Norway historical timeline

Origins

Norway’s recorded history opens violently, with the raid on Lindisfarne in 793 and three centuries in which Norse ships reached Ireland, Normandy, Russia, Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland. Harald Fairhair is credited with unifying the coastal kingdoms in the late ninth century. Christianity arrived with kings rather than missionaries, and Olav Haraldsson’s death at Stiklestad in 1030 turned a defeated ruler into the national saint and the country Christian within a generation.

Turning points

The Black Death of 1349 may have killed half the population and destroyed the native nobility, and Norway entered a union with Denmark that lasted from 1380 to 1814. Handed to Sweden by treaty in 1814, Norwegians responded by writing a constitution at Eidsvoll on 17 May, which is still the national day; full independence came peacefully in 1905. German occupation from 1940 to 1945 produced a resistance whose sabotage of the heavy-water plant at Vemork is among the war’s better-known operations. Then, in 1969, oil was found at Ekofisk. The state kept control of the resource and banked the proceeds, and voters twice declined to join the European club their neighbours entered, in 1972 and 1994. The attacks of 22 July 2011 killed seventy-seven people and remain the country’s deepest modern wound.

Influential people

Henrik Ibsen rewrote what European drama could do, and Edvard Grieg and Edvard Munch did comparable work in music and painting. Fridtjof Nansen crossed Greenland, designed the ship that drifted with the polar ice, and later ran refugee relief for the League of Nations. Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole first. Sigrid Undset and Knut Hamsun both won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Hamsun’s later support for the occupation still complicates how he is read.

Cultural evolution

Norway writes in two official standards, Bokmål and Nynorsk, the second assembled in the nineteenth century from rural dialects as a deliberate alternative to Danish-influenced writing. Allemannsretten, the right to walk and camp on uncultivated land whoever owns it, is written into law, and friluftsliv — open-air life — is closer to an obligation than a hobby. Egalitarianism runs deep enough to have its own satirical name, the Law of Jante, and the stave churches are the country’s most distinctive surviving medieval architecture.

Present-day significance

The oil fund is the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world and owns something over one per cent of all listed equity on earth, which gives a country of five and a half million an unusual voice in corporate governance. Norway sits in the European single market without being in the union, awards the Nobel Peace Prize from Oslo, has moved further and faster to electric cars than any other country, and through Svalbard holds a stake in an Arctic that is becoming strategically contested.