According to ehealthfacts, Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Scandinavian unitary state in the form of a constitutional monarchy consisting of the western part of the Scandinavian peninsula as well as Jan Mayen, Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has an area of 385,252 km² and a population of about 5 million. It is the second most sparsely populated country in Europe. The country’s longest border goes east to Sweden, while to the north there is also a border to Finland and a short distance to Russia. The rest of the country is bounded by the sea: the Barents Sea to the north, the Norwegian Sea to the west, the North Sea to the southwest and the Skagerrak to the south. The country’s capital is Oslo.
TIMELINE:
10,000-4000 BCE – Oldest Stone Age. People live by hunting, trapping and fishing.
10,500 FVT – Blomvåg find in Øygarden municipality. Best known for the place where it was believed that the oldest traces of people were found in Norway. The flint stones that were found are in doubt as to whether they were processed by humans or nature at all.
9000-8000 BCE – A new glacier covers most of the country.
4200-3600 BCE – The petroglyphs at Alta.
4000-1800 BCE – Youngest Stone Age in Norway.
1800 BCE – The Bronze Age in Norway is divided into 2 phases – the oldest from 1800-1100 BCE and the youngest from 1100-500 BCE.
542 – The Justinian plague that spreads from Central Asia to Europe and Asia Minor and is said to have ravaged in the 5th century onwards, strikes Norway. The epidemic is estimated to have caused 40 million deaths.
600-800 – The Merovingian period in Norway. Viking ships are being produced.
872 – The Viking Age is characterized by the expansion and emigration of the Vikings who were sailors. According to tradition, Harald Hårfager gathered the Vikings in 872 after the battle of Hafrsfjord in Stavanger, making him the first king of Norway (the dating to 872 may be somewhat coincidental, and the real year may well have been shortly before 900). The Viking Age ends in the 12th century, when the country becomes Christian.
1130-1240 – The Civil War period in Norway took place during this period.
1349 – The Black Death strikes Norway, causing drastic changes in the country, with between 40 and 50% of the country’s residents dying of the disease, causing a period of social and economic decline. The plague left Norway very impoverished. Although the death rate was roughly on a par with the rest of Europe, economic recovery took somewhat longer due to a very dispersed population. Many farms were abandoned, and the population increased only very slowly. The tenants of the few surviving farms found that their trading position vis-à-vis the owners of the farms had significantly improved.
1380-1814 – Denmark – Norway is the modern name for the Commonwealth between the kingdoms of Denmark and Norway after the final collapse of the Kalmar Union in 1523 ( Sweden declared independence), and from 1536 (Norway formally subject to the Danish crown), and until 1814 when Norway was ceded to the Swedes and left the Commonwealth.
1854 – The Eidsvoll line between Eidsvoll and Oslo and thus became the first railway in Norway. The Eidsvoll line was important for inland transport, as it, together with the steamboat Skibladner, transported passengers and goods to Hamar, Gjøvik and Lillehammer.
1860 – Mass emigration from Norway to America begins.
1888 – Fridtjof Nansen led the first expedition that managed to cross the ice sheet in Greenland, which really made him world famous.
1893 – Fridtjof Nansen spearheaded an expedition to the North Pole with the ship Fram, a voyage that took over three years. Together with Hjalmar Johansen, Nansen reached 86 ° 14 N, the northernmost point any human had reached at that time. During the expedition, he experienced the phenomenon of dead water, which he was the first to describe.
1896 – April 6, Norway gets its first cinema. Read more here (in Norwegian).
1911 – Roald Amundsen was a Norwegian polar explorer. He is best known for finding the Northwest Passage and for leading the expedition, which first reached the South Pole on December 14, 1911, after a race with a British expedition led by Robert Scott.
1914-18 – During the First World War, 800 Norwegian ships are lost during the German submarine war. 2000 Norwegian sailors lose their lives.
1918 – more than 7,000 Norwegians die of the Spanish flu, which claimed more than 50 million. died, of which 14,000 Danes.
1922 – Fridtjof Nansen receives the Nobel Peace Prize.
1925 – January 1. Norway’s capital returns to its original name Oslo. The name was changed to Christiania in 1624 at the behest of the common Danish-Norwegian king, Christian the Fourth. From 1877 the name has been written Kristiania.
1926 – Roald Amundsen, Lincoln Ellsworth and Umberto Nobile lead the airship “Norway” from Ny-Ålesund to Teller in Alaska, becoming the first to cross the North Pole. At the same time, it was established that there was no land in the polar region.
1940 – Vidkun Quisling founded in 1933 the Nazi party Nasjonal Samling (NS), which played no role before the war. During the German invasion on April 9, 1940, he attempted a coup, but under German pressure had to withdraw in favor of the Administrative Council
appointed by the Supreme Court.
1940 – During the German invasion on April 9, Max Manus fought in Gösta Benckert’s company at Kongsvinger Fortress and Glåmdalen. On January 16, 1941, he was arrested for selling illegal newspapers in the resistance movement. He was approached in his apartment in Vidars gade in Oslo, where he tried to escape by jumping out of the window. He lay lifeless on the street, and he was picked up by the ambulance and driven to Ullevål hospital, where he was bedridden until his escape on the night of Friday 14 February, 1941. Read more here. A film was made about his exploits in 2008 which you can read more about here.
1941 – Allied troops are deployed on the island during the war to prevent Nazi Germany from occupying the islands in the area. Norway fell during the German occupation in 1940. The majority of the island’s residents were Russians, and the Soviet Union had a non-aggression pact with Germany until June 22, 1941. Britain and Canada sent forces to the island to destroy installations, mostly Soviet coal mines, and prevent the Germans from taking them over.
1942 – On February 1, Quisling, with German approval, becomes Prime Minister of a government of NS members. As head of state, he also got his personal bodyguard: the Driver’s Guard. There was a minority in the population who supported the Nazis, and up to 15,000 Norwegians enlisted in German military service, including in the Waffen-SS. Quisling’s and the party’s attempts to Nazify Norway suffered total shipwreck due to popular opposition. After the war, he was convicted of treason along with 24 others and executed by firing squad on October 24, 1945.
1943 – Operation Sicily, also known as Operation Zitronella, was a German attack on Allied targets on Svalbard in Norway from 6-9. September. The entire population of Svalbard was evacuated in August 1941, and a garrison of 152 men from Norway, Canada and Great Britain was stationed in Barentsburg. The garrison was set up in connection with Operation Gauntlet, which aimed to build a weather station and destroy important installations and mines. The intention was to make Svalbard less attractive to a possible German occupation.
1943 – Operation Source took place on September 20, and was a top secret and extremely risky British operation, where several mini-submarines were to sink the German battleship Tirpitz in port, in this case in Altafjord in Finnmark in northern Norway. Only X-5, X-6, X-7 and X-10 managed to emerge. Several of the mini-submarines sank with crew along the way. Large amounts of explosives were placed under Tirpitz which were severely damaged during the operation.
1945 – UFO MYTH: A UFO apparently crashed on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen.
1947 – UFO MYTH: A report by Journalist Dorothy Kilgallen (see more here in English), in the month of May, stated that British scientists and air defense personnel were in the process of excavating the wreck of a mysterious flying ship in Spitsbergen, Norway. The Swedish military confirmed its extraterrestrial origins and reported 17 bodies found. The story appeared like a little beep one day in the American media before it was doused by the military.
1963 – The Kings Bay affair in Norwegian politics was triggered by an accident in 1962, in the coal mine in Ny Ålesund, located on Norwegian territory on Svalbard in the Arctic Ocean. Read more in Norwegian here.
1985 – The Swedish pop group, A-ha broke through both in Europe and in the US with Take On Me, partly due to a partially animated video. Among the group’s later hits are The Sun Always Shines on TV, Manhattan Skyline, The Living Daylights (from the James Bond movie Living Daylights ), and Stay on These Roads.
2011 – July 22. The terrorist attacks in Norway were partly a bomb blast in the government quarter in Oslo and partly a massacre on the island of Utøya. The two attacks cost a total of 77 dead and 96 wounded.
