Norway(1) including Svalbard and Bear Island

How is the land laid out?

People compare Norway's shape to a spoon: the southwest wide and oval, the middle long and narrow and the very top wider again. The land is filled with mountains and plateaus(2), and the coastline deeply indented by fjords and further lengthened by numerous islands. The mountains crest at the Norwegian-Swedish border along the spoon's 'handle', where they are called the keel of the Scandanavian Peninsula. The biggest island chains are the Vesterålen and the Lafoten. Near the second chain is the famous set of whirlpools, the Maelstrom (or Moskstraumen). The high country is streaked with long alpine lakes and has some sizable glaciers, particularly north and northeast of Sogne Fjord. Rivers drain west from the Swedish border, north from the Finnish border or south into Oslo Fjord.

Norway's nearest territory is Svalbard, a set of tundra and ice-covered islands not far north of continental Europe. The principle island in the group is Spitsbergen, Europe's fifth largest island.

Who lives there?

Almost everyone speaks a dialect of Spoken Norwegian. At least two in three--especially urban people--write Bokmal, a written language more closely related to Danish than the spoken dialects. The rest write in in Nynorsk, which is based on Norwegian dialects. Almost nine in ten Norwegians belong to the Norwegian State Church, which is Evangelical Lutheran Protestant Christian. Total Christians are 92% with the remainder being the non-religious and the miscellaneous religions of recent immigrants.

There are no cities with a million residents but Oslo(3), the capital, approaches that size. Its port is ice free and the base of a large merchant fleet.

Who was there before?

Indo-European dialects may have arrived in southern Norway by 2000 B.C.E. It is more probable that Germanic dialects were spoken there in the last few centuries B.C.E. These Northern Germanic dialects evolved into Old Norse and the western Old Norse dialects evolved into Norwegian and other languages found on islands.

By 1000 B.C.E. other speakers had moved north from the southern Baltic shores to central Norway and beyond. At the beginning of their migration they probably spoke a language ancestral to Sami, Finnish and Estonian, but by 500 B.C.E. Sami was distinct, influenced by isolation, Old Norse and the previous inhabitants of the area.(4)

Old Norse religion

Roman Catholic Christianity was violently imposed by King Olaf I in the tenth century, though older beliefs persisted for a while. The Lutheran Protestant version of Christianity replaced the older version when the Danish rulers of Norway switched in the 17th century.

Samek former religion

Around Norway:
north
southeast of northeastern Finnmark
south from Finnmark
east
southeast
southwest
west, from the center

Around Svalbard:
north
east and southeast
west and southwest

Other broad topics

Norway and its possessions
Europe

Footnotes

(1) Norge in Norwegian.
(2) Vidda or fjell in Norwegian.
(3) Formerly Christiania or Kristiania.
(4) People had been in the north for about 8,000 years. The ancestors of the physical culture of the Sami had probably been in the area about 4,000 years.