The puukko is a traditional finnish knife for hunting and carving. Even though the word is generally uncorretly used to refer also to scandinavian short bladed knives.
It's worth knowing that Finland is not part of Scandinavia and has different heritage and culture, even if it was under swedish and russian domination during its history.
Back to knives, even if scandinavian and finnish ones are rather similar they are, at last, called in different ways. The puukko equivalents in Sweden are called slidkniv or brukskniv, in Norway brukskniv or tollekniv and in Denmark brugskniv.
All these knives can be dated back to early Middle Age, around the Migration Period and following Viking Age.
At the time the most common style was a simple barrel handle and a straight spined blade. As already said the type of grind and his height can vary quite a lot from smith to smith and from purpouse to purpouse.
Blades were most commonly laminated with iron sides and steel core, beeing good steel rare and very expensive. It's not casual that the european tecnique of pattern welding can be first found in this period, used mostly for swords and seaxes.
Finnish rhombic section is probably more recent, beeing firstly found around 1600, but it's possible that we just have a lack of material to detect an earlier origin.
It was however created reforging sqare files that already gave from themself a hint of the geometry and a good steel too.
The handle materials, like today, were mostly local woods, various deer antler, bovine horn, various metal for bolsters, leather and birch bark.
The most common handle shape was and is the barrel or fish belly one. The more elaborate ones, like fishtail or bird head ones become popular after the 1920s.
A special note must be done on birch bark. Widely used in all Scandinavian and Baltic peninsula for any kind of stuff: from shoes to cups, from boxes to hats, from roof lining to paper, from sheaths to knife handles.
Birch bark is an extremely tough material, water and moisture proof, beeing full of an essencial oil, warm, grippy and velvetly to the touch.
To give an idea of its toughness exist examples of knives where the steel blade is almost completely worn out by rust while the birch bark handle is still solid and in good shape.
Sheaths were and are made of tanned bovine or deer hide. Traditionally back sewed in the centre and with a wood liner, modern swedish sheaths now tends to have the seweing shifted towards one of the sides.
Birch bark sheaths are still sometimes made, even if they seem more common in Finland.
Back on grinds, speaking of living makers, I can tell that scandinavian blades have usually a ricasso and a lower grind, while finnish have a higher grind and very rarely a ricasso.
Grind height depends also on spine thickness and blade geometry and this also is a very personal thing among smiths.
Just had to rant on the soap boxing that seems to have to happen here every time a simple question is asked.
