History of the Leuku and Puukko?

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Jul 24, 2010
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Anyone know and care to share? How about the history of your favorite knife or at least the history behind what inspired your favorite knife?

Either way there's a lot of lurking and not enough posting going on here haha.
 
The leuku and puuko are Scandinavian in origin, adapted for processing fish and caribou/reindeer for food and hides in cold weather. Caribou meat is extremely lean, though in the winter the animals develop a very thick, defined layer of fat for insulation. Being able to slice through different media with precision was key. The Saami, the ancient nomadic reindeer herding culture in the Scandinavian tundra, originally forged them by burning peat, which collected iron ore washed out of the Scandinavian mountains. The ore was heavy with traces of titanium and nickel. I'm not sure of the date of origin, the Saami didn't have a written language until 1000AD.
 
Interesting bit I'll tack on: If you look at other arctic cultures like the Inuit and Indigenous Siberians, that also work extensively with fish and caribou, they seem to have adopted or independantly developed knives of near identical design: zero ground with a thin blade and biiiiig belly.
 
Interesting bit I'll tack on: If you look at other arctic cultures like the Inuit and Indigenous Siberians, that also work extensively with fish and caribou, they seem to have adopted or independantly developed knives of near identical design: zero ground with a thin blade and biiiiig belly.

The Inuit had iron?? Last I checked vikings did work with iron in Greenland but due to the lack of burning material they couldn't make much of it. In fact they reverted mostly to pre-iron age tools when the small ice age started around the 13th century. To my knowledge the Inuit never worked with any metal until they bartered knives much later.

Different point, I personally think that most "outdoor" knives are completely off the mark. For me the most common work you do camping is food prep and frankly all these oversised tacticool blades fare badly. Actually the simple kitchen knife works better than all the trash that is being offered as specially designed for the outdoors. When I was last in Skukuza I went to the museum to see Harry Wolhuter's knife, which he used every day being one of the legendary Kruger rangers, and it is a fairly simple design with a very thin blade. Looks like a big kitchen knife. He also used it to kill a lion and it didn't break. Guess you don't need sharpened prybars.
 
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The Inuit had iron?? Last I checked vikings did work with iron in Greenland but due to the lack of burning material they couldn't make much of it. In fact they reverted mostly to pre-iron age tools when the small ice age started around the 13th century. To my knowledge the Inuit never worked with any metal until they bartered knives much later.

Different point, I personally think that most "outdoor" knives are completely off the mark. For me the most common work you do camping is food prep and frankly all these oversised tacticool blades fare badly. Actually the simple kitchen knife works better than all the trash that is being offered as specially designed for the outdoors. When I was last in Skukuza I went to the museum to see Harry Wolhuter's knife, which he used every day being one of the legendary Kruger rangers, and it is a fairly simple design with a very thin blade. Looks like a big kitchen knife. He also used it to kill a lion and it didn't break. Guess you don't need sharpened prybars.

What do you mean, 'had iron'? They are still very much an active culture, and a vast majority of the cutting tools I see in anthropology studies are more or less an original puuko design. And Viking culture was dead by the 13th century, Christianity became prevalent after 1000AD and their religion, which was the defining aspect of their culture, died out.
 
The original argument was that the Inuit developed Puukko type knives which they couldn't if they had no metal. Up to this day they buy what comes from other countries, there is no knife manufacturing with a long standing tradition neither in Northern Canada or Greenland which can be considered home grown Inuit, I'm sure there are Inuit knife makers but this does not equal to a widespread knife making culture. One could argue that their wooden and horn tools were similar to a Puukko design, personally I think this is nonesense because in order to get a wooden tool sharp you have to make it very thin so by default they look like Puukkos.

The viking settlements in Greenland died out in the 14th century, the exact dates are unknown but until 1300 trade between Europe and Greenland was common and only disappeared once the small ice age started (1300 - 1850) because it became too difficult. Another aspect was that trade with Greenland was a royal privilege which meant the the number of ships was limited and once the mother country had internal issues there was little interest until it was basically forgotten. Sad story but not everything works out for the good.

I suggest the book Collapse from Jared Diamond if one is interested in what happened in Greenland and all the open questions like why didn't the Vikings in Greenland not fish? Why did they not copy the Inuit boats once the Inuit started settling in Greenland. Truth is that the descendants of the vikings in the 17th century, when they traveled to Greenland again, immediatley copied the kayaks.
 
I used the words "adopted or independently developed"-if you read my post you'd see that we're on the same track. I guess it depends on how you define Viking culture-the root word is largely based on the old norse verb that meant to go on an expedition, which generally was done so to appease Odin. Once Christianity became prevalent in mainland Scandinavia, I don't know how you could really consider the culture to still be 'Viking' because the defining aspect of their culture had changed. It may have taken Christianity longer to spread to the colonies though... One could hypothesize that the longboats were an important aspect in their pagan based culture and that's why they didn't adopt Inuit kayaks until they recolonized Greenland after Seiðr had died out.
 
I've been mostly flat on my back the last few days with a flubugthingy from hell.

But- can't really argue much about the inuit side of things right now, I've got some references in various books including finds of bone knives and axes shaped very similarly to viking era implements.

To work on the history you have to work with the various names in dialect: buiku (sami for puukko), huggare (swedish for leuku), stuorniibi (sami for leuku). It gets complicated, but it's remakably hard to find really good data.

If you look at the tasks, the blades make a lot of sense. They've also, traditionally, been more or less immune to the "thickness rage." One of my main reasons for coming back to them time and again is just that. They work, and work well, without getting into 1/4 or 5/16 blade thicknesses!
 
Hope you start to feel better Christof, I was wondering what was up, you've been more quiet then usual. We've had the flu running rampant around here so I know how ya feel.

Interestingly enough then do have a wiki page on this but it doesn't cover anything that hasn't been said already. It does have links to the Sami people who I guess first came to use and make this type of knife if anyone is interested on reading about that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sami_knife
 
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