ArtistSwedish
Tore Sunna
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When the Nordkalott road opened between Kiruna and Narvik, two kings needed knives to cut the ribbon. Both came from the hands of Tore Sunna. That commission - all-horn knives crafted for King Olav V of Norway and King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden - stands as the most condensed expression of what Sunna represented in Sami duodji: a craftsman whose precision and cultural authority were recognized far beyond the reindeer-herding communities of northern Sweden where he spent his life.
Sunna was born in 1942 in Åresjokk, a small Sami settlement in northern Sweden. He came from a family where skill with materials was a given: his brothers Helge, Knut, and Per were all practitioners of duodji, and Lars Levi Sunna would later become known for ecclesiastical Sami art within the Swedish state church. Tore began working with traditional materials in earnest from the age of 14, committing to handicraft as a full-time pursuit at a time when the economic and cultural pressures of mid-century Sweden were pushing many Sami communities toward assimilation. His dedication made him, by most accounts, the most prominent of the Sunna brothers in terms of auction market recognition and collector interest.
Duodji is not simply craft - it is a conceptual framework for the relationship between material, function, identity, and place. In the Southern Sami tradition where Sunna worked, knives are the central object: the blade the most necessary tool, the handle and sheath the space where artistic expression concentrates. Sunna worked primarily with reindeer horn (both half-horn and whole-horn forms), birch, and leather, engraving stylized geometric and organic patterns into the horn surfaces with a precision that distinguishes his pieces from most contemporaries. His lockaskar (lidded boxes) and salt bottles in birch and horn also appear regularly at auction, demonstrating a range beyond the knife form.
His pieces are signed with either his full name or the monogram "TS," and occasionally appear under the variant spelling "Thore Sunna" in older auction records. The consistent signature practice helped establish provenance in a field where attribution is often uncertain. Sunna died in 2006, leaving a body of work that is now primarily accessible through the secondary market.
On Auctionist, Sunna is represented by 31 items with 2 currently active. The items appear almost entirely in the collectibles category, reflecting how the Swedish auction market classifies duodji. Norrlands Auktionsverk handles the largest share with 16 items, followed by Stockholms Auktionsverk Magasin 5 with 6. The auction data shows top results for a birch and reindeer horn kiisa (a traditional lidded box) at 14,001 SEK, and whole-horn knives reaching 9,050 EUR at Bukowskis - a figure that underscores the difference between mainstream duodji prices and the premium commanded by a documented master. Most pieces trade in the 1,000-6,000 SEK range.