Norway

From the Viking kingdoms and a saint-king to North Sea oil, Arctic sovereignty and a prosperous modern realm.

Norway's history runs from the Viking Age, when the petty kingdoms of the fjords were welded together under Harald Fairhair after the Battle of Hafrsfjord around 872, to one of the wealthiest and most settled states of the modern world. Christianity was imposed by the warrior-king Olaf II, whose death at Stiklestad in 1030 turned him into Norway's eternal patron saint, and the medieval kingdom reached a height before the Black Death of 1349 carried off half its people. Weakened, Norway entered the Kalmar Union of 1397 and then the long union with Denmark, in which it was reduced for centuries to a province governed from Copenhagen. The Treaty of Kiel in 1814 transferred Norway to Sweden, but Norwegians answered with the Eidsvoll constitution of 17 May 1814 and, after a forced union with Sweden, dissolved that union peacefully in 1905 and chose their own king, Haakon VII. The twentieth century brought German occupation, the recovery of sovereignty over the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard under the 1920 treaty, the discovery of North Sea oil in 1969, two popular rejections of European Community and European Union membership, and at last, in 2010, a treaty settling the long Barents Sea boundary dispute with Russia.