The history of Norway

Norway's history has been shaped by a long, mountainous coastline that made the sea its main road. Hunter-gatherers arrived as the ice retreated, and the Sámi of the north and the Norse farmers of the south developed side by side. In the Viking Age Norwegians raided, traded and settled across the North Atlantic, and a single kingdom took shape. After the Black Death the country slipped into unions with Denmark and then Sweden for more than five centuries, before full independence in 1905. Occupied by Germany in the Second World War, Norway later became one of the world's richest states on the strength of North Sea oil.

The coast of Norway emerged from the ice at the end of the last glacial period, and people followed quickly, drawn by seals, fish, seabirds and reindeer. By around 9300 BCE settlers had reached Magerøya near the North Cape. Archaeologists name these early cultures after their sites, such as Komsa in the far north and Fosna in the west.

Farming arrived around 4000 BCE in the lowlands around the Oslofjord, and between about 2900 and 2500 BCE cereals, cattle, sheep and pigs spread along the coast as far north as Alta. The Bronze Age, from about 1800 BCE, brought permanent farms in the fertile districts of the Oslofjord, Trøndelag and Jæren, and trade southward with Jutland. In the north, hunting and fishing remained the basis of life. There, speakers of a Uralic language mixed with the older population over the first millennium BCE, and from this came the Sámi people and their languages.

During the Iron Age, which began around 500 BCE, iron tools let farmers clear more land. Society was organised in extended kin groups, and disputes were settled at the thing, an assembly of free men. Runes appeared in the first centuries CE, and furs were traded with the Roman world. In the Migration Period after 400 CE, chieftains grew more powerful, hilltop forts were built.

The raid on the monastery of Lindisfarne in England in 793 is conventionally taken as the start of the Viking Age. Longships carried Norwegian chieftains to the British Isles within days, and land hunger in the western fjords pushed many to settle abroad. Norwegians colonised Shetland, Orkney, the Faroe Islands and the Hebrides, founded Dublin and other towns on the east coast of Ireland, and from the 870s settled Iceland. From Iceland, Erik the Red led settlers to Greenland in the 980s, and his son Leif Erikson reached North America around 1000. Raids also brought home captives, enslaved as thralls.

At home, the petty kingdoms of the coast fought for supremacy. Harald Fairhair, allied with the earls of Lade in Trøndelag, won the Battle of Hafrsfjord near Stavanger, traditionally dated to around 872, and is remembered as the first king of all Norway, though his authority over the interior was thin. His son Haakon the Good, raised in England, set up the regional law assemblies of the Gulating and Frostating and a levy fleet, the leidang. Around 890 a chieftain from Hålogaland named Ottar described to King Alfred the Great of Wessex how he collected tribute in furs and walrus hide from the Sámi, one of the earliest written glimpses of the north.

Christianity was pushed on Norway by its kings. Olaf Tryggvason forced conversions in the 990s before dying at the Battle of Svolder in 1000. Olaf Haraldsson had the regional assemblies adopt church law, destroyed pagan sanctuaries and built churches, but chieftains resentful of his power drove him out with the support of Cnut the Great, king of England and Denmark. When Olaf returned in 1030, he was killed by a peasant army at Stiklestad. Within a year he was venerated as a saint, and his shrine at Nidaros, now Trondheim, became the country's religious heart. After a spell of unpopular Danish rule, Olaf's son Magnus the Good became king in 1035.

Magnus's successor, Harald Hardrada, had served in the Varangian Guard of the Byzantine Empire. He invaded England in 1066 and was killed at Stamford Bridge, weeks before the Norman victory at the Battle of Hastings. From 1130 rival claimants, all of whom could claim royal descent, plunged Norway into a century of civil wars. Nidaros became an archbishopric in 1152. The wars ended under Haakon IV Haakonsson, who reigned from 1217 to 1263 and brought in clear rules of succession. In 1262 Iceland and in 1261 the Norse settlers of Greenland accepted his rule, and with Shetland, Orkney and the Faroes the Norwegian realm reached its greatest extent. His son Magnus the Lawmender issued a single law code for the whole kingdom in 1274.

The thirteenth century was a time of peace and growth, sometimes called Norway's golden age, with Bergen as the royal seat and leading trading port. By then most land belonged to the king, the church or the aristocracy, though Norwegian tenant farmers stayed legally free and were never reduced to serfdom.

The Black Death reached Bergen on a ship from England in 1349, and repeated epidemics over the next half century halved the population or worse. Whole valleys were abandoned, royal and noble incomes collapsed, and the native aristocracy shrank to a handful of families. Trade fell under the control of German merchants of the Hanseatic League, whose office at Bryggen in Bergen operated almost as a state within the state, exporting dried cod from the north in exchange for grain.

Dynastic marriages tied Norway to its neighbours. In 1380 Olaf IV inherited both Denmark and Norway, and in 1397 his mother, Margaret I, united the three Scandinavian crowns in the Kalmar Union. The union was dominated by Denmark, the richest and most populous partner, and Norway's council lacked the strength to break away. When Sweden left the union in 1523, Norway stayed under the Danish crown.

Under the kings in Copenhagen, Norway became the junior half of Denmark–Norway. The last archbishop of Nidaros, Olav Engelbrektsson, tried to defend Catholicism and Norwegian autonomy, but Christian III won the Danish civil war, and in 1537 he imposed the Protestant Reformation along Lutheran lines, seized church lands and dissolved the Norwegian Council of State, declaring that Norway would be ruled as a part of Denmark. Danish became the written language of church and administration, though Norwegians kept their spoken dialects.

The economy revived from the sixteenth century, when water-driven sawmills turned Norway's forests into exports to the Netherlands and later Britain; much of Amsterdam was built on Norwegian timber piles. Silver mining began at Kongsberg in 1623 and copper mining at Røros. Wars with Sweden cost Norway the provinces of Jämtland and Härjedalen in 1645, in a war that formed part of the Thirty Years' War, and Bohuslän in 1658. In 1661 Frederick III became absolute hereditary monarch, and a professional bureaucracy of officials, often Danish-born, governed the counties. The population grew from about 150,000 in 1500 to about 900,000 by 1800.

In the far north the crown extended its control over Sámi lands, where Norway, Sweden and Russia had all claimed taxes. The missionary Thomas von Westen led a campaign from 1716 to convert the Sámi and suppress their traditional religion, including the drums used by their noaidi, or spiritual specialists. The border treaty of 1751 with Sweden divided Sámi lands between the two states but guaranteed reindeer herders the right to cross it.

Denmark–Norway sided with France in the Napoleonic Wars from 1807, and the British blockade brought hunger to Norway. After Napoleon's defeat at Leipzig, the Treaty of Kiel of January 1814 transferred Norway from the king of Denmark to the king of Sweden. Norwegians refused to accept the deal. Prince Christian Frederik, the Danish heir and governor in Norway, summoned an elected assembly, which met at Eidsvoll and adopted one of the most liberal constitutions of its age on 17 May 1814, now the national day. A brief Swedish invasion followed, and under the Convention of Moss Norway accepted a union with Sweden on condition that it kept its constitution and its parliament, the Storting. On 4 November 1814 the Storting elected Charles XIII of Sweden as king of Norway, creating the union between Sweden and Norway.

Officials dominated the early decades, and nobility was abolished in 1821. Farmers won a majority in the Storting from the 1830s and local elected councils followed in 1837. Romantic nationalists collected folk tales and dialects, and Ivar Aasen's Landsmål, now Nynorsk, offered a written language based on rural speech.

The first railway opened from Christiania, as Oslo was then named, to Eidsvoll in 1854. Norway's merchant fleet boomed, becoming the world's third largest by 1880. Poverty and a growing population drove mass emigration: by 1930 around 800,000 Norwegians had left, most for the American Midwest. A constitutional conflict over whether ministers had to answer to parliament ended in 1884, when King Oscar II appointed the Liberal leader Johan Sverdrup prime minister, making the government responsible to the Storting. Universal male suffrage followed in 1898. Meanwhile the Sámi and the Kven, Finnish-speaking settlers of the north, faced an intensifying policy of Norwegianisation from the mid nineteenth century: schools taught only in Norwegian, and a law of 1902 allowed state land in Finnmark to be sold only to people who could speak Norwegian.

Friction grew over Norway's demand for its own consular service. When King Oscar refused to sign the law, the Storting declared on 7 June 1905 that the union was dissolved. A referendum in August approved the break by 368,208 votes to 184, and after negotiations at Karlstad Sweden accepted it peacefully. A second vote approved a monarchy, and Prince Carl of Denmark became King Haakon VII. Hydroelectric power drove new industries such as Norsk Hydro, and laws kept waterfalls and mines in Norwegian hands. Women gained the vote on equal terms with men in 1913. Polar explorers such as Fridtjof Nansen became national heroes, and Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole in December 1911.

Norway stayed neutral in the First World War, but its merchant fleet largely served Britain and lost about half its ships and some 2,000 seamen to German submarines. The Svalbard Treaty of 1920 recognised Norwegian sovereignty over the Arctic archipelago. The interwar decades brought unstable minority governments, strikes and, during the Great Depression, high unemployment. In 1935 the Labour Party, which had moved from revolutionary to reformist politics, formed a government under Johan Nygaardsvold with the support of the Agrarians, beginning a long period of Labour rule.

Norway declared neutrality in 1939, but both Britain and Germany saw its coast as vital. Germany struck first, invading on 9 April 1940. The sinking of the cruiser Blücher in the Oslofjord gave the king and government time to escape the capital. Fighting, with British and French help around Narvik, lasted two months, after which King Haakon and the government left for London on 7 June. Vidkun Quisling, leader of the fascist National Unity party, proclaimed himself head of government on the day of the invasion; his name became a byword for collaboration. Real power lay with the German Reichskommissar Josef Terboven. Norway became part of the war of Nazi Germany in the Second World War, with up to 360,000 German troops stationed there by 1945.

The government in exile controlled most of the large merchant fleet, which carried Allied cargoes and paid for the government's costs, though about half the ships were sunk. At home, the Supreme Court resigned, teachers and clergy refused to join Nazified organisations, and a resistance movement carried out sabotage, including attacks on the heavy water plant at Vemork that supported German nuclear research. Of roughly 2,100 Jews in Norway, at least 775 were arrested or deported, most aboard the ship Donau in November 1942, and around 765 were murdered in the Holocaust, most at Auschwitz. About two-thirds of Norway's Jews escaped, many to Sweden with help from the resistance. Retreating German forces burned much of Finnmark and northern Troms in 1944 and forcibly evacuated the population as Soviet troops advanced. After liberation in May 1945, a legal purge convicted about 53,000 people of treason or collaboration, and 25 Norwegians, Quisling among them, were executed.

Labour governments under Einar Gerhardsen rebuilt the country through state planning, rationing and investment, aided by the Marshall Plan. The welfare state took shape, crowned by a national insurance scheme in 1967. Norway abandoned neutrality to become a founding member of NATO in 1949, while refusing to host permanent foreign bases or nuclear weapons, a gesture to the Soviet Union, with which it had shared a land border since 1944. During the Cold War the far north was a frontier of NATO surveillance. Norway joined the European Free Trade Association in 1960, but voters rejected membership of the European Community in 1972 and of the European Union in 1994; it instead joined the European Economic Area and the Schengen area.

Oil changed everything. Phillips Petroleum found the Ekofisk field in 1969, and production began in 1971. The state took a large share through taxation and the state oil company Statoil, and Stavanger became the centre of the industry. To avoid squandering the windfall, the Storting created a petroleum fund in 1990, which received its first deposit in 1996 and grew into the world's largest sovereign wealth fund. Gro Harlem Brundtland became the first woman prime minister in 1981, and in 1993 Norway hosted the secret talks behind the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

The Alta controversy of 1979 to 1982, over damming a river in Sámi reindeer country, turned into a national debate on Sámi rights. Although the dam was built, it led to a constitutional amendment on Sámi culture in 1988 and the opening of the Sámi Parliament in 1989, and in 1990 Norway became the first country to ratify the International Labour Organization convention on Indigenous peoples. In 1997 King Harald V apologised on behalf of the state for the injustice of Norwegianisation.

Norwegian forces took part in NATO operations in Afghanistan and Libya, and the former prime minister Jens Stoltenberg served as NATO's secretary general. On 22 July 2011 a far-right extremist, Anders Behring Breivik, set off a bomb at the government headquarters in Oslo and then shot dead dozens of young people at a Labour youth camp on the island of Utøya, killing 77 people in all, the deadliest attack in the country since the Second World War. The Conservative leader Erna Solberg governed from 2013 to 2021, and in 2017 the Church of Norway was separated from the state.

A commission on Norwegianisation and injustice against the Sámi, Kven and Forest Finns, set up by the Storting in 2018, delivered its report in June 2023, and in November 2024 the Storting adopted measures in response, beginning with a formal apology. Labour's Jonas Gahr Støre became prime minister in 2021 in coalition with the Centre Party. The Centre Party left the government in January 2025 in a dispute over European energy rules, and Stoltenberg returned to politics as finance minister. In the election of 8 September 2025 Labour came first and the parties of the centre-left won a majority of seats, allowing Støre to continue at the head of a minority government, while the right-wing Progress Party became the largest opposition party.