Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1942, Page 265
FRONTIERS OF THE NORTHERN NATIONS 253
the ring had been closed from both sides. All this cannot have
been a matter of chance: it seems obvious that the dangers of
the Nöteborg Peace had been realized in Sweden.
It was only now that the question of a frontier between
Finland, or “East Land” as it was called, and the rest of the
Swedish Kingdom could arise, for before then Sweden and Fin-
land had had no common land boundaries. Characteristically,
the new frontier was at first an ecclesiatical boundary, viz. that
between the dioceses of Uppsala and Ábo. The parish of Torne
belonged to the former, and that of Kemi to the latter. But the
whole of Ostrobothnia occupied a special position, and as late
as the i6th century it was hardly regarded as belonging to Fin-
land in the same way as the more Southerly districts. Nor was
there any linguistic or ethnographic boundary coinciding with
the political frontier: in the same way as Ostrobothnia contained
a considerable Swedish population within its coastal districts,
so the northernmost part of the growing Swedish district of Norr-
land came to include widely scattered Finnish settlements, and
this continues to be the case to-day, in spite of the modifications
which the frontier has undergone since then.
But this was not the only expansion which took place beyond
the frontiers laid down by the Peace of Nöteborg. Gradually,
settlement pushed across the frontier from the West along prac-
tically its whole length. The fortress of Nyslott was built in 1475
on soil which should have been Russian according to the pro-
visions of the treaty of 1323. When Sweden obtained contact
with the young Muscovite great power which had taken the place
of Novgorod in the great trial of strength with the Western
countries, the question again became burning. The situation was
indeed an anomalous one: Finns and Swedes were driven by
the logic of events completely to reinterpret the original pro-
visions of the Nöteborg Peace, which had now become a dead
letter. For more than a century there was no mutually recognized
frontier on this important front. After a long succession of mili-
tary events, during which Finland was only one of the theatres
of war, a settlement was at length arrived at by the Peace of
Tevsina in 1595, and a Russo-Swedish frontier at last established
on the ruine of the Nöteborg Treaty.
This was an event fraught with great importance for the
future, and it came to decide the fate of the frontier of Finland
as it is to this very day. The peace of Stolbova in 1617, “the