Historical earthquakes in Fennoscandinavia—how large?

We have recently analyzed two historical earthquakes in Scandinavia, Kattegat 1759 and Lurøy 1819, and concluded that the events had MS-magnitudes around 5 and not 6 as generally assumed. Wahlström [Wahlström, R., 2004. Two large historical earthquakes in Fennoscandia still large. Phys. Earth Planet. Int. 145, 253–258] has been very critical of these results and has suggested that our findings are ‘unreliable’ and thus should be ignored. We strongly disagree with Wahlström. The problem at hand is how to handle observational outliers. If such outliers are ignored, as we advocate, the magnitude estimates for many historical earthquakes will be significantly lowered.