Norway

• 1. Introduction

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  Norway gives the United Kingdom a Christmas tree every December, a quiet thank-you for British help during the Second World War. It is a small gesture from a country that holds the world's largest sovereign wealth fund, valued at US$2.1 trillion. This is a land of extremes. From late May to late July, the sun never sets north of the Arctic Circle. From late November to late January, in the far north, it never rises. Officially the Kingdom of Norway, this Nordic country sits on the western and northernmost edge of the Scandinavian Peninsula. Its capital and largest city is Oslo. How did a nation once called a colony of Denmark, ground down through four centuries of foreign rule, become one of the wealthiest and most stable places on earth? Why does its coastline, when you trace every fjord and island, stretch more than 100,000 kilometres? And how did petroleum pulled from beneath the North Sea reshape a country that, even before plague, held only about 500,000 people?

• 2. The Way Northwards

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  Around the year 890, a traveller named Ohthere of Hålogaland gave an account that fixed a name in English. The Old English word Norþweg meant northern way, or way leading to the north. It described how the Anglo-Saxons saw the coastline of Atlantic Norway. In that same year, they also called the place Norðmanna land. In the traditional view, the native name's first part was norðr, a cognate of the English word north, giving Norðr vegr, the way northwards. It named the sailing route along the coast. It stood against suðrvegar, the southern way toward Germany, and austrvegr, the eastern way toward the Baltic. Today Norway carries two official names, Norge in Bokmål and Noreg in Nynorsk. Those two written forms of Norwegian both survive because the country could not settle on a single one, a tension that would surface again during a 19th-century search for national identity.

• 3. Kings And Vikings

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  By tradition, Harald Fairhair unified Norway into one realm in 872 after the Battle of Hafrsfjord at Stavanger, making him the first king of a united Norway. His kingdom was mainly a South Norwegian coastal state, and he ruled with a strong hand. According to the sagas, many Norwegians left to settle Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Greenland, and parts of Britain and Ireland. Norwegian Viking explorers found Iceland by accident in the ninth century, while heading for the Faroe Islands. They eventually reached Vinland, known today as Newfoundland in Canada. Christianity arrived slowly. Haakon I the Good became Norway's first Christian king in the mid-10th century, but his attempt to introduce the faith was rejected. The work fell to the missionary kings. Olaf Tryggvasson raided in England, including an attack on London, then returned to Norway in 995 and landed at Moster, where he built the first Christian church in the country. From Moster he sailed north to Trondheim, where the Eyrathing proclaimed him King of Norway. Feudalism never truly took hold here as it did across the rest of Europe.

• 4. Plague And The Hansa

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  In 1349, the Black Death reached Norway and within a year killed a third of the population. Later plagues cut the population to half its starting point by 1400. Whole communities vanished, leaving land standing empty and pushing surviving farmers toward animal husbandry. The death rate matched the rest of Europe, but recovery took far longer because the population was small and scattered. From 1000 to 1300, Norway had grown from 150,000 to 400,000 people, and by 1300 the king, the church, or the aristocracy owned seventy per cent of the land. Falling taxes after the plague weakened the king and stripped many aristocrats of their surplus. The Hanseatic League seized the opening. During the 14th century it took control of Norwegian trade and built a trading centre in Bergen. The merchants there formed a state within a state for generations. The League's grip squeezed every class, the peasantry most of all, so heavily that no real burgher class formed in Norway. Pirates called the Victual Brothers launched three devastating raids on Bergen, the last in 1427.

• 5. The Four Hundred Year Night

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  Some called it the 400-Year Night, the long stretch when all of the kingdom's intellectual and administrative power sat in Copenhagen. Sweden broke out of the Kalmar Union in 1521. Norway tried to follow, but the rebellion was defeated, and the union with Denmark held until 1814. With the introduction of Protestantism in 1536, the archbishopric in Trondheim was dissolved. Norway lost its independence and effectively became a colony of Denmark. The Church's income and possessions flowed instead to the court in Copenhagen. The steady stream of pilgrims to the relics of St. Olav at the Nidaros shrine dried up, and with it much of Norway's contact with the cultural and economic life of Europe. The hardship was not only political. The famine of 1695 to 1696 killed roughly 10% of Norway's population. Between 1740 and 1800, the harvest failed in Scandinavia at least nine times, each failure costing many lives. Norway was eventually restored as a kingdom in 1661, still bound in legislative union with Denmark, but its land kept shrinking. In the 17th century it lost the provinces of Båhuslen, Jemtland, and Herjedalen to Sweden through a run of disastrous wars.

• 6. Two Wars And A King

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  On the 9th of April 1940, German forces invaded a country that had once more proclaimed its neutrality. Military and naval resistance held for two months. In the north, Norwegian forces launched an offensive in the Battles of Narvik but surrendered on the 10th of June, after British support was diverted to France. King Haakon VII and the government escaped to Rotherhithe in London, sending radio speeches and backing clandestine actions against the Germans. Vidkun Quisling, leader of the small Nasjonal Samling party, tried to seize power on the day of the invasion but was pushed aside by the occupiers. Real power lay with Josef Terboven, head of the German occupation authority. The resistance struck where it mattered. Fighters destroyed Norsk Hydro's heavy water plant and stockpile at Vemork, crippling the German nuclear programme. Even more vital was the Norwegian Merchant Marine, the fourth-largest merchant fleet in the world, run by Nortraship for the Allies. It took part in operations from the evacuation of Dunkirk to the Normandy landings. A generation earlier, in the First World War, Norway stayed neutral but lost 436 merchant ships to the Kaiserliche Marine and 1,150 sailors killed. Up to 15,000 Norwegians left a darker mark, volunteering to fight in German units, including the Waffen-SS.

• 7. Oil And The Fund

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  In 1969, the Phillips Petroleum Company found petroleum at the Ekofisk field west of Norway, and a nation's fortunes changed. Oil had been discovered at the small Balder field in 1967, though production there only began in 1999. In 1973 the government founded the state oil company Statoil, now Equinor, but oil did not provide net income until the early 1980s because of the enormous capital required. Per capita, Norway became the world's largest producer of oil and natural gas outside the Middle East. The petroleum industry now accounts for around a quarter of the country's gross domestic product. In 1995 the government created the Government Pension Fund Global, funded by oil revenues and invested in financial markets outside Norway. By 2017 its assets passed US$1 trillion, about US$190,000 per person and roughly 250% of that year's GDP. Spending is held in check by the budgetary rule, lowered in 2017 to 3% of the fund's total value. The fund follows ethical guidelines and cannot invest in companies that make parts for nuclear weapons. Other resource-rich nations, including Russia, now try to build similar funds modelled on Norway's. The country was also the first to ban deforestation, declaring its intention at the UN Climate Summit in 2014 alongside Great Britain and Germany.

• 8. Land Of Fjords

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  Sognefjorden is the world's longest fjord at 204 km, and the world's second deepest. This is the defining feature of a coastline broken by huge fjords and thousands of islands. Norway holds about 400,000 lakes and 239,057 registered islands, and the lake Hornindalsvatnet is the deepest in Europe. The numbers stretch the imagination. The coastal baseline runs 2,532 km, but the mainland coastline including fjords reaches 28,953 km, and when islands are counted the figure climbs to 100,915 km. The Gulf Stream and prevailing westerlies give Norway warmer, wetter weather than its latitude should allow. Southern Lofoten and Bø Municipality keep every monthly mean above freezing despite sitting north of the Arctic Circle. Without the Gulf Stream, the very northernmost coast would lie under ice in winter. Norway shelters about 60,000 species across more habitats than almost any other European country. The polar bear is the largest land predator, while the brown bear holds that place on the mainland. National Geographic has listed the Norwegian fjords as the world's top tourist attraction, drawing the hikers and skiers who fill a tourism industry that employs one in fifteen people across the country.