[Sidenote: Conclusions as to the origin of the Northern "Finns"]
To sum up what has been said here, the following explanation may be the most natural: in prehistoric times the coasts and inland districts of north Scandinavia and the Kola peninsula were inhabited by a wandering people of hunters, who belonged to the same race or family as the Fishing and Reindeer Lapps, and who were thus related to the Samoyeds farther east; but through long contact with the Karelians on the White Sea and with the Kvæns they had acquired a Karelian-Finnish language. Their language, however, as Konrad Nielsen has shown, contains also many words which resemble Samoyed, whether this be due to original kinship or to later influence. These people were called by the Norsemen Finns, or, to distinguish them from the other sort of Finns farther south, Skridfinns, because they were in the habit of travelling on ski in the winter. People of this race of hunters learned the domestication of reindeer from contact with reindeer nomads, the Samoyeds, farther east. Most of them continued their life of hunting, sealing and fishing, but adopted reindeer-keeping to some extent as an auxiliary means of subsistence. The Eskimo are a good example of how, in northern regions, a wandering people of hunters may have a fairly uniform culture and language throughout a much greater extent of territory than is here in question; for they have essentially the same culture and language from west of Bering Strait to the east coast of Greenland. A tribe related to these hunter Finns, who spoke very nearly the same language but lived farther east, where there was certainly hunting to be had on land but little at sea, gradually became transformed entirely into reindeer nomads, and diffused themselves at a comparatively late period over the mountainous tracts westward, and along the Kjölen range southward. As the Norsemen pressed northward along the coast of Nordland they encountered the hunter Finns or Fishing Lapps. Through this contact with a higher culture these Lapps learned much, but on the other hand the Norsemen learned something from their sealing and hunting culture, which was well adapted to these surroundings. Thus a higher development of sea-hunting arose. Originally the Lapps had a light boat, the planks of which were fastened together with osiers, with a paddle, which was well adapted to sea-fishing, and for which they still have a genuine Lappish word in their language. From the Norsemen they learned to build larger boats and to use sails, whence most of their words for the new kind of navigation were Norse loan-words. We see from Peder Claussön Friis's description that in the sixteenth century the Fishing Lapps even "had much profit of their shipbuilding, since they are good carpenters, and build all the sloops and ships for the northward voyage themselves at their own cost and to a considerable amount.... They also build many boats...." In other words, we see that they had completely adopted the Norwegians' boat- and ship-building, and with it the words connected therewith. In the same way they certainly acquired better appliances for sea-fishing than those they originally had; consequently in this too they learned of the Norwegians, and it was therefore natural that they gradually adopted Norse names for sea-fish too, even if they had names for them before; besides which they were always selling this fish to the Norwegians. It was otherwise, however, with sealing, which had previously been their chief employment on the sea. In this they were superior to the Norsemen, as the implements of the Kjelmö find show, and here the Norsemen became their pupils. For this reason then they kept their own names for seal, and the many genuine Lappish words they have for them prove that this was an important part of their original culture. If we should imagine that the Lappish language came in at a comparatively late period with the Reindeer Lapps, as Dr. Hansen thinks, we should be faced by incomparably greater difficulties in explaining how they acquired these many genuine Lappish words for seal, than would confront us in explaining how they got loan-words for reindeer-keeping from the Norwegians, or how the original Fishing Lapps took Norse loan-words for sea-fishing and the use of boats. And now as regards place-names, it is not improbable that these were determined for later times principally by the permanent settlements of the Norsemen, along the outer sea-coast, and not by the scattered Finns (Lapps), who led a wandering life as hunters and fishermen, and who no doubt were driven out by the Norsemen.