Reifentiere: Ring-Turned Animals

Ring turning grew up around Seiffen at about the turn of the 19th century, as tin mining faded. Its first written record is a document of November 14, 1810, in the Dresden city archive, but a Nuremberg toy catalog of 1803 already shows ring-turned buildings, so its beginnings lie before 1800. No inventor is known.

It was an ingenious answer to hard times. One turned ring gave dozens of identical blanks, so toy animals could be made cheaply enough to sell across the world, and the Seiffen toy museum credits the technique with making Erzgebirge wooden toys competitive internationally. In 1906 the ring turners formed a compulsory guild; around 1920 some thirty of them worked in Seiffen, and one skilled turner could keep four families of home workers supplied with blanks in a day.

Then the craft dwindled. By the 1980s it had become mainly something to watch in a museum. In Seiffen’s open-air museum, in the water-powered turning mill of 1758–1760, where ring turning came in 1889, it is still shown every day. The museum’s collection holds 367 whole rings and pieces of rings.