Aside from the Sami, there have been other Finno-Ugric groups who also moved into Norway. The Finns of Northern Norway and Finns in the southeast came 400 years ago but nearly disappeared in the Norwegianization policies of the 19th and 20th centuries.
In recent decades ancestors and organizations have dug into their families and lifted up the Finnish and Kven heritage of Norway. These two groups of Finns immigrated into different parts of Norway, and have their own culture different from one another. The Kven settled in Northern Norway as fishermen and farmers, while Skogfinner lived in the forests close to the Swedish border in the southeast.
The Finns at Finnskogen
About a half million Norwegians have Finnish ancestry from the Finns that settled at Finnskogen, the previously uninhabited woodlands on the Swedish border. Most of the Finns came from Savolax in Finland, but due to wars, bad harvests, and the lack of fertile land, many moved west in the 1500s. The Swedish king wanted settlement on the border to Norway and gave good conditions for those who wanted to live there, and so the Finns came to these places — their way of living fitted perfectly with the land the Finns settled in. Eventually, the Finns also crossed the Norwegian border around the early 1600s.
As the name Finnskogen suggests, the areas were mostly forest before the 1600s. Norwegian farmers sought fertile soil that was rare in the woodlands close to the Swedish border. The Finns had agriculture that was quite different from the Norwegian one, with techniques that they had learned and brought with them from Finland and the Baltic. First, the forests was burned down before the soil was plowed and cultivated with seeds as the burned soil was fertile for only a short time. This slash-and-burn technique was time-consuming, physically demanding, and required a lot of forest grounds, as one could only use the soil once.
As such they quickly ran out of land and moved closer and closer to the Norwegian farmers, not without dissatisfaction and protests. In Ringerike Norwegian farmers claimed that Finns had settled on land that rightfully belonged to them, while others were worried the Finns would empty the forests of wild game, fish, and timber. The Finns had different techniques for trapping and hunting wild game, but also for use of wood and building houses. On the farm there was a “smokehouse” that had a stone oven without a pipe in the corner of the room, which quite often filled the house with smoke but in turn preserved the heat efficiently. The farm also had a sauna, a building for drying grain, and stones carved with symbols to protect the property. The Finns were superstitious and used different ways to solve their problems and beliefs. Although Norwegian farmers also had superstitious beliefs, the culture and language of the Finns seemed strange and hard to comprehend, which is why the Finns often were named as sorcerers and barbarians. Some local farmers also wanted the Finns evicted altogether as they were worried they would become too numerous. Then the authorities did try to control the Finns after all, as their arrival into Norway coincided with the rising export of timber to Europe. The inland forests came of great value, and many landowners feared that the Finns would come to ruin the timber with their slash-and-burn agriculture. As such the authorities started to register every Finn and wrote if they had done damage to the forest, a punishment so severe it could end in death penalty in the late 1600s.
Kvens in Northern Norway
The other group of Finns named Kven settled in the northern parts of Norway. Due to war and famine, Kven moved from Quenia or Kvenland which is today in the northern parts of the Finnish and Swedish Bothnia region. Kvens have been in Norway as far back as the Viking Age, as the Kvens were mentioned in the written works of “Ottar’s tales” from the 800s. But sources are not detailed so we can’t say for sure when the Finns settled permanently in Norway, or how many they were.
There were waves of immigration, and most of the Kvens settled along the coast of Finnmark county in northern Norway, from Varanger bordering Russia to Skibotn in the West. The Kvens were farmers who acquired skills in fishing, which contributed to building permanent fishing towns all along the Finnmark coast. Many Kven families were wandering into Norway as late as the 1860s hunger crisis in Finland, and Kven children were sent with the nomadic Sami from northern Sweden to southern parts of Troms county due to bad harvests and hunger. Here they were adopted by Norwegian families and the Sami given compensation for the transport of the children. Most Kvens settled in the eastern parts of Finnmark, and towns such as Vadsø had over 50% of the population being Kvens, and they were a total of 25% of the inhabitants of Finnmark county in the late 19th century.
Assimilation and “the Finnish danger”
As Norway gained independence from their union with Sweden in 1905, assimilation of minorities had already been going strong for several decades. The authorities wanted the minorities to melt together with the majority and they targeted the most ethnically diverse regions of the country. The Finns in the southeast bordering to Sweden were already quite integrated, save for a few villages that still kept their traditions alive. But in the north it was not the case, and so the government focused mostly on Finnmark and Troms regions in their Norwegianization policies: as well as ambitions to build the nation and educate using language as the main tool, it was a strong wish to secure the northern borders to Russia and Finland without causing military tension, and so Norway built schools, churches, and roads as “cultural fortresses” instead.
Most Kvens settled where other Kvens lived and some villages or towns were nearly only Kven in the early 1900s. The Norwegian authorities feared that Finnish nationalism and their ideas of a “United Finland” would spread into the Kvens on the Norwegian side so that the Kvens would build a “state within the state”. The surveillance of Kvens increased as a result of this, and they were given a free subscription to Norwegian newspapers, roads to Finland was destroyed and rebuilt into Norwegian villages and houses built strategically close to other Norwegian settlement. But to buy a house or land a Kven needed to prove Norwegian citizenship and language skills, hence he had to be assimilated.
The fear of the Kvens and their own culture worsened as Finland gained their independence from Russia in 1917, following the Russian revolution and Finnish civil war. Norwegian military presence became more permanent a result, and borders more closed. The surveillance of Kvens and their activities heightened in the 1930s and up until the Second World War, as the Finnish-Russian Winter War of 1939 were fought close to the Norwegian border in the north.
The end of Norwegianization and today
Despite the government ending the Norwegianization policies in the 1950s — 1960s, the cultural and social impact of it lingered for a long time. Kvens in the north had kept their traditions by gathering in their villages where the language was kept alive, but as centralization and the rebuilding of Finnmark county followed after the war, many young Kvens moved to the cities and thus stopped teaching their children their language out of trauma and shame. The word “Kven” was used as a swear word among Norwegians and so many preferred to call themselves “Finns” or “of Finnish heritage” if anything. Today both words are used, as many with Kven background wish to take their cultural belonging back. There are about 10–15 000 registered Kvens today, and between 2–8000 people still speak their language. These estimates are most likely to be low according to the Kven Institute, as Kvens often married Sami or Norwegians and thus lived in a multicultural environment. However, the Kven languages are threatened to extinction today, despite being nationally recognized as a language in 2005.
In the south, assimilation had gone faster and hence the Skogfinn/Finn language had died out in the early 1900s. But there are still remnants of the language in many aspects, as Finnish names and surnames are still in use together with names of places such as Mostalamb (black pond) or Hokkavika (wolf bay). The forest Finns worked to preserve their traditions since the 1940s however, and every year since the 1970s there is a yearly “Forest Finns day” at the Norwegian Forest Finn Museum in Grue, Hedmark region. In 1998 Norway acknowledged their minorites as national minorities, and so the Finns as both Kven and Skogfinner got their organizations, museums, traditional clothing, and preservation of cultural monuments.
