Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1942, Side 255

THE HISTORICAL FRONTIERS OF THE
NORTHERN NATIONS
by Nils Ahnlund,
Professor of history in the University of Stockholm.
THAT water unites rather than separates, if the waterway
in question is not too broad, is a truth known to all stu-
dents of the political geography of the past. On the Euro-
pean Continent the old national boundaries are formed by forests,
mountain tracts, and similar inaccessible regions far more fre-
quently than by lakes or major rivers. This almost invariably
holds good in the case of the oldest dividing lines which separate
the Northern nations from each other and from their neigh-
bours outside Scandinavia. It is a well-known fact that Scandi-
navia has two “external” boundaries: the Southern frontier of
Denmark, and the Eastern frontier of Finland, both of which
have been among the most hotly fought-over demarcation lines
in Europe. But history shows that the “internal” Scandinavian
frontiers have also undergone great changes before they settled
down in the form which they have to-day.
¥e will first glance for a moment at the oldest Danish-Ger-
man frontier. As a tribal boundary, it is older than the union of
Denmark into one State, being clearly discernible as far back as
the ^th century. From the first, the difference between Scan-
dinavian and Saxon settlement is marked by the river Eider,
which falls into the North Sea, and whose broad and slow waters
lend itself very well to this purpose. In the direction of the Baltic,
the Eider boundary was continued by the Levensau, which has
now largely been absorbed in the Kiel Canal. But the real strenght
of this frontier lays in the fact that the region to the South of
it consisted of large tracts of forest and waste lands, and it was
only natural that when the defensive wall known as the Danne-
virke was constructed a thousand years ago, it was placed to the
North of this line. Already the earliest sources, from the time
of Charlemagne, mention the Eider both as a political and na-
tional boundary, a frontier between States. As the forests of
North Holstein were settled by the German Saxons, now in-
corporated in the reconstituted Empire of the Carolingians, a
clash between the Teutons of the North and those of the Conti-
nent became inevitable. The history of the successive crossings