2 Kroner 'Rødegardister' Skillemyntsedler

The "Rødegardister" nickname — meaning roughly "Red Guards" — was applied by the Norwegian public to these small-denomination emergency notes, a derisive reference to their distinctive red colouring at a time when Bolshevik revolution was fresh news and political anxieties ran high across Scandinavia. The name stuck well enough to enter the numismatic literature permanently.

These skillemyntsedler were introduced specifically to address a wartime and immediate postwar coin shortage, as metal had been hoarded or diverted throughout WWI. The series ran into the early 1920s as the shortage persisted longer than Norges Bank anticipated.