The Matt and Borka families’ longstanding feud

The Matt and Borka families’ longstanding feud is a generational rivalry that shapes the geography, loyalties, and dangers of the story’s robber world. It begins as an inherited rule of hostility, hardens into a struggle over territory and booty, and nearly turns the children’s kinship across clan lines into another casualty of adult conflict. Its resolution comes through an unexpected combination: Ronia and Birk claim one another as siblings, while Matt and Borka finally replace their feud with a negotiated alliance.

Inherited Enmity and the Robbers’ World

The feud predates the central conflict by generations. Borka is described as Matt’s archenemy, as Borka’s father and grandfather had been enemies of Matt’s father and grandfather. The narrator presents their antagonism as seemingly immemorial: the two families have long been robbers and a threat to ordinary travelers crossing the deep forests. That inherited history supplies the conflict with a ready-made explanation, but not a just one; the clans’ allegiance to old hostility persists even when its origins have blurred.

The rivalry is mapped onto the landscape. Robbers’ Walk, the narrow mountain pass between Borka’s Wood and Matt’s Wood, is dangerous to travelers whichever clan controls it. To those robbed, the distinction between Borka’s robbers and Matt’s robbers makes little difference. To the rival chiefs, however, it is decisive: they fight over booty and, when merchants are scarce, rob one another. Their feud is thus both a family inheritance and a contest over the material advantages of controlling a route.

Ronia initially has no knowledge of this public identity. She is too young to know that Matt is a feared robber chief; to her he is the bearded father who laughs, sings, gives her porridge, and is loved. This contrast between her intimate experience of Matt and the danger his profession brings to travelers establishes a central tension: family affection can make the feud feel remote, but it cannot prevent its consequences from entering family life.

Territory, Memory, and the Return of Old Hostility

The conflict becomes immediate when Borka explains that soldiers have made it impossible for his band to remain in Borka’s Wood, so he has brought his wife, child, and robbers elsewhere. He has taken up residence in the North Fort, within Matt’s stronghold, without asking. Matt condemns the occupation as a violation of shame and propriety; Borka answers that a robber who has always taken what he wanted has little standing to make that complaint. Their exchange exposes the hypocrisy and mutual recognition beneath the accusation: both men know the rules of their profession, but each treats the other’s actions as intolerable when they threaten his own claim.

Their hostility is sustained not only by present interests but by family memory. Borka recalls that Matt’s father taught him to regard every member of Matt’s clan as an enemy, living or dead. He also remembers that, before that lesson, he and Matt had scarcely understood themselves as belonging to different clans. Matt now accepts the inherited distinction and demands that Borka either leave Matt’s Fort or face a fight to the death. Yet their recollections preserve evidence of another possible relation: as children, they had hunted rats together in the old pigsty before adult and family loyalties hardened into enmity.

For a time, the occupation and the larger feud also alter the surrounding world. With the Borka robbers preoccupied, little robbery takes place, and travelers find Robbers’ Walk unusually peaceful. The sheriff’s men discover that Borka’s former den is deserted and empty of loot, while Matt remains difficult for them to catch in his forest. The temporary quiet is not a reconciliation; it is an unintended consequence of the clans’ internal struggle, and it leaves the underlying contest unresolved.

The Feud’s Human Cost

Matt concentrates on driving Borka’s band out, scouting the North Fort and attempting a direct assault by its rope ladder. Arrows force Matt and his men back, and Little-Snip is injured. The episode makes the conflict’s territorial logic concrete: the rival groups do not merely exchange threats but organize their movements and defenses around possession of the fortress. The violence also reaches beyond the chiefs, exposing members of both bands to the consequences of their leaders’ feud.

After Bumper is injured in a clash between the groups, Matt declares that he will put an end to all the Borka robbers. Bumper survives, but Matt’s resolve escalates the danger rather than containing it. Ronia, who has hoped the hostility would fade, recognizes that it has instead grown more threatening. Each morning she watches Matt ride out with his men and worries about how many will return unharmed; she cannot feel at ease until they gather again at the long table that night. The repeated cycle of departure and anxious return turns the feud into a domestic condition, not merely a contest fought elsewhere.

Ronia challenges the premise that the dispute must end in bloodshed. Matt blames Borka for shooting first and insists that removing him from Matt’s Wood is worth the fight. Ronia asks whether there is another way, while Lovis also warns that the struggle can end only in bloodshed and misery. Matt, angered that both oppose him, tells Ronia to find another way to get Borka out. His challenge makes the family conflict personal: Ronia’s judgment now directly contradicts her father’s chosen course, even as her concern extends to both groups.

The feud reaches its sharpest family crisis when Matt holds Birk as leverage against Borka. Borka calls Matt hard and vile for using his child to obtain what he wants, and says he must first find a safe place for his band before he can leave. Ronia sees Birk with a rope around his neck and, unable to accept his captivity, crosses to Borka’s side. Borka responds by taking Ronia as a counter-hostage. The exchange shows how the feud turns children into instruments of their fathers’ political struggle, even when their own relationship cuts across the division.

Chosen Kinship Across Clan Lines

The children’s bond offers a direct challenge to the feud’s inherited categories. Earlier, in the falling snow near Wolf’s Neck, Ronia tells Birk that she wishes he were her brother. Birk accepts the proposal on her terms, and she asks him to call her Ronia. The moment is a chosen kinship rather than an inherited clan assignment: the two children create a relationship that the adults’ history says should not exist.

That bond becomes consequential when Ronia crosses the divide to help Birk. Birk identifies her as his sister and says she saved his life; Ronia answers that he saved hers as well. Their mutual account matters because it gives their closeness a history of reciprocal rescue, not simply an emotional label. It also makes the old division visible from within: Birk belongs to Borka’s family, Ronia to Matt’s, yet each recognizes an obligation to the other that exceeds the demands of the feud.

The separation imposed by the conflict leaves emotional traces even outside the hostage crisis. When Ronia later tries to sing the Wolf Song to Birk in their cave, remembering Lovis singing it for her and Matt when life in Matt’s Fort was as it had been makes her unable to continue. The song connects the divided household she has left with the new refuge she shares with Birk; the old family attachment remains, but it can no longer be restored simply by repeating its familiar comforts.

From Feud to Alliance

The change in the adult relationship arrives after the earlier conflict has given way to a shared concern. Matt hears himself referring to a collective problem as “we” and recognizes the implication before proposing that the clans join forces. The proposal unsettles him because it contradicts the hostility inherited from his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. Borka welcomes the prospect of one strong band but immediately imagines himself as its chief, showing that alliance does not erase their rivalry over authority.

The chiefs settle the question through a wild beasts’ match, a contest governed by rules that permit many forms of rough play but forbid a kick between the legs; breaking that prohibition means losing the fight. Matt wins and emerges as chief, though Borka retains a chieftain’s name and reputation and may continue with his own men. Matt’s word is to count for more, establishing a hierarchy within the new united band rather than pretending the two leaders have become equals in every respect.

The formal settlement is followed by a feast in the stone hall for both groups. As Matt and Borka recall their childhood together, including hunting rats in the old pigsty, the shared past that once survived only as a contrast to their inherited enmity becomes a resource for reconciliation. Ronia and Birk sit together at the far end of the table, and their laughter rises above the robbers’ voices. Matt and Borka welcome it, relieved to have the children home again; the scene joins the new alliance to the cross-clan bond that has already challenged the feud in practice.

Matt’s promise that Birk may one day become chief appears to offer the old succession a future, since Ronia refuses the role. But Ronia immediately questions the assumption that Birk wants to become a robber chief. The ending therefore resolves the families’ immediate hostility without declaring that their children must inherit either its leadership or its vocation. The feud has been displaced by an alliance, while the next generation’s choices remain distinct from the identities imposed on them by family history.