Mora No-Guard Knives
I've got a Mora #1 that I am actually scared to use. It has no guard and the way the blade meets the handle there is a smooth transition from smooth wood right to razor sharp steel across about 1mm. It's a safe queen. The Eriksson above is the same knife basically but with a guard and a bit of a pommel on the end.
The standard Mora #1, #2, and so on are "guardless" knives.
That design has been around since . . . pretty much forever.
In Scandinavia (including Finland) there's been this tradition for generations that a Mora-style knife with a guard is a
boy's knife, whereas once he has learned how to properly handle a knife, either the guard is removed, or the knife is replaced with a guardless one. Kind of a rite of passage into adulthood.
If you think about it a bit, there are a number of applications where a guard just gets in the way (think camp kitchen, cutting board, that kind of thing). Your kitchen knives don't have guards for that very reason. Likewise, look at the skinners and other butcher knives used by professionals. No guard. (Some of the newer models do have handles with grooves and/or side flanges to keep your fingers off the edge.)
The traditional Mora knife isn't intended for stabbing, nor are other traditional Nordic designs (e.g. Puukko, Leuku).
It's not difficult to train or learn a safe technique with guardless knives. In fact, a guardless knife is actually
safer when it's really sharp than when it's dull, so you would
want a Mora knife to be scary sharp.
On the other hand, if you expect to be stabbing or doing other point-force work with a knife, then the traditional Nordic design is not the best choice.
