There is a photograph making the rounds from Stockholm this week that belongs in a museum frame. King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, dark suit and all, has an axe in his hands and is splitting wood over a chopping block. Next to him, laughing, is Julia Kalthoff – a young woman in a blue work jacket who runs the company where the photo was taken. Behind them, shelves of axe handles and raw timber stretch across the workshop.
It is not the kind of scene you expect from a royal visit, and that is exactly the point. The King came to Kalthoffs yxor, Kalthoff’s axe company on Södermalm in Stockholm, to see what a new generation of craftspeople is building. Kalthoff herself is no stranger to royal attention: she previously received the King’s Kompassrosen, the Compass Rose scholarship.
A scholarship for the brave
The story of the Kompassrosen goes back to a birthday. When the King turned 60, the Swedish Scouts founded the Ungt Ledarskap – Young Leadership – foundation to lift up young leaders. Since then, the King has awarded the Kompassrosen every year to leaders under 25 who have shown courage (mod), compassion (omtanke), and the will to act (handlingskraft).
Those three words would look good stenciled on the wall of any American workshop. During this week’s visit, Kalthoff told the King about her leadership journey and the values behind her company – how she got into the trade, what running an axe company in 2026 actually takes, and why the old skills matter to her. The King listened, then picked up an axe of his own.
Meanwhile, in America, the anvil is ringing
Here is why this Swedish story lands so well on American soil: the United States is in the middle of its own heritage craft renaissance. From Pennsylvania to Oregon, small forges and axe makers are finding customers who are tired of things that break. Blacksmithing classes book out. Young people who grew up with screens are discovering they love the weight of a hammer. Buying something made by hand, from someone you can name, has become a quiet luxury.
This is not a sector that reports quarterly earnings, and that is kind of the point. Walk through a craft fair in Asheville or a makers’ market in Portland and the pattern is obvious: hand-forged knives, small-batch axes, furniture with real joinery. The appetite for the authentic is growing, and it is not nostalgia. It is a correction. After a decade of everything arriving in two days and lasting two years, people want objects with a maker behind them.
A recent study on conservation’s bright spots found that preservation works best when it is rooted in real places and real people – the same logic powering the craft revival, one workshop at a time.
Young hands, old tools
That is what makes the King’s visit more than a charming photo. A monarch in his late seventies traveled across Stockholm to spend time with a young woman who makes axes, because her generation is carrying something forward. The Kompassrosen’s three virtues – courage, compassion, the will to act – describe every young American who has quit something safe to learn a trade.
America’s own drive to make things is alive at the ambitious end too – General Fusion recently hit a world first at 12 million degrees, a reminder that making things, whether a reactor or a tool handle, still sits at the heart of progress. Craft and high tech are not enemies. The kid who learns to swing a hammer today might help build the reactors of tomorrow.
Kalthoff’s workshop on Södermalm is a long way from Main Street, USA. But the hunger is the same on both sides of the Atlantic: for work that leaves a mark, for things that last, for leaders young enough to still be brave. The King of Sweden gets it. Increasingly, so does America.
Photo: Nathalie Malic / Kungahuset.
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