NorwayNorge

Mainland Norway stretches about 1,750 km in a straight line from the south coast to the Russian border, but its coastline, with fjords and islands, runs to about 100,000 km. Ice-age glaciers cut the fjords: long, deep valleys that the sea flooded when the ice retreated. The Sognefjord runs more than 200 km inland and reaches over 1,300 m deep. The Geirangerfjord and Nærøyfjord are listed together by UNESCO as the West Norwegian Fjords.

Only about 3% of the land is farmed. The rest is mountain plateau (vidda), forest and bare rock, which is why settlements cling to fjord shores and islands, and why ferries and tunnels matter more than motorways. The Lærdal tunnel, at 24.5 km the world's longest road tunnel, links Oslo and Bergen by road; the E39 coast route still needs several ferries.

The Gulf Stream keeps the coast ice-free and surprisingly mild: Tromsø, at 69°N, is warmer in winter than many places much further south in continental Europe. The same moist air makes Bergen one of Europe's wettest cities. Inland, winters are hard and snowy, which gave Norway its skiing tradition; the word 'ski' comes from Old Norse.

North of the Arctic Circle, light rules life. The midnight sun lasts from about mid-May to late July at the North Cape, and the polar night covers the far north from late November to mid-January. Svalbard, an Arctic archipelago governed by Norway under a 1920 international treaty, sits halfway to the North Pole; its capital, Longyearbyen, is one of the northernmost towns in the world.

Norwegian Vikings sailed west. From the late 8th century they raided the British Isles, settled the Orkneys, Shetland, the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland, founded Dublin, and reached North America around 1000. Kings such as Harald Fairhair and Olav Tryggvason unified and Christianised the country by force. Olav Haraldsson died at the battle of Stiklestad in 1030 and became Saint Olav, whose shrine at Nidaros (Trondheim) made it one of the great pilgrim destinations of medieval Europe.

Medieval Norway was strong and ruled Iceland, Greenland and parts of Scotland. The Black Death of 1349 killed perhaps half the population, and the crown passed to Denmark through dynastic marriage. From 1380 to 1814 Norway was the junior partner in a union ruled from Copenhagen; Danish became the written language of officials and towns, and Bergen's trade was dominated by the German Hanseatic merchants of Bryggen.

In 1814, after Denmark's defeat in the Napoleonic wars, Norway was handed to Sweden. Norwegians used the gap to write their own constitution, signed at Eidsvoll on 17 May 1814, one of the most liberal of its time. Sweden accepted the constitution but kept Norway in a union under the Swedish king. Through the 19th century a national romantic movement rediscovered folk tales, dialects, stave churches and peasant culture, and built a separate identity.

Norway voted to dissolve the union in 1905 and chose a Danish prince as King Haakon VII. Germany invaded in April 1940; the king and government escaped to London, and the collaborator Vidkun Quisling's name became a word for traitor. After liberation Norway joined NATO in 1949 as a founding member, built a welfare state under Labour governments, and twice rejected EU membership, in 1972 and 1994.

Norway has the largest Sámi population of the four countries of Sápmi, perhaps 50,000–65,000 people, concentrated in Finnmark and Troms but present across the country. Kautokeino and Karasjok on the Finnmark plateau are Sámi-majority towns, where North Sámi is the everyday language and reindeer herding shapes the calendar.

From the mid-19th century the state pursued 'Norwegianisation': Sámi and Kven children were sent to boarding schools where their languages were banned, and land could be bought only by those who spoke Norwegian. The policy lasted into the 1960s. A turning point came with protests against the Alta river dam in 1979–81, when Sámi activists went on hunger strike outside parliament. The dam was built, but the protests led to a constitutional amendment and the Sámi Parliament in Karasjok, opened in 1989.

Today Sámi languages have official status in several municipalities, Sámi National Day (6 February) is flown on public buildings, and the Finnmark Act of 2005 transferred most land in the county to a jointly run estate. Conflicts continue: in 2021 the Supreme Court ruled that wind farms on Fosen had been built in breach of herders' rights, and protests in 2023 pressed the government to act.

For visitors, Easter in Kautokeino brings reindeer races, weddings and the Sámi Grand Prix music contest. Museums in Karasjok and Tromsø explain Sámi history, and Sámi-owned companies offer reindeer sledding and lavvu (tent) dinners. The polite rule is the same as anywhere: ask before photographing people, herds or camps.

Norway's wealth began with fish. From the Middle Ages, cod caught off Lofoten in winter was hung on wooden racks to dry into stockfish, which kept for years and was shipped through Bergen to southern Europe. Salted and dried cod, klippfisk, fed Portugal, Spain and Brazil, which is why bacalao is a Norwegian coastal dish too. Skrei, the migrating Arctic cod that arrives from January to April, is still celebrated with dinners of fish, liver and roe.

Farm food is built for preservation and cold: cured lamb and mutton, sour cream porridge, flatbreads, lefse and cheese. Brunost, the sweet brown whey cheese sliced with a special cheese slicer (invented in Norway in 1925), is on every breakfast table. Fårikål, lamb and cabbage stewed with whole peppercorns, is the national dish and has its own day in late September.

Salmon farming, pioneered in Norway in the 1970s, turned the country into the world's largest producer of Atlantic salmon. Farms fill fjords along the coast; debates about sea lice, escapes and a new resource-rent tax on the industry are national news. King crab, introduced by Soviet scientists in the Barents Sea in the 1960s, spread west and became a Finnmark delicacy.

Everyday eating is modest even in a rich country. Many Norwegians take a matpakke, a packed lunch of open sandwiches wrapped in paper, to work and school. Weekend hikes end with a Kvikk Lunsj chocolate bar and coffee from a thermos, and Friday night is 'taco Friday', a national habit. Restaurants are expensive because labour and alcohol are taxed heavily, but a strong New Nordic scene has grown in Oslo, Bergen and Stavanger.

On 23 December 1969 Phillips Petroleum confirmed a huge oil field at Ekofisk in the Norwegian North Sea. Norway decided early that the resource belonged to the nation: the state set up Statoil (now Equinor) in 1972, took a large direct stake in fields, and taxed oil profits at 78%. The 'ten oil commandments' adopted by parliament in 1971 aimed to keep control national and avoid the pitfalls that hit other oil states.

The central idea is saving. Since 1996 the state's oil income has gone into what is now called the Government Pension Fund Global, invested in shares, bonds and property abroad. By the mid-2020s it was worth roughly 20 trillion kroner, owning around 1.5% of all listed shares worldwide. A fiscal rule limits spending to about 3% of the fund each year, to protect the economy from overheating and to save for future generations.

Oil made Norway rich but created contradictions. It is one of the world's largest exporters of oil and gas, and after Russia's invasion of Ukraine it became Europe's largest gas supplier. At home it has the world's highest share of electric cars among new sales — close to 100% — and hydropower supplies nearly all its electricity. Climate activists and young people challenge new oil exploration in court; the industry argues its gas replaces coal elsewhere.

For visitors, oil explains high wages and therefore high prices, spotless infrastructure, new tunnels and bridges, and generous public services. It also explains Stavanger, the oil capital, whose Petroleum Museum tells the story in detail.

Norway is a constitutional monarchy with a popular king, Harald V, on the throne since 1991, and the Storting, a 169-seat parliament elected every four years. Labour's Jonas Gahr Støre became prime minister in 2021 and won a second term in the September 2025 election. Politics is consensual by international standards; the big arguments are about oil, the cost of living, rural services and the distance between Oslo and the regions.

The welfare state is generous: free public universities for residents, heavily subsidised childcare, long parental leave and strong public health care. Friluftsliv, the open-air life, is almost a civic duty; around half of households have access to a hytte, a cabin in the mountains or by the sea, where many spend weekends and holidays.

Norway shares a 198-km border with Russia in the far north. Since 2022 it has tightened security, raised defence spending, restricted Russian fishing vessels in some ports and closed Storskog to most Russian tourists. It is a founding NATO member but stays outside the EU, following most EU rules through the EEA agreement without a vote on them.

The attacks of 22 July 2011, when a far-right extremist killed 77 people in Oslo and on the island of Utøya, remain a national wound. The response, led by then prime minister Jens Stoltenberg, stressed 'more democracy, more openness'. The 22 July Centre in the government quarter explains what happened.