying and collecting most of the raw materials in the woods and fields nearby. "Archaeology became so much more than just stuff in the ground. It became an exploration of what it was to be human."
Most of these old skills produce less than modern methods produce, but they do so more reliably and cheaply, says Langlands, and often more beautifully as well. They were developed in circular (instead of growth) economies, grounded in the cultivation of finite local natural resources, and their resilience and sustainability deserves new attention. "It seems we are finally coming back to this notion that making has a spiritual element to it, that making fits within a wider understanding of who we are and where we are going." This is an illuminating book on the pleasures of traditional work, and how we can rediscover that tactile world of skillful creation. --Sara Catterall
Shelf Talker: Anecdotes of practical experiments are combined with historical expertise in these essays on ancient skills of human life and how they can reconnect us with ourselves and the world.
The Forgotten Everyday Origins of ‘Craft’
A new book explores the fascinating medieval history of a word whose current meaning has little to do with skill or labor.
A close-up detail of the book cover for 'Craeft'
W. W. Norton
SARAH ARCHER FEB 25, 2018 CULTURE
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In his new book Craeft, the archaeologist and BBC presenter Alexander Langlands offers a fascinating and surprisingly relevant dive into a subject that might seem niche to many—the origins of traditional crafts in medieval Europe. The reviews, by and large, have been enthusiastic. But some of the article headlines present a curious opening argument for the work. A short write-up in The Guardian is introduced, “Craeft review—not just a load of old corn dollies.” In The New York Times Book Review, a thoughtful piece by the renowned graphic designer Michael Bierut is similarly branded, “Before Glitter and Glue Sticks, Craeft.”
You’ve probably encountered this cliché before: Something in the news—perhaps a sea of handmade Pussyhats—is “not your grandma’s knitting.” The word “craft” can seem to demand an apology or clarification: a reminder that no serious, technically accomplished endeavor should ever be confused with the homespun. For decades, academics have explored the ways in which traditionally domestic and feminine pursuits (as well as the creative traditions of communities of color and of artists in the developing world) tend to be dismissed as “craft,” as distinct from “art” or “design.” In Craeft’s introduction, Langlands quotes the late, eminent furniture designer David Pye, who because of this divide once characterized craft as “a word to start an argument with.”
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So if “craft” is guaranteed to start a fight, what is “craeft,” exactly? To understand this, it helps to know a bit about Langlands’s backstory. He’s trained as an archaeologist and specializes in Anglo-Saxon Britain; but he’s better known to viewers of British TV from his role as a presenter on the BBC’s historic farms series, including titles like Victorian Farm and Edwardian Farm. Langlands’s television experience appears to have inspired him to view archaeology more experientially than he had before. Not content to unearth artifacts and speculate about how an ancient object might have been made, or who might have owned it, he’s intrigued by how things were used, and what it might have been like to work with them in historical context.
For Langlands, the Anglo-Saxon word “craeft” is distinct from our modern word “craft” in spirit and in practice. “Craeft” means having the wisdom of one’s surroundings, understanding nature and the seasons, and knowing one’s materials, as well as how objects and systems fall apart. To illustrate the point, Langlands’s book offers a bewitching virtual tour of life in Medieval England. Describing his happy first experience with filming Tales From the Green Valley (part of the historic-farms series), Langlands writes:
I was spending nearly every single hour of every day immersed in historical farming. I was tending, ploughing, scything, chopping, sweeping, hedging, sowing, walling, slicing, chiselling ... the list is almost endless. Most significantly, I was watching with an archaeological eye how my actions were altering and reconfiguring the material environment around me.
This, in a nutshell, is what’s at the heart of Craeft: It’s vignette after charming vignette of ancient processes, described in exuberant detail as Langlands travels through Spain, France, England, Scotland, and Iceland. Readers get a richly atmospheric peek into “craefts” like the thatching of roofs, the spinning of wool, and the tanning of hides.
Langlands’s discussion of how the modern word “craft” acquired its cultural baggage begins with language. When the term “craeft” first emerged in England during the middle ages, it connoted power, physical strength, and skill. But as early as 1200, it began to mean “cunning” or “sly.” (Even today a weaselly person might be called “crafty.”) Later, perhaps due to its association with “power,” it also began to hint at the supernatural, as in “witchcraft.” But none of this quite explains why, today, outlets reviewing Langlands’s book feel the need to reference “corn dollies,” as if preempting reader judgment about a word that once just described a sphere of activity, like “technology” or “food.” And Langlands doesn’t quite fill in this gap.
He does provide a lively history of the Arts and Crafts movement that originated in mid-1800s Great Britain and flowered in North America, which industrialized later during the Gilded Age. Langlands highlights, among other things, the movement’s connections to progressive politics (William Morris, of floral-wallpaper fame, was an ardent socialist). Nineteenth-century English design reformers like Morris and John Ruskin believed workers should have the satisfaction of creating goods from start to finish, rather than just toiling endlessly on single parts of things. The movement’s central irony is that the economics of the craftsman ideal don’t work: Then, as now, most people cannot afford to solely buy goods that have been handmade by a well-paid individual. Accordingly, Arts and Crafts masterpieces, like Tiffany silver, are more apt to be found in museums—hardly the realm of the humble glue stick.
Which brings us back to “craft”: Apart from its use as a marketing term for, say, microbrews, the word today doesn’t usually connote a skilled trade. Unlike “working,” “crafting” is commonly understood as fun: It can be self-consciously silly, feathered, decoupaged, and brightly colored. It’s fun for kids and meditative for grownups. In most cases, the product of a crafting session is less important than the relaxing process by which it was made. This is the case not only because mass production has trained consumers to value the widespread affordability of manufactured goods. It’s also because industrialization permanently altered how people understand work, leisure, and time. Craft is leisure, but it’s terribly efficient: It provides the satisfaction of transforming a stack of materials into a tangible, recognizable finished object, often by way of a therapeutically repetitive process. Craft’s magic trick is that it’s play that’s been designed to look like work.
Hard as it may be to believe now, there was a moment not so long ago when social reformers were worried that people had too much free time. The rational measures of work that are often taken for granted today were unfamiliar concepts when the U.S. and Great Britain first industrialized. The notion that work had an “on/off” switch didn’t come naturally to people whose work lives had largely been governed by the seasons and the rhythms of the agricultural calendar. The natural consequence of the factory clock was the advent of recurring blocks of unplanned time in workers’ schedules, which posed a challenge: What was one to do? And if one wasn’t a laborer, but a 19th-century moral scold concerned with public vices like gambling and drinking, what was there to do in one’s off hours?
Plenty, according to the historian Steven Gelber, whose book Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America chronicles the rise of what he terms “productive leisure.” “Hobbies developed as a category of socially valued leisure activity ... because they bridged the worlds of work and home,” Gelber writes. While hobbies appeared to provide a break from the office and factory life, Americans’ cultural aversion to idleness demanded a sense that one always be busy in some fashion. Enter craft, or “craeft” as metaphor.
Craft began to thrive during the 1910s and ’20s in the classroom, too. The little-known but highly influential Scandinavian philosophy of sloyd, first outlined in 1865, turned the study of craft into something resembling one of the liberal arts by arguing that such projects could build students’ characters and intellects. Likewise, the educator and philosopher John Dewey privileged the benefits of making of things over the quality of a finished object. Craft instruction began to animate classrooms and summer camps alike.
By the 1930s, toy companies were producing hobbycraft kits by the thousands; magazines promoted activities like furniture and carpentry for men, knitting and sewing for women, and beading and pottery for kids. Craft kits were packaged with supplies, instructions, and patterns. Rather than true “craeft,” kits are closer to assembly. The convergence of “process over product” educational theory and the hobbycraft industry is what doomed the word “craft” to associations with the unserious and unskilled. Where the word had once connoted expertise and skill, even supernatural abilities, by the mid-20th century, it had become an instant signifier of amateurism.
What Langlands is advocating for in his book is more widespread knowledge about the time when craft was integral to daily life. In the era he studies, activities like beekeeping weren’t escapes from reality, but essential to it. He also smartly notes that neither “craft” nor “craeft” is a synonym for “working with one’s hands.” At its root, the word “manufacture,” which is associated with mass production, means “to make by hand.” Most of the cheap goods we buy are made at least in part by people. The reason assembly isn’t “craeft,” to follow his logic, is that the final form of an assembled object is predetermined, requiring no ingenuity or material wisdom.
In Craeft, Langlands calls for living and working with awareness of our environments, materials, and challenges in real time. We don’t have to quit our jobs and start keeping bees in order to do this. Every architect thinking through climate-change-resilient design is applying “craeft” logic to their work; so are chefs who source all their produce locally, and jewelers who use only reclaimed gems and metals. We need not be literal about “craeft” to enjoy its benefits, or to see how it might benefit the world. Sometimes, a metaphor is the right tool for the job.