A shoreline that keeps on going
With every fjord, bay and island counted, Norway's coastline comes to 102,936 kilometres. The climate along it is largely set by the Gulf Stream, and people have gathered towards the south: about 41 percent live in the counties around the Oslofjord, on less than a tenth of the mainland.
That coast fed Norway long before anyone drilled it. Dried fish from the north passed through Hanseatic merchants settled in towns such as Bergen, and the trade laid the basis for commercial fishing. Store norske leksikon ranks Norway as Europe's largest supplier of fish and fish products, and the farms along its shore raise mostly salmon.
Five centuries of shared crowns
Harald Fairhair became the first Norwegian king in the late 800s, but independence proved fragile. The Black Death arrived in 1349 and killed between a third and a half of the people. From 1380 the country was tied to Denmark, and the Reformation of 1537 left it a dependent province.
The Treaty of Kiel ceded Norway to Sweden in 1814, and representatives at Eidsvoll answered by signing a constitution on 17 May. A union with Sweden was forced on them that August, though Norway kept its constitution. From the second half of the century, more than 750,000 Norwegians left for America. The union ended in 1905. A parliamentary resolution on 7 June so angered Sweden that war briefly threatened, yet on 26 October King Oscar II gave up the Norwegian crown.
Germany invaded on 9 April 1940, and Norway surrendered that June. About 2,100 Jews lived in the country. Around 1,000 escaped to Sweden with help from the underground, while roughly 770 were deported, most of them to be murdered at Auschwitz. Only about 34 survived. The welfare state took shape in the decades after liberation. Voters refused European membership in 1972 and again in 1994, by 53.5 and 52.2 percent, although the EEA agreement still binds Norway closely to the EU.
The country's worst peacetime day came on 22 July 2011. A far-right extremist set off a car bomb in Oslo's government quarter, killing 8 people, then shot 69 more at a Labour Party youth camp on the island of Utøya. He received 21 years of preventive detention, the maximum sentence available.
The Sami and the Norwegian school
The Sami have traditional homelands across Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Norway keeps no official record of Sami identity, so nobody knows how many there are, though the Sami Parliament's electoral roll held 25,676 people in 2025.
From 1851 the state used its schools to make Sami children Norwegian, and the policy later reached the Kven, a Finnish-speaking minority. An instruction of 1898 made Norwegian the language of teaching. Boarding schools followed in Finnmark from 1901, and some children were physically punished for speaking Sami. The 1898 rule fell only with the school law of 1959, and the loss has lasted: Sami is now a majority language only in inner Finnmark.
The turning point was a dam. Over a hydropower scheme on the Alta river, Sami protesters pitched tents outside parliament in 1979 and began a hunger strike. The Supreme Court found the project lawful in 1982, and the dam opened in 1987. The protesters lost the river but moved the state: a Sami Act came that same year, a constitutional provision in 1988 and the Sami Parliament in 1989. A truth commission reported in 2023, and on 12 November 2024 parliament apologised for its active part in Norwegianisation.
Green energy has reopened the argument. In October 2021 the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Fosen wind farm licence was invalid because it violated herders' cultural rights, yet the turbines kept turning. Young Sami occupied the energy ministry's reception about 500 days later, and agreements with the herders came only in December 2023 and March 2024.
Saving the oil, walking the woods
Few people expected oil. In 1958 the Geological Survey told the Foreign Ministry that finding any on the shelf could be discounted. Then, just before Christmas 1969, Phillips reported Ekofisk. The state, which owned the resource, founded Statoil, now Equinor, in 1972 and came to tax the industry at a marginal rate of 78 percent. Oil and gas remain the largest sector of the economy.
Much of that money was put aside. Parliament legislated for a fund in 1990 and the first deposit came in 1996. By the end of September 2026 it held 22,014 billion kroner, including almost 1.5 percent of the shares in the world's listed companies. A fiscal rule is meant to keep government spending within its expected real return, estimated at around 3 percent a year.
At home the same country runs on water. Hydropower made about nine-tenths of its electricity in 2025, and electric models took 98 percent of new car sales in the first ten months of 2026. A land of emigrants has become one of arrivals, with immigrants now 17.5 percent of residents and Poland their commonest birthplace. Parents share 49 weeks of leave at the full benefit rate. About a tenth of those who write Norwegian use Nynorsk, the standard Ivar Aasen built from dialects.
Weekends often belong to one of more than 450,000 cabins and summerhouses. Beyond their walls lies allemannsretten, an old custom written into law in 1957, which lets anyone walk, ski, pick berries and generally camp for two nights on uncultivated land, whoever owns it. A nation that holds shares around the world still leaves its own hills open to all.
