By Isla Quinn
A lathe, a ring, a knife. That is nearly the whole recipe for a wooden animal from the Ore Mountains, and nothing about it is quick.
The craft is called Reifendrehen, ring turning. Wikipedia says a suitable piece of wood is worked on a special lathe to produce a wooden ring, about 30 to 50 centimetres across, whose cross-section forms the outline of the figure. Small slices are then sawn or split off the ring with a sharp knife. The same article says the technique emerged around 1800 near Seiffen, enabled efficient mass production in the nineteenth century, and demands great experience and skill. It does not name the wood, so we will not.
A mining village that changed trades
Seiffen is in the Erzgebirge district of Saxony, about 650 metres above sea level, on 12.43 square kilometres, according to Wikipedia. It had 2,027 residents at the end of 2022. The town’s history, the article says, began when miners opened up the district 700 years ago, and the earliest record is from 1324, as Cynsifen. As the ore ran down, people turned to woodcraft.
Wikipedia’s article on Ore Mountains toymaking says much the same. Wooden toymaking became important because of the abundance of timber after silver mining declined. Production is concentrated in Seiffen and its surroundings. Most of the products, it says, were taken to the toy markets of Nuremberg and redistributed from there.
The Nuremberg date
In 1699, according to Wikipedia’s Seiffen article, Johann Friedrich Hiemann brought Seiffen toys to the Nuremberg market. The town became known for nutcrackers, smoking men, Christmas pyramids and Schwibbögen, the wooden candle arches. The article also says that when an export tax in 1890 changed from value to weight, craftspeople responded by developing miniature matchbox toys. Small, light, cheap to ship. It is a good example of how a tax rewrote a trade.
What the region makes
The toymaking article lists Christmas pyramids, Räuchermann incense smokers, nutcrackers, wooden figures such as angels, miners and turned animals, Christmas mountain scenes and Ore Mountain candle arches. The regional article adds hand-carved wooden trees, called Spanbäume, and music boxes, and notes that the Ore Mountains are nationally known for their Advent and Christmas customs, with window displays that turn a house into a sea of light. The region is sometimes called Weihnachtsland, Christmasland.
Nutcrackers deserve a note of caution. Wikipedia says the most famous nutcracker carvings come from Sonneberg in Thuringia and from Seiffen, and that figurative nutcrackers have existed since at least the fifteenth century. It lists makers’ names as collector’s items, and describes the figure as a good luck symbol in Germany. We have not checked which makers still work, and we will not name any.
The cost, and the co-operatives
The toymaking article is blunt about the human cost. Children, it says, often had to work more than 12 hours a day. Cooperatives such as Dregeno formed to secure a minimum income. It is worth keeping both facts in mind next time you pick up a charming little figure.
The mines are a World Heritage Site
In 2019 the region was inscribed by UNESCO as the Erzgebirge/Krušnohoří Mining Region, according to Wikipedia, with 22 mining sites in Germany and the Czech Republic. The Ore Mountains run roughly 150 kilometres along the border, separating Bohemia from Saxony. Seiffen’s wooden crafts appear separately on the region’s World Heritage site as monuments of the wooden crafts, though we have not read that page in full.
How a ring becomes a herd
A travel writer who watched a demonstration at the open-air museum in Seiffen describes it step by step. A wooden disc is mounted on a lathe. As it spins, the craftsperson cuts notches with several chisels, removing unwanted wood from alternate sides. The finished ring is taken off the lathe and sliced vertically, like a cake, and individual animals fall out. The writer says each ring could be cut into 40 to 60 figures, which still needed finishing and painting. That is one visitor’s account, and it is a blog, so treat the numbers as indicative.
The same account says the first water-powered lathe was built in 1760 by Johann Heinrich Frohs, with water dammed in ponds and run onto a waterwheel of 5.2 metres. It also says the whole family was involved in toymaking, as a cottage industry, and that the craftsperson demonstrating at the museum had no apprentice, which raised concern about the craft’s future. We have not confirmed any of that with the museum. The blog’s 1760 date for the first water-powered lathe also sits awkwardly beside Wikipedia’s “around 1800” for the ring-turning technique. They may describe different things, the lathe and the method, and we cannot settle it here.
The preserved lathe
The World Heritage site’s page on Seiffen says the village is known for traditional wooden toys, made with a special form of wood turning, Reifendrehen. It says the region shifted from mining to woodworking in the eighteenth century, that by the early eighteenth century Erzgebirge wooden toys were traded throughout Europe, and that the site preserves the only wood-turning equipment that is completely preserved and still operational today. That last claim is the heritage site’s own. The page also describes the miners’ church as one of the most famous religious buildings in the Erzgebirge, an octagonal structure that became a key artistic motif.
Seeing it
The Ore Mountain Toy Museum in Seiffen displays a large collection of typical wooden toys and similar items, Wikipedia says, and the Reifendrehen article mentions visitor workshops in the region. We have not confirmed opening times or whether demonstrations are running, so look up both.
When you see a turned animal, look at the edge. The profile of the ring is still in it.
What to ask
Ask whether the piece was ring-turned, carved or cast. Ask where the wood is from. Ask who finished and painted it. Ask whether it carries a regional mark, and what the mark requires. We have not checked what any such mark requires, so ask the seller to show you.
We will not name a workshop here, because we cannot source one.
Roam first. Shop later.