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Tinto Maps #11 - 19th of July 2024 - Scandinavia

Welcome everyone, today I’ll talk about the Scandinavian region. Part of it was the first maps we drew for Project Caesar back in early spring of 2020. Today we will look at all parts of the Scandinavian Peninsula (including Denmark & the Kola Peninsula). Greenland & Iceland will be looked at in a separate map talk.

Countries
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Scandinavia has only five location based countries at the start of the game. Denmark, who is in a bit of a crisis at the moment and their vassal Schleswig is in the south. On the peninsula proper, we have Sweden and Norway who are in a union at the moment as they share the same King. Scania was sold off to Sweden by the Danes five years before the start of the game.

There is no need to show off a Dynasty map, as Denmark does not exactly have a ruling King at the moment, and the rest is ruled by Magnus IV of the Bjälbo Dynasty.

Locations

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While Scandinavia has a lot of locations, we have to remember that this is a huge area, and together with Kola & Karelia, it is the same size as France, Spain, Portugal, Italy & Benelux together.. The size of locations are smaller in the south, particularly where the population was and still is relatively bigger.


Provinces
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We have tried to follow historical traditional province borders here, but some ended up too big like Småland, Lappland or Österbotten, which were cut into pieces, and some are just too tiny to matter.

Now I wish I had time to write up a history about each province here, but I’ll just add a few fun tidbits.

Satakunta, which is the Finnish name, is named in Finnish like the old regions of Svitjod, which were divided into “hundreds”. It was also refered to Björneborgs län, named after Björneborg (Pori in Finnish), a town founded by Johan III when Ulfsby was no longer accessible from the sea. The regiment from the area was the last Swedish Army Regiment that has ever won a battle inside Sweden, and their military march is a song I think every Finnish Citizen want to play repeatedly on TV during the Olympics..

Småland, which is divided into Tiohärad and Kalmar Län here, should really be referred to as Småländerna, as there were 12 small countries there.. Compared to the 3 other much larger countries of Svealand, Östra Götaland and Västra Götaland. And now why is Östra Götaland not containing Kinda?

Topograhy
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It's mostly flatland.. I went by the rule that if the peaks are less than 500 meters it's flatland, and you need to have over 1,000 meters and rather uneven to be a mountain. Norway is interesting there.. We do have a lot of impassable areas in Norway, making this one of the most fun parts to play in.

Vegetation
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There are some farmlands in Denmark, Scania and in Götaland, but the rest is basically a big forest.. And up north it's even worse.

Climate
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Yeah, well. There is a reason I moved to Spain..


Cultures
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Most of the north east is still Sami, and the Finnish tribes have not unified into the more modern Finnish culture. We decided to call the modern Meänkieli with their more ancient name of Kven. We still have Gutnish on Gotland, but the Norwegian, Danish and Swedish cultures have been becoming more monolithic already.

Religions
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The Finnish are mostly Catholic, but the Sami, Tavastian, Savonia, Bjarmian and Karelians are mostly still following their old pagan beliefs. There are still some Norse people in the forests of Dalarna and Västmanland..

Raw Materials
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It is mostly lumber, fish, wild game, fur and iron. We of course have the famous copper mountain as well.

Markets
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Scandinavia is divided by the rich markets of Lübeck and Riga. A strong Scandinavian country will probably want to set up their own unified market.


Population
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Not many people live up in the north..
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I liked nice round numbers as estimates, but the team I hired for content design are mad men, and wanted the distribution to feel more organic.. For the far north of Scandinavia we know that people were semi nomadic, and that some people lived there.. But if it was 100 there, or 250 there or 20 there it's just guesswork..


And let's end with a quote from the Greatest of Poets..

Jag vill, jag skall bli frisk, det får ej prutas,
Jag måste upp, om jag i graven låg.
Lyss, hör, ni hör kanonerna vid Jutas;
Där avgörs finska härens återtåg.



Next week Pavia is back with some German maps…
 
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Graphical issue: when two parts of a country are connected by water could you have only one larger name of the country appear there? Basically as it is now in EUIV. That's especially important in places like Aegen Sea, where every other island being signed "Byz." creates a visual mess. But also here the number of "Swedens" is definitely excessive.
 
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Edit on 12.05.2025

I deleted all the information on Ásatrú in Telemark, as after further insight into the article I referred to, both the journalist and “historian” are operating on word of mouth from locals and family members.

If there are changes to the map, and you need inspiration for raw goods in the “Telemark” area, here is some local insight. The local produce of Skien, Porsgrunn and other areas in Telemark could be lumber or farmlands. I don't think we actually fished that much here, other than the more coastal areas, of course. Larvik is also quite unique in the sense that they have a unique stone produced, known as “Larvikitt”. But this stone was not relevant until the 1900s, unlike the farms and lumber in the inner parts of Telemark. Porsgrunn in Telemark also got its namesake from the colloquially known “Pors-flower" (Myrica gale), which is known to have certain medical properties, as it was used locally as medical herbs for stomach aches, but this city was not founded until 1838. But then again, Skien wasnt founded until 1358 either. The only relevant town/city in Telemark itself during this period was Skien, the rest of the area is sparse isolated farms and homesteads. Atleast in 1337. The Larvikitt, Myrica gale (Pors-flower/bog myrtle), and rare-earth element reservoirs mentioned in the coming paragraph still would have existed of course, but had not been discovered/utilized yet.

Also, 'Fensfeltet' in 'Ulefoss', was newly (2024) discovered to hold 8.78 million tonnes of magnetic rare-earth elements (REE), where 1.45 million tonnes of this is neodymium- and praseodymium ("Gigantfunn av verdifulle metaller på Fensfeltet”, NRK, Veronica Westhrin, 2024). This means that Norway, from this discovery, now has the largest reservoir of RRE in Europe due to this discovery in Telemark (V. Westhrin, NRK, 2024).

Fensfeltet-fra-lufta.jpg

(Image from fensfeltet.no)

But this of course has no bearing on 1337, where Telemark consisted mostly of sporadic farms and forests prime for lumber production.
 
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I mentioned Upper Silesia mainly of Ślęża mountain, place of Sun cult since bronze age till christianization of Poland.
It was a place of cult first of the Celts and then of the Germanic Sillings - from whom the name of Mount Ślęża and also the name of Silesia comes from.

BTW. Mountain Ślęża is located in Lower Silesia.
 
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Nice and early :)

Some geographic points I see :

As a proponent of a spherical map, I cannot be happy about how the Kola peninsula looks (and similar distortions westwards) :(

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The province sizes seem okay though, a couple of times larger than those in more populous regions, but not TOO large so you need months to travel between them as in EU4. The coastal ones up north even might be smaller than I could have imagined (does the western bay of the White Sea really warrant 8-ish locations for 300-ish km?)

I'm wondering about the wastelands in Karelia and Kola though. The Karelia one especially has today got roads through it, and little towns here and there, little different from plenty of the coastline or the regions just west of it. And I don't see a reason the Kola one wouldn't be similar if someone actually cared to go and live there.
Especially looking at the other side, where all coastal locations are connected through occupied land, that might seem too optimistic ? I might do a similar runthrough here as I did for upper egypt last weekend, it seems much more accurate to have gaps in overland transport, no ?


Shouldn't there be more Finno-Karelian lakes drawn (and maybe also in southern Sweden, but less) ?

What's up with the Åland ? In reality, it's a clear geographic extension of Finland, not an island in the middle of the gulf

Copenhagen is missing ? - answered Also, it doesn't seem to make sense to continue combining Falster and Møn into Lolland, as in EU4 ?

I'm guessing Södra Lappland isn't supposed to have an exclave ?

For the goods : at the Russian side of the current Russia/Norway border, there's a lot of Nickel reserves. Irl only discovered in the 1930s, but seems addable to make this more interesting ?
 
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It's finally here! Some questions before I start preparing feedback for this region:

1. Being such an early map, is the province density in Finland and rest of the region something you're happy with or are you planning to increase it?

2. I know people always ask for zoomed in location maps, but could we also get a full location map of the region? It could give a better view of province density and how things connect into each other.

3. Could we also get an area map?

4. Is there some sort of a system for place names that existed during the timeframe of the game but don't make sense at game start? If not, do you have a policy for what level anachronisms are allowed? For example the city of Fredrikshamn was named after king Fredrik I who reigned in the 18th century, so the name doesn't make much sense in 1337. Similarly the castle of Olofsborg was built only in 1590.

5. Why does Sweden own Luleå without owning the locations connecting to it?
 
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I hope that you can deforest Sweden, it should probably take a long but it would have been historical for the period.

It will probably require a lot of work and some system to change the province's resources, but I missed it in EU4. In particular for the US where deforestation was a huge reason for how the American Colonies and later the US could dominate the continent.
 
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The Norwegian provinces and locations feel a bit too modern. I don't know enough about the historical division of Norway, but I see at least a few place names that have their modern names.
 
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please fix dithmarschens borders. the northern peninsula Eiderstedt should belong to the Husum location. it has literally never belonged to dithmarschen and is separated by the historical HRE/Denmark border-river Eider

also husum should probably belong to schleswig and not south-jylland, but as a Dithmarscher i dont really care. BUT PLEASE fix dithmarschens borders, how did this even happen in the first place, dithmarschens borders have literally never changed
 
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I don't know the history of the region, so there might be good reason for this, but why are there signficant parts of the northern swedish and finnish coastlines (around the gulf of bothnia), with majority swedish population, which are not owned by Sweden? Particularly on the finnish side of the gulf, there is a significant stretch of coastline which is majority swedish population, but I thought the main reason swedes lived anywhere in Finland would be because Sweden owned land there
 
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It was a place of cult first of the Celts and then of the Germanic Sillings - from whom the name of Mount Ślęża and also the name of Silesia comes from.

BTW. Mountain Ślęża is located in Lower Silesia.
I live hundreds km from Silesia, I meant the place around mountain anyway xd. This is one etymology of the name from several. The one true is probably indoeuropean topopnym from the name of local river. This would explain why Ślężanie were named as such while they're slavic, doubt they'd like to be called after Germans. And in 845 Ślężanie were named Sleenzane in Bavarian Geographer not silingi
 
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The location of Luleå, which seems to a disconnected holding (or colony?) of the Kingdom of Sweden seems to have almost entirely Kven pops, meanwhile, the "uncolonised" location of Piteå right below it has random blue stripes indicating a significant minority Swedish population.

Perhaps that is a mistake? Maybe the stripes were meant for Luleå and not Piteå? Just sharing something that caught my attention.
 
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2 questions:
any reason you have decided to use Hedmark and oppland, instead of Veste and østre Opplandene? whitch would be a more historic name for the two regions.

And i asume tønset is Tynset? why use the old name of tønset instead of the newer name, when you are using newer names other places?
 
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Is there a particular reason for naming the Vestsjælland location Kalundborg? With the medieval importance of Sorø abbey and the royal academy that was instituted after the reformation, I've always thought it would be cool to have it represented in the earlier period. I will probably just manually rename the location if possible.
I guess Sorø and Ringsted being so close, yet naming different locations would be odd.
 
I'll do some excessive nitpicking with my place of birth first before any other finnish locations.


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The location borders here are a bit weird. Paltamo and Kajaani are basically on the very edges of the location borders, while Sotkamo might be in the Nurmes location? Hard to say without a 1-to-1 overlay.

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Oh hey that's why image editing programs exist. So yeah, while Kajana (swedish name for Kajaani) isn't that bad, Paltamo and Sotkamo borders could probs be changed.

BUT WAIT! Whats this?

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You mixed up the Paltamos! The central location of the parish (i guess that's the english word for seurakunta?) was actually modern-day Paltaniemi, not modern-day Paltamo.

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So the location border is even MORE wrong. Literally unplayable.

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As further proof, Paltaniemi was part of the Paltamo kunta until 1954. Location border should reflect that.

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Having Kajana be part of Savolax is terrible heresy. Make it part of Ostrobothnia. While initially this region was part of Savonlinna county (linnalääni) for a brief period, it is traditionally seen as part of Ostrobothnia.

ALSO a major thing that I said in my earlier post: these lands should be inhabited almost exclusively by the Sami. Permanent populations of finnish peoples didn't start happening much until the 1500s thanks to Gustav Vasa's settlement/colonization program. There is plenty of archeological and toponymical evidence of Sami settlement in the area. The population numbers could be a bit lower, but it doesn't really matter much as they get the point across (very sparse population).

EDIT DISCLAIMER: Pavia noted in the Italy thread that google maps has limited usefulness due to using a different map projection. So direct comparisons/overlays don’t work. However, you can still note the relative places of settlements based on geographical features, in this case the Oulu lake. Sotkamo is southeast of Kajaani, but on the map it appears to be northeast. That’s enough to see that something is slightly wrong.
 

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