Norvegia-Norway-Oppland
Earliest peoplesBetween 3000 and 2500 BCE new immigrants settled in eastern Norway. They were farmers who grew grain and kept cows and sheep. The hunting-fishing population of the west coast was also gradually replaced by farmers, though hunting and fishing remained useful secondary means of livelihood.
From about 1500 BCE bronze was gradually introduced, but the use of stone implements continued; Norway had few riches to barter for bronze goods, and the few finds consist mostly of elaborate weapons and brooches that only chieftains could afford. Huge burial cairns built close to the sea as far north as Harstad and also inland in the south are characteristic of this period. The motifs of the rock carvings differ from those typical of the Stone Age. Representations of the Sun, animals, trees, weapons, ships, and people are all strongly stylized, probably as fertility symbols connected with the religious ideas of the period.
Little has been found dating from the early Iron Age (the last 500 years BCE). The dead were cremated, and their graves contain few burial goods. During the first four centuries CE the people of Norway were in contact with Roman-occupied Gaul. About 70 Roman bronze cauldrons, often used as burial urns, have been found. Contact with the civilized countries farther south brought a knowledge of runes; the oldest known Norwegian runic inscription dates from the 3rd century. At this time the amount of settled area in the country increased, a development that can be traced by coordinated studies of topography, archaeology, and place-names. The oldest root names, such as nes, vik, and bø (“cape,” “bay,” and “farm”), are of great antiquity, dating perhaps from the Bronze Age, whereas the earliest of the groups of compound names with the suffixes vin (“meadow”) or heim (“settlement”), as in Bjorgvin (Bergen) or Saeheim (Seim), usually date from the first centuries CE.
Settlements
The period of the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west (5th century CE) is characterized by rich finds, including chieftains’ graves containing magnificent weapons and gold objects. Hill forts were built on precipitous rocks for defense. Excavation has revealed stone foundations of farmhouses 60 to 90 feet (18 to 27 metres) long—one even 150 feet (46 metres) long—the roofs of which were supported on wooden posts. These houses were family homesteads where several generations lived together, with people and cattle under one roof. From this period and later (600–800), nascent communities can be traced. Defense works require cooperation and leadership, so petty states of some kind with a defense and administrative organization must have existed.
These states were based on either clans or tribes (e.g., the Horder of Hordaland in western Norway). By the 9th century each of these small states had things, or tings (local or regional assemblies), for negotiating and settling disputes. The thing meeting places, each eventually with a horg (open-air sanctuary) or a hov (temple; literally “hill”), were usually situated on the oldest and best farms, which belonged to the chieftains and wealthiest farmers. The regional things united to form even larger units: assemblies of deputy yeomen from several regions. In this way, the lagting (assemblies for negotiations and lawmaking) developed. The Gulating had its meeting place by Sogne Fjord and may have been the centre of an aristocratic confederation along the western fjords and islands called the Gulatingslag. The Frostating was the assembly for the leaders in the Trondheim Fjord area; the earls (jarls) of Lade, near Trondheim, seem to have enlarged the Frostatingslag by adding the coastland from Romsdals Fjord to the Lofoten Islands. A lagting developed in the area of Lake Mjøsa in the east and eventually established its meeting place at Eidsvoll, becoming known as the Eidsivating. The area around Oslo Fjord, although at times closely tied to Denmark, developed a lagting—with its meeting place at Sarpsborg—called the Borgarting.
The Vikings
The name Viking at first (c. 800) meant a man from the Vik, the huge bay that lies between Cape Lindesnes in Norway and the mouth of the Göta River in Sweden and that has been called Skagerrak since 1500. The term Viking Age has come to denote those years from about 800 to 1050 when Scandinavians set out on innumerable plundering expeditions abroad. Surplus population, superior ships and weapons, well-developed military organization, and a spirit of adventure seem to have combined to cause this great movement. The Norwegians mostly sailed westward, raiding and settling in Ireland, Scotland, England, France, the Shetland Islands, the Orkney Islands, the Hebrides, the Isle of Man, the unpopulated Faroe (Faeroe) Islands, and Iceland. People of Norwegian descent settled in Greenland and undertook expeditions to Vinland (somewhere on the northeast coast of North America). Many Vikings returned home, and this meeting with western Europe was decisive for the unification and Christianization of Norway.
In the second half of the 9th century the Viking chief Harald I Fairhair, of the Oslo Fjord area, managed—in alliance with chiefs of the Frostatingslag and parts of the Gulatingslag—to pacify the western coast. The final battle took place in Hafrsfjord, near Stavanger, sometime between 872 and 900, whereafter Harald proclaimed himself king of the Norwegians. His son and successor, Erik I Bloodax (so called because he murdered seven of his eight brothers), ruled about 930–935. He was replaced by his only surviving brother, Haakon I, who had been reared in England. Haakon was Norway’s first missionary king, but his efforts failed; he died in battle in 960.Christianization of Norway
The Viking chiefs established relations with Christian monarchies and the church, especially in Normandy and England. Thus Olaf I Tryggvason, a descendant of Harald Fairhair, led a Viking expedition to England in 991. He was baptized and returned to Norway in 995, claiming to be king and recognized as such along the coast, where Christianity was already known. These areas were Christianized by Olaf, by peaceful means if possible and by force if necessary; he also sent missionaries to Iceland, where the new religion was adopted by the parliament (Althing) in 999–1000. In the same year, Olaf was killed in the Battle of Svolder. Fifteen years later another descendant of Harald Fairhair, Olaf II Haraldsson—who had returned from England—was acknowledged as king throughout Norway, including the inland areas. Olaf worked to increase royal power and to complete the Christianization of the country. In so doing, he alienated the former chieftains, who called on Canute of Denmark (now ruler of England) for help. Olaf was killed in battle with the Danes and peasant leaders at Stiklestad in 1030.
Canute’s rule in Norway soon proved unpopular with the chieftains, and, with support from the bishops, the deceased king Olaf became St. Olaf, the patron saint of Norway. With the death of Canute in 1035, Olaf’s young son, Magnus, was elected king. He was succeeded in 1047 by his uncle Harald III Sigurdsson (Harald Hardraade), a former commander of the Vikings in the imperial guard in Constantinople. Harald was killed during a vain attempt to conquer England in 1066.
The Olaf (Fairhair) kings firmly established the Norwegian monarchy with the help of English bishops. In return, sees and abbeys received the larger part of the estates that the Fairhair dynasty had confiscated from the Viking chieftains during the unification of Norway.
The 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries
At the end of the Viking Age all royal sons, legitimate or illegitimate, were considered to have equal claims to the crown if they were accepted by a lagting. During the 11th and early 12th centuries it was not unusual for Norway to have two or more joint kings ruling without conflict. Thus, Harald III’s son Olaf III reigned together with his brother Magnus II until the latter died in 1069. Olaf ruled from 1066 to 1093 without being involved in a war; by giving the dioceses (Nidaros [Trondheim], Bergen, and Oslo) permanent areas, he inspired the first Norwegian towns. Olaf’s son, Magnus III, ruled for 10 years, during which he undertook three expeditions to Scotland to establish Norwegian sovereignty over the Orkneys and the Hebrides. He was succeeded by his three sons, Olaf IV (1103–15), Eystein I (1103–22), and Sigurd I Magnusson (1103–30), who ruled jointly and imposed tithes, founded the first Norwegian monasteries, built cathedrals, established the bishopric at Stavanger, and incorporated the clergy of the Scottish isles into the church of Norway.
Conflict of church and state
Following the rule of Magnus III’s sons, the increasing power of the church and the monarch contributed to a century of civil war. During the early 12th century the kings expanded their direct rule over the various provinces, and the family aristocracy in Norway grew discontented. With the accession of Harald IV (ruled 1130–36), interest groups within Norwegian society began supporting pretenders to the throne, and the church was successful in exploiting civil unrest to win independence.
Even though Norway first was Christianized from England, the Norwegian bishops—together with the other Nordic bishops—fell under the archbishop of Bremen (Germany) in the 11th century. A Nordic archbishopric was established in 1104 in Lund (now in Sweden), probably to remove any influence from the Holy Roman emperor on the Nordic churches. In 1152–53 the English cardinal Nicholas Breakspear (later Pope Adrian IV) visited Norway, resulting in the establishment of an archbishopric in Nidaros. The Holy See decided that the new archbishopric should comprise the five bishoprics in Norway (Nidaros, Bergen, Stavanger, Oslo, and Hamar) and the six bishoprics on the western islands (Skálholt and Hólar in Iceland, Greenland, the Faroes, the Orkneys, and the Hebrides with the Isle of Man). In 1163 the church of Norway supported the claims of a pretender, Magnus V Erlingsson, in return for his obedience to the pope, guarantees for the reforms of 1152, and the issuance of a letter of privileges for the church. Magnus’s coronation was the first at which the archbishop presided. The first written law of succession, dating from this coronation, established primogeniture in principle and the prior right of legitimate royal sons to the crown. Instead of kings being elected by the things, a representation dominated by the church was to serve as the electoral body. The law was never applied, and Magnus was succeeded by Sverrir Sigurdsson, a priest from the Faroe Islands who represented himself as a grandson of Harald IV, the first pretender king. After seven years of fighting, Sverrir was acknowledged in 1184 as king of all Norway and set out to bring the church under royal control. He refused to recognize the reforms and privileges made since 1152, and the archbishop and most of the bishops went into exile; Sverrir was excommunicated. The exiles in Denmark established a rebellious party and allied themselves with the secular enemies of the king, who were opposed to the king’s administrative reforms—including the establishment of the hird as a new aristocracy composed of court officials and the heads of estates. This opposition party won control of the Oslo and inland areas and threatened Sverrir’s rule until his death in 1202.
Civil war continued until 1217, when Sverrir’s grandson Haakon IV became king, beginning the “Golden Age” of Norway. Haakon modernized the administration by creating the chancellor’s office and the royal council. He prohibited blood feuds, and a new law of succession was passed (1260) by a national assembly that established the indivisibility of the kingdom, primogeniture, the prior claim of the legitimate royal sons, and, most importantly, the hereditary right of the king’s eldest legitimate son to the crown. During Haakon’s reign relations in the northern area were first regulated by a treaty with Russia (signed at Novgorod; a similar treaty signed there went into effect in 1326). Greenland and Iceland agreed voluntarily to personal unions with the Norwegian king in 1261 and 1262, marking the greatest extent of Norwegian expansion, which included the Faroes and the Scottish isles. Haakon died during an unsuccessful expedition to the Hebrides in 1263, and in 1266 his son and successor, Magnus VI, ceded the Hebrides and the Isle of Man to Scotland in return for recognition of the Norwegian claim to the Orkney and Shetland islands.
Magnus VI earned the epithet Lawmender for his work on Norway’s legislation. During his reign (1263–80) a common national law code, with special chapters for the towns, replaced the earlier provincial laws in 1274–76. Haakon’s law of succession was confirmed, and a hereditary nobility was established. The king thus took over the legislative functions, and the thing became courts presided over by royal judges (lagmenn). Such a systematic national code, prepared in the king’s chancery, was unique in 13th-century Europe. It remained in force from the 1270s until the Norske Lov of 1687; the version of the code for Iceland (the Jónsbók, 1281) is still partly in force. In a concordat of 1277 the church of Norway had to accept the new lawbooks. Some of the privileges of the church were curtailed, but those that were confirmed left the church essentially independent within its own sphere.
Magnus was succeeded by his young son Erik II (1280–99). Erik’s regency was led by secular magnates who controlled central power throughout his reign. The church tried to win privileges that had been denied by Magnus, but the regency proved stronger. The magnates also tried to limit the rights of the German merchants in Norway but were answered by a blockade from the Hanse cities and forced to agree to the German demands. Erik was succeeded by his brother, Haakon V (1299–1319), who was determined to renew the royal power. He built a series of fortresses, including Akershus in Oslo, marking the shift of political power from the west coast to the Oslo area. Haakon was unable to restore royal power to the extent he wished, however.
Union with Sweden
Haakon’s successor was Magnus VII Eriksson, the young son of his daughter, Ingebjørg, and Duke Erik, son of Magnus I of Sweden. The child was also elected to the Swedish crown in 1319, creating a personal union between the two countries that lasted until 1355. The countries were to be governed during the king’s minority by the two national councils, with the king’s mother as a member of both regencies. The regency in Norway failed to prevent the increasing power of the magnates: the king came of age in 1332 but later was forced to recognize his younger son, Haakon, as king of Norway (1343) and to abdicate in his favour when he reached his majority (1355). Magnus’s elder son, Erik, was designated king of Sweden.
The Black Death struck Norway in 1349–50. It killed as much as two-thirds of a population of about 400,000, and the country did not regain that level again until the mid-17th century. The upper classes were particularly hard hit; only one of the bishops survived, and many noble families were reduced to the peasantry by the death of their workers and the decrease of their incomes. The circumstances of the remaining farmers and fishermen, however, improved correspondingly.
The power of Haakon VI (1355–80) was also limited. The high civil servants and clergy who had fallen victim to the Black Death were replaced by Danes and Swedes. The central government as a whole lost control over the kingdom, and the local areas began to conduct their own affairs. Haakon VI married Margaret, the daughter of Valdemar IV Atterdag of Denmark, and their son, Olaf, was elected king of Denmark in 1375. Olaf also became king of Norway at his father’s death (1380), but he died in 1387 at the age of 17, and his mother, who had served as regent in both kingdoms for him, then became the ruler.
Greenland
The first Nordic settlers in Greenland reached the island in 985 under the leadership of Erik the Red. Two colonies were established on the western coast, one near Godthåb (modern Nuuk) and one near Julianehåb (almost at the southern tip of the island), where a few thousand Norsemen engaged in cattle breeding, fishing, and sealing. The most important export was walrus tusks. A bishopric and two cloisters were organized in Greenland. The Greenlanders lacked wood and iron for shipbuilding and could not support communications with Europe; in 1261 they submitted to the Norwegian king, to whom they agreed to pay taxes in return for his acceptance of responsibility for the island’s provision through a yearly voyage. A worsening of the climate may have occurred early in the 14th century, resulting in a decline in agriculture and livestock breeding. Plagues ravaged the populace; the Black Death alone is estimated to have halved the population. When Norway, with Greenland and Iceland, became subject to the Danish king, conditions worsened; the only ships that then sailed to Greenland belonged to pirates. About 1350 the Godthåb settlement apparently was deserted and then occupied by Eskimo (Inuit), and in 1379 the Julianehåb area was attacked. The last certain notice of Norsemen in Greenland was about 1410; sometime during the following 150 years they disappeared from the island. It was not until the beginning of the 18th century that Greenland again came into the Danish sphere.
The Kalmar Union
With the accession of Margaret I of Denmark to power in 1387, the foundation was laid for political union with Denmark. She adopted her grandnephew Erik of Pomerania (later Erik VII), then six years old, as her heir, and in 1388 she was acclaimed queen of Sweden as well. The next year Erik was proclaimed heir apparent in Norway, and in June 1397 he was crowned king of all three Scandinavian nations in a ceremony at Kalmar, Sweden.
Under the Kalmar Union, Norway became an increasingly unimportant part of Scandinavia politically, and it remained in a union with Denmark until 1814. Margaret and Erik left vacant the highest Norwegian administrative position and governed Norway from Copenhagen. Most appointments made in Norway were given to Danes and Germans. Whereas in Denmark and Sweden national councils took over the government, in Norway the council was unable to assert itself.
After the accession of Christian I of Oldenburg in 1450, Norwegian government was again centred in Copenhagen. The lower estates were also essentially powerless against the Danes, and isolated peasant uprisings had neither good leadership nor clear political goals. In 1448 Norway had accepted the Swedish candidate for king, Karl Knutsson, but was forced to acknowledge Christian I and to remain in the union with Denmark. In 1469 Christian pawned the Orkney and Shetland islands to the Scottish king to provide a dowry for his daughter, and the islands were never reclaimed.
The cause of this political impotence in Norway has been a subject of considerable debate. According to one theory, the conscious policy of the kings since the 12th century of crushing the local family aristocracy to strengthen royal power deprived the country of a counterpart to the strong and often rebellious Danish and Swedish aristocracies. A second theory holds that geography was responsible for the absence of a strong aristocracy—that is, that the poorness of the soil prevented economic expansion through the creation of large estates. This geographic factor, together with the loss of population during the Black Death and subsequent epidemics, may explain why Norway’s aristocracy was more affected by the plague than were the nobles in the rest of Scandinavia. The huge loss in population deprived the aristocracy of much of its labour force, which led to the abandonment of farms and the decline of many nobles into the peasant class.
The 16th and 17th centuries
After 1523 the Norwegian council tried to obtain some independence for Norway within the union. But, because the bishops dominated the council, they became the losers in the Norwegian parallel to the 1534–36 civil war in Denmark. As a result, the council was abolished, and the bishops lost all hope for help from Sweden, which did not want to provoke Denmark and whose king was himself leaning toward Lutheranism. Olaf Engelbrektsson, the last Norwegian archbishop and head of the council, left Norway in early 1537 for the Netherlands, taking with him the shrine of St. Olaf.
In Norwegian political history, the year 1536 is a nadir—in Copenhagen, Norway was proclaimed a Danish province forever. Norwegian topography and society, however, were very different from those of Denmark, and the hereditary Norwegian crown was viewed as a distinct monarchy. Thus, Norway was allowed to keep most of its ancient institutions and laws, and new ones had to be given in a special Norwegian version (for example, the Norske Lov of 1687). From 1550 Norway’s natural resources, including fish, timber, iron ore, and copper—commodities from outside the Baltic area and most useful to western Europe—were increasingly exploited. Consequently, a Norwegian bourgeoisie became a political factor. After 1560 Denmark had a constant fear of Swedish plans to occupy Norway. Therefore it was important that the Norwegians not feel oppressed by rule from the political centre in Copenhagen. All this may explain the special attention the Danish government gave to Norway.
Most representative of this attitude was Christian IV, who visited Norway often and founded several towns (e.g., Kristiansand, with a plan to control the Skagerrak; Kongsberg, with its silver mines; and Christiania, after a destructive fire in Oslo in 1624). He even went on an Arctic tour to Vardø in 1599, proclaiming the Arctic waters to be the “king’s streams.” This was part of his reaction to Swedish pretensions toward the Arctic Ocean.
A certain separatist policy has been attributed to Hannibal Sehested, the king’s son-in-law and, in the 1640s, governor of Norway. He created an army (by conscription of peasants) and a separate financial administration, but he may have wanted a platform against the Danish nobility to work for absolutism. There were no signs of secession in the Norwegian population. When Sehested was deposed in 1651, the financial administration reverted to Copenhagen.
For almost a generation after 1664, Ulrik Frederick Gyldenløve, the illegitimate son of Frederick III, was governor of Norway. He courted the Norwegian peasants and at the same time gave monopolies on trade and timber exports to restricted numbers of merchants. By applying such principles the government in Copenhagen and the Danish public servants managed to rule the now far-off Norway after the Swedish annexations of Skåne, Halland, and Bohuslän.
The 18th century
Economic and social conditions
The modern frontier of southern Norway, which had been established in 1660, was confirmed by a treaty with Sweden in 1751. This treaty also established the frontier farther north (to Varanger) and assigned the interior of Finnmark (Finnmarksvidda) to Norway. The frontier treaty of 1751 is remarkable in two ways. Among existing frontiers in Europe, it was the second oldest (the oldest being the Pyrénées frontier, established in 1659). And a special supplement to the treaty, called the Lapp codicil, guaranteed free crossing of the new frontier to the nomadic, reindeer-keeping Sami (Lapps), based on the seasonal grazing needs of their herds. The modern frontier in Varanger was established by a convention in 1826 between the king of Norway and Sweden and the tsar of Russia.
Romanticists of the later 18th century idealized Norwegian rural society, with its free peasants in a wild landscape. Certainly, their situation contrasted favourably with that of the Danish tenants; the landowning farmers in eastern Norway, especially, earned sizable incomes from their timber forests. In the east and in the region of Trøndelag, therefore, the countryside was characterized by a class of wealthy timber merchants and farmers and a large rural proletariat. Elsewhere in the countryside social conditions were more nearly equal. The Norwegian population consisted almost exclusively of peasants and fishermen; no city or urban agglomeration exceeded 15,000 inhabitants. The census of 1801 counted 883,000 inhabitants in Norway and 925,000 in Denmark. The numbers reveal a remarkable population growth since the 17th century and indicate an economic stability that in the 19th century provided the basis of Norway’s quest for independence.
Thomas Malthus was the first demographer to see the exceptional possibilities for population studies in the Scandinavian countries, where civic registers were kept by parsons. In 1799, the year following his publication of An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus went to Norway to confirm his theories about checks on population growth. He found a late marital age, which he ascribed incorrectly to military service and a large servant class. In fact, early marriages were hindered by poverty and lack of land. Moreover, Norwegian population statistics of the 18th century indicate years of famine and epidemics, as do Swedish and Danish statistics. Malthus was correct, however, in discerning that demographic evolution in nonindustrialized countries could be studied better in Scandinavia than anywhere else in the world.
Return to Greenland
How and why the Norse community in Greenland perished at the end of the Middle Ages is an unsolved and fascinating problem. In the beginning of the 18th century there still was hope of finding Norse descendants among the Eskimo in Greenland. A Norwegian clergyman, Hans Egede, having managed to persuade the authorities that such people should be converted to the Lutheran faith, arrived in the Godthåb Fjord (in the southwest) to begin a new European settlement in Greenland but found only Eskimo. Later in the century another colony was founded at Julianehåb. wo factors are visible in this activity. First, the Pietist movement, which had considerable influence in Denmark, demanded religious conversion and stressed an obligation to bring the gospel to the heathens. A Ministry of Missions, founded in 1714, supported Egede in Greenland as it supported missionary activity among the Sami in northern Norway and the Indians at Tranquebar on the Coromandel Coast of southern India. Second, missionary activity became possible because of a close alliance with commercial interests. Egede himself founded a company in Bergen for trade with Greenland. The trade later passed to the Royal Greenland Trading Company of Copenhagen. The trade with Finnmark (now the northernmost part of Norway) was reserved, in principle, for merchants of Copenhagen as well.
The Napoleonic Wars and the 19th century Denmark-Norway’s attempt to remain neutral in the struggle between France and England and their respective allies early in the 19th century came to an end after England’s preemptive naval actions of 1807, in which the entire Danish fleet was taken. The continental blockade of England that followed, which was against Danish interests, was a catastrophe for Norway. Fish and timber exports were stopped, as well as grain imports from Denmark. The consequences were isolation, economic crisis, and hunger. In 1810–13 England consented to some relaxation of its counterblockade against Norway. As a whole, however, the years 1807–14 convinced leading groups in Norway that they needed a political representation of their own.
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