ABSTRACT
As rivers were links between the worlds in both a geographical and spiritual sense, it is perhaps unsurprising that river mouths emerged as central places in Fennoscandia. They were ecologically rich environments and acted not only as gateways between different regions but also symbolically fertile as places where the land and the sea meet, as well as entry points to faraway lands to the inland direction. They saw the earliest formation of Neolithic-type village settlements in the northern Baltic Sea region around 4000 bc and have ever since then been central places in the northern world, eventually forming the ‘hubs’ of northern trade in the later Iron Age. River mouths not only connected different regions and worlds to each other but also provided arenas for diverse encounters of people with different cultural backgrounds. Such meeting places existed, to a certain degree, outside the norms of everyday society, with evidence (e.g. in the form of rock art) for ritualized exchanges at different times from the Neolithic to the modern period.
This chapter analyses the ‘place’ of river mouths in the northern world, with a focus on how river mouths came to be viewed as special places, which at the dawn of the historical period emerge as realms lingering between myth and history. Since classical antiquity, the North has been imagined as a land of fantastic realms, such as Hyperborea, a view that persists to the medieval and early modern periods. For example, the German eleventh-century chronicler Adam of Bremen writes of a Land of the Amazons in the northern Baltic Sea region, while Swedish medieval sources feature accounts of the enigmatic and much debated birkarls who appear to have been the ‘lords of the North’ in some sense. This chapter shows that later prehistoric central places at northern river mouths can meaningfully be connected to northern realms lingering between myth and history, such as Kvenland and Bjarmia mentioned in Norse sagas.
