First, thanks to Jane for actually checking the sources for what's in Dragon Pass! Secondly, I didn't think that Oakfed got loose in Sartar; just Prax.
On the subject of saws and forest-felling, I've just been checking out Jean Gimpel's "The Medieval Machine", a must-read for many of the grittier questions of possible Gloranthan tech. This is probably getting very digesty, so I'll copy it over there.
Firstly, while the Romans did have saws, they were
not the sophisticated steel weaponry of the North
American lumberjack. The saws that felled much of NA
forests in under a hundred years are very sneakily
designed. The teeth come in three rows, two angled
outwards and sharpened on the outsides to rip channels
in the wood, while the center teeth were actually
chisel-shaped to cut away the central strip remaining,
including a large enough cutaway between the teeth to
accommodate the sawdust so as not to choke the blade.
(Roman saw stock couldn't be made en masse in rolling
mills, either, but had to be forged.) Until this
sawtooth ensemble was developed, axes remained the
best way to fell a tree, and splitting and then adzing
the surface the best way to make a plank.
Quick estimate on how much wood it took to make an average house - 20 oaks. Windsor Castle - 4000.
Now, it turns out that the real reason that forests quickly needed stewards to protect them in the Middle Ages was the need for wood in iron smelting. One furnace (usually located in the forest) needed 25m3 of wood, in the form of charcoal, to turn 200kg of iron ore into 50kg of iron. It was estimated that a furnace running for 40 days could consume a 1km radius of forest as fuel. (Quick example of a wood shortage: in 13thC Douai (northern France), poorer families had to rent a wooden coffin, which was reclaimed by the undertaker after the ceremony was over.)
Getting back to Glorantha, since bronze is assumed in many cases to be available as a native metal, this shouldn't be such a problem. What the trade-off is in needing to heat bronze to melting point for many applications, vs ductile point for RW iron, I'll leave for others to check out. Bring on the Rubber Bible!
However, with the huge consumption of wood that
smelting can take, I think that for Sartar and
Heortland to remain well-forested, there's not as much
forging going on as one might think. Or the dwarves
are doing much of it with their secret coal technology
(early 13thC in Britain). Or maybe Heat Metal spells
are saving the forests of Sartar.
Alison
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End of Glorantha Digest
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