Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1942, Page 260

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LE NORD
years). By a series of dramatic strokes of military policy, Carolus
Gustavus made the Baltic the Southern frontier of Sweden, a
frontier which succeeding ages have accepted as a natural one
without too much heartburning. Thanks to the similarity of
language, religion, and customs, and a consistent Swedish policy
of assimilation, Scania before many years had elapsed became
a loyal Swedish province, in spite of certain features, heritages
from its Danish past, which have survived till this day.
For obvious reasons, the history of the Swedish-Norwegian
frontier after 1380 presents many points of contact with that
of the Danish-Swedish frontier, for in that year a union between
Denmark and Norway was established which was to last practic-
ally without interruption till 1814. The most interesting part
of our subject is, however, connected with the preceding era of
Norwegian independence, which is remarkable for the wealth of
historical sources which have come down to us. If the Icelandic
Saga literature is to be credited, the Norwegians at the begin-
ning of the nth century succeeded in reconquering the country
between Svinesund and the Göta River, which for some time be-
fore then had been in the hands of the Swedish King. When we
reach an age when more detailed sources are available, Yiken,
as this district is called, is at any rate Norwegian. Or rather,
this part of Viken too, for the large Norwegian province known
under that name originally comprised the whole of the country
about the Oslo Fiord. In the later and limited sense of the word,
Viken, or what was later on called Bohuslán, was at an early
date bounded on the North by Svinesund, the inlet where the
modern international frontier between Norway and Sweden
begins. To the South, this district stretched all the way down to
the Göta River, with the castle of Bohus confronting the Swedish
wedge of territory in these coastal regions. A number of frontier
conferences held during the early middle ages seem only to have
confirmed this traditional frontier between the two related na-
tions.
Reckoned from the Northern point of Viken to a point near
the sea in the South, this boundary for a long stretch practically
coincided with the present-day frontier, even though an exact
delimitation was hardly needed in these mountainous and wooded
tracts, which were outside the area of cultivation. A detailed re-
cord handed down to us from about 1270 shows the essential
continuity of this boundary, and also indicates how persistently