Swedish Military Mora Knife

Origins

Knives have been made around Mora, in the forested province of Dalarna in central Sweden, since at least the late seventeenth century. Like the Finnish Puukko, the Mora knife began as a farmer's and woodsman's tool, and by the twentieth century two factories dominated the trade. Frosts was founded by Erik Frost in 1891, and the firm later known as KJ Eriksson was founded in 1912. Their cheap, sturdy knives were sold all over Scandinavia, and "mora" became the everyday Swedish word for this kind of knife. In 2005 the two companies merged, and they now trade as Morakniv.

Design & Construction

The classic Mora knife has a straight-backed, single-edged blade roughly 10 centimeters long, ground with a single wide bevel on each side that is easy to sharpen on a flat stone. Older blades were usually laminated carbon steel, with a hard core layer between softer outer layers, so the edge stayed sharp while the blade resisted breaking. The tang runs into a simple barrel-shaped handle, traditionally of birch, and there is no guard. The sheath was leather on older knives and plastic on later ones. Knives bought for the armed forces were often, though not always, stamped with the Three Crowns, the Swedish state mark. Collectors note that black handles were a special military order in the early years, and orange handles marked knives for the civil defense service. Military Mora knives were general tools, and no single model number from the war years is well documented.

Service

Sweden stayed neutral in the Second World War, but from 1939 it called up hundreds of thousands of men in the years Swedes call the beredskap, or "readiness." They guarded the borders with Finland and Norway, built defenses, and spent long winters in the field. Swedish sources agree that the Mora knife was the most common knife in the country and in the armed forces. However, the exact models, contracts and issue dates from 1939-45 are poorly recorded, and many soldiers simply carried their own. Swedish volunteers also fought for Finland in the Winter War. The Swedish Volunteer Corps, about 8,000 men, held part of the front in northern Finland in early 1940, and its weapons and equipment came largely from the Swedish army. Sources do not name a particular knife issued to the corps, but a Mora knife would have been the ordinary Swedish knife of the day. Sweden had no purpose-made fighting knife during the war. In the late 1940s the army tested double-edged versions of the Mora and the French M1916 trench knife. It finally adopted the FM/52 fighting knives in 1952, closely based on the American M3 trench knife. The air force's first survival knife followed around 1948.

Legacy

The Mora knife stayed in Swedish service through the Cold War as a utility knife issued with tool kits, medical kits and field equipment. Variants included an air force survival knife from the 1970s and 1980s and a knife carried at the army parachute school. From the 1990s the Mora 2000 became the standard Swedish forces knife, and it is still in use. Mora knives are also widely used by the other Scandinavian armies. Unlike the American Ek Commando Knife, it was never meant as a fighting weapon, but it is one of the most widely carried military knives in the world, and surplus Swedish army Moras are still easy to find.