Kven

The Kvens are a Balto-Finnic people of the far north, whose Kven language is a Finnic tongue closely related to Finnish and Meänkieli. The Old English Orosius of the ninth century calls them Cwenas, and the Icelandic sagas place the kvenir in Kvenland east of the Scandinavian mountains.

Dano-Norwegian tax censuses first register Quæn settlers in the 1520s. From the early eighteenth century larger waves crossed into Norway, driven by the devastation of the Great Northern War of 1700 to 1721, failed harvests and a growing rural population; farmers and fishermen from the Torne Valley and Kainuu cleared fjord land in Troms and Finnmark, farming and fishing salmon.

The Danish crown welcomed them against Swedish and Russian claims, and a Kven delegation won royal backing to settle at Alta. By the early nineteenth century Kven farming and fishing communities lined the fjords of northern Norway.