Puukko

Origins

Small single-edged knives have been used across northern Europe for well over a thousand years, and the puukko belongs to that long tradition, alongside the Swedish Mora knife and, more distantly, the Viking-age Seax. In Finland a knife was an everyday necessity in a country of forests, farms, lakes and long winters. Men wore a puukko on the belt as a matter of course, and boys were given one young. Different regions developed their own styles. The town of Kauhava in the Ostrobothnia region of western Finland became especially famous for its knifemakers. In the nineteenth century Ostrobothnia was also known for the "puukkojunkkarit", gangs of young men whose brawls at weddings and fairs often ended with knives drawn, which gave the puukko a rougher reputation too.

Design & Construction

A typical puukko has a blade roughly three to four inches long, with a straight, thick back and an edge that curves up to meet the back at the point. The blade is usually ground with a single wide, flat bevel on each side running right down to the edge. This makes it easy to sharpen on a flat stone in the field and very good for carving wood. The tang runs through the handle and is fixed at the end. The handle is normally made of birch, often the dense, figured curly birch, or of stacked rings of birch bark, sometimes with fittings of brass or reindeer antler. There is usually no guard, or only a very small one. The sheath is the other distinctive part. It is deep, made of thick leather, often with a wooden liner, and it swallows the blade and part of the handle, holding the knife by friction. It hangs from the belt on a loop, so it can swing freely.

Combat Use

The puukko was not a fighting knife by design, but it went to war with the Finnish Army. In the Winter War of 1939-40 and the Continuation War of 1941-44, Finnish soldiers, many of them farmers and woodsmen, carried their own puukkos as general tools. They used them to cut firewood and spruce boughs for shelters, prepare food, repair skis and equipment, and do the countless small jobs of life in the forest in deep cold. In the close fighting of patrols and raids a knife could also become a weapon, but the soldier's main arms were the rifle, such as the Mosin-Nagant M/28-30, and the Suomi KP/-31 submachine gun. Russians had long called this type of knife a "finka", a Finnish knife, and the name was familiar in the Soviet Union well before the war.

Legacy

The puukko is still made and carried in Finland, by hunters, fishermen and campers, and it is a common gift. Among the best-known makers are Iisakki Järvenpää of Kauhava, founded in the nineteenth century, and Marttiini of Rovaniemi in Lapland, founded in 1928. The Finnish Defense Forces later issued a combat knife of their own, the sissipuukko or ranger knife, which keeps the puukko's simple shape. In the history of military knives, the puukko sits beside American knives like the KA-BAR Knife and the Ek Commando Knife, but it is older than any of them and was never really a weapon first.