At that time it had a mainly Finnish-speaking population in its lower part nearer the coast, and a Sámi-speaking population in the upper part. It comprises the area recognized today as Finnish and Swedish Tornedalen. This location was determined in the Norwegian border protocols that were part of the negotiations concerning the northern part of the Norwegian-Swedish border (Schnitler 1962, XX–XXV). 1 In the mid-eighteenth century Kvenland was more exactly located on both sides of the estuary of the Torne River on the northernmost shore of the Gulf of Bothnia, and from there widening along its tributaries up to the Norwegian border about 350–500 km northwest of the coast. In the medieval sources the political area of Kvenland was variously depicted as comprising all the area north of Swedish Svealand, as in the Viking Age source, to being more specifically located between the provinces of Hälsingland, Finnmark, Finland and Karelia (Green 1893, 23 Ross 1940, 5–23 Fell 1983, 5–65 Egil Skallagrimssons Saga 1989, 30 Opsahl 2003, 23–60). In these sources Kvenland is always located east of the mountain range separating Norway and Sweden. From the late ninth century up to the thirteenth century it was depicted as a province inhabited by fishers and warrior groups, called Kvens. The historical province of Kvenland is mentioned in Norwegian and Islandic sources in various political discourses. The Finnish speakers in Tornedalen, thus, kept their linguistic and cultural continuity but lost their western Scandinavian ethnonym Kven. When this was integrated into the Swedish kingdom the inhabitants were designated Finns by the Swedes. Their core territory was situated in the upper Gulf of Bothnia area. The investigation shows that the Kvens constituted a group of Finnish speaking people existing in continuity from the Viking Age. The names Kven and Kvenland were never used in Sweden. The ethnonym and the territory of Kvenland were used by the Norwegians to maintain an ethnic boundary with the Finnish speakers in the upper Bothnian area.
The continuity of the ethnonyms is investigated as a chronological chain of communicative and collective memory.
It brought the history of ethnic groups to the table and in the process made visible ethnonyms and names for provinces used previously. In the negotiations over fixed borders between Sweden, Denmark and Russia, recognition of ethnic groups played an important political role in legitimating the territorial claims of the states. The aim is to trace how the ethnonym Kven and the interrelated imagination of Kvenland changed over time in Nordic political discourse from the Viking Age to the mid-eighteenth century.
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