About Northern Bush

Northern Bush focuses on living outdoors, primarily in Scandinavia and similar climates & nature, but also elsewhere around the world. Common topics are camping, hiking and non-urban survivalism and what is called bushcrafting , ie creating things that make life more comfortable out of improvised natural materials when you are outdoors. Included here is e.g. building a temporary camp, preparing different types of fires, water and food, gear maintenance etc. In addition to this, common topics are Nordic folk culture & traditions, as well as Norse and Sami culture. The site will also have reviews of equipment, not least knives, for bushcrafting and hiking, and nearlying fields. It will also contain articles with experiences and tips, with a particular focus on northern type climates and nature.

Bushcrafting to some degree overlaps with survival skills and a bit with prepping as well. There won’t be any vomit-inducing worm omelets or climbing of high pines to collect tinder though. That kind of crap just gets you into trouble.

Northern Bush is a sister site to HROARR.com, one of the most important sites dedicated to research into Historical European Martial Arts and Arms.

The plans for the site are quite open still and possibly it will develop similarly to HROARR, with a growing community sharing ideas. It will grow with the wishes and requests of its followers. It’s sister site HROARR.com currently has some 25-30,000 regular followers with about 500-800 unique readers per day. The hope is that Northern Bush will exceed that, given the larger audience the site’s focus has. The site is run by Roger Norling, chief editor and responsible publisher of both sites.

Our logo

The somewhat mystical Ð letter in our logo is the Norse letter ‘Eth‘, pronounced the same way as the beginning of English “the” or in “Northern“. The lower case variant is ð. It was  used in Old English, Middle English, Icelandic, Faroese, Elfdalian and in all of Scandinavia during the Middle Ages, but was subsequently replaced with the letter ‘d’ in the Scandinavian languages and with ‘th’ in English. Its use has survived in Iceland and the Faroe Islands. So, the logo actually reads “Northern Bush”, only using the ancient letter Eth; Ð.

The Nordic Region

The Nordic Region has a, from an international perspective, rather unusual tradition of living in the wild that goes back to the Middle Ages and strengthened in the 1940s, a tradition that is defined and protected even by law, the Everyman’s Right, as it is called in Sweden. This means everyone by law has the right to access to all land and sea, even that owned by someone else, and extends so far as allowing everyone to camp for a few nights on any piece of land, under the condition that it won’t disturb the land owner to an unreasonable degree. The basic rule is “Don’t disturb, don’t destroy”). This traditional right, and obligations, extend even to visiting people from other countries.