Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1942, Síða 262

250
LE NORD
upper österdal River, which originally were Norwegian, had
in 1644 been seized by the Dalecarlians under a clerical leader,
but they were not formally ceded to Sweden till 1751, by the
treaty of that year.
To the North of Jámtland began the vast area of Lappland,
also called the Finmark in old Scandinavian sources, a territory
which then was completely untouched by civilization. It was
long before any State could assert any influence here, and even
longer before any real frontier was established. The levying of
taxes on the Lapps was for long an important interest both of
Sweden and Norway. But the vagueness of the frontier, and the
nomadic habits of the population, made this taxation a fruitful
source of disputes. By 1600 there had in this way developed an
extremely acute conflict of interests between Sweden, Norway-
Denmark, and, to a certain extent, Russia, all three of which
claimed the right to levy taxes in the coastal regions on the Arctic
Sea. It is clear that Charles IX entertained schemes of acquiring
an outlet for Sweden to open waters in the North in these parts.
But the attempt to realize these schemes was frustrated, and by
the Peace Treaty of 1613, which ended the Kalmar War, Sweden
was forced to renounce this ambitious Finmark policy, as
it proved for ever. In this Northern area, the watershed was now
regarded as a sort of traditional, but never actually delimited
frontier. In the immediate vicinity of the watershed a new silver
deposit was found in the iö^o’s, and a frontier dispute seemed
imminent. In these circumstances, the Government in Stockholm
sent out a surveyor to establish the course of the traditional
frontier, including that on the Finnish side, on the basis of the
Lappmark watershed. The same principle was adopted during
the preparatory work which preceded the frontier treaty of 1751,
which, it may be added, formed part of a projected reconciliation
between Sweden and Denmark, and which followed close upon
the engagement of Gustavus, Crown Prince of Sweden, and at
that time four years old, (the later Gustavus III), and Princess
Sophia Magdalena, the daughter of Frederik Y of Denmark, who
was even younger.
The Swedish-Finnish boundary, to which we come next, occu-
pies a special position in that it is not till very late, i. e. in 1809
that it became an international frontier. From the very first,
however, there is an intimate connection between the Swedish-
Finnish frontier and the boundary between Finland, which till