First came the Ice Ages

Over millions of years, the Earth went through many ice ages. Enormous glaciers covered vast areas of the planet, including the Scandinavian Peninsula, and reshaped the landscape beneath them completely.

But the ice was never constant. During warmer intervals, called interglacials, plants and animals returned. In Norway, scientists have found fragmentary remains of mammoths, muskoxen, and woolly rhinoceroses from these periods. However, as far as we know today, there were no humans in this region before or during the ice ages.

The first humans

In Scandinavia, the most recent glacial cycle lasted from approximately 115,000 BC to 9500 BC.

Read more

Keeping the rodents out

The Norwegians placed the stabbur on wooden stilts or boulders — structures specifically designed to keep rodents and other creatures out.

Throughout summer and autumn, the farmers worked hard to stock the stabbur with enough food to last through a long and frosty winter.

The stabbur contained foods such as threshed grain, flour, flatbread, butter, frost-resistant cheese, and dried, smoked, or salted meat and fish.

The stabbur did not have a fireplace, so the food and items stored there had to withstand low temperatures. Frost-sensitive foods — such as some vegetables, milk, eggs, and other perishable products — needed to be kept in a frost-free location. These were typically stored in a cool indoor pantry or in an earth cellar, either underneath the main house or outdoors.

A building of all sizes

Typically — but not always — the stabbur was a wooden structure. The earliest versions were built using a stave‑type construction, but from the Viking Era onwards the lafting log‑building technique became more dominant, at least in some regions of the country.

Read more

The northern route

The most common interpretations of the name Norge are:

1. the land to the north,

2. the northern route, or

3. the route leading north.

Looking at Norway on a map, with its long, northward coastline, these meanings make a lot of sense. However, according to linguists, there may also be a second and a third interpretation.

Narrow inlet

In 1847, the student Niels Halvorsen Trønnes claimed that the name Norge is based on the Old Norse word nór, which in this context means a narrow inlet or channel.

Read more

What and where

The Kingdom of Norway (Kongeriket Norge) is an independent constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy. The country occupies the western and northern portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula — the elongated landmass in the north-western corner of the European continent. It stretches from the Arctic north to the more temperate south.

Human settlement

Human settlement in this part of the world began after the end of the latest ice age — some 11,500 years ago. The early settlers were nomadic or semi-nomadic hunter-fisher-gatherers. Farming came later.

Cultural history

Norway’s cultural history has been shaped by migrations coming in through the north-east — present-day Finland and Russia — as well as from mainland Europe to the south.

Today, most of the population traces its roots to the south, while the Sami and other historical minority groups hail from the north-east. Modern-day Norway is a multicultural society with influences from all corners of the world.

The oceans and the coastline

The oceans are closely linked to Norway’s history. The country’s southern, western, and northern coasts — like fortress walls — face the powerful North Sea, the Norwegian Sea, and the Barents Sea.

Throughout history, Norway has been a seafaring nation and has fostered many Arctic, Antarctic, and world ocean explorers. Norway’s coastline, with all its intricate nooks and crannies, is often cited as the second longest in the world, surpassed only by that of Canada.

Up until the Industrial Revolution, the coastal waters served as the country’s main transportation route and were a vital connection to the outside world.

The landscape

Norway’s dramatic terrain was sculpted by the massive glaciers of the ice ages, leaving behind fjords, archipelagos, deep valleys, towering mountain peaks, plateaus, and occasional flatlands.

The climate

Norway’s climate varies considerably, ranging from Arctic conditions in the north to more temperate zones in the south, and from the chill of the mountains to the relatively milder temperatures along the coast.

The Gulf Stream — and its continuation, the North Atlantic Current — carries warm water from the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico across the Atlantic, making Norway’s coastal areas far more temperate than they would otherwise be.

Summers are short and intense, while winters are long, cold, and dark, with the ground often frozen solid and covered in deep snow for months on end.

More from Norwegian Roots

More from Norwegian Roots

When one of Norway’s leading photographers, Anders Beer Wilse, took this photograph in 1930, he may have thought that he had just captured the future. Or maybe he was commissioned by Electrolux, the vacuum cleaner company, to promote one of the many uses of its products. As far as we know, the use of the vacuum cleaner in horse grooming did not quite catch on.

The photograph comes without much information beyond the year it was taken. It is noted, however, that the horse on the left was born in 1917 at Bogstad — possibly Bogstad Gård, often referred to in English as Bogstad Manor — north-west of the Oslo city centre.

The photograph is a window into a different time. We can deduce that the stable had electricity. The stalls are clean and dry — but hard and narrow — and would not comply with the requirements of today. The Norwegian regulations on the welfare of horses of 2005 state the following:

‘A tie stall must be long and wide enough for the horse to lie flat on its side without having to use the stable aisle. The partition must be long enough to prevent the horses from kicking each other. In a tie stall, the horse must be tethered. The tether must cause as little inconvenience as possible to the horse and be designed so that the horse cannot easily become trapped or injured, and so that it can lie down and get up without obstruction. The horse must be easy to release. It is not permitted to keep more than one horse in a tie stall. A mare with a foal must not be kept in a tie stall.’

More from Norwegian Roots

More from Norwegian Roots

More from Norwegian Roots

The building closest to the camera in the image above may be a good example of one form of what the Norwegians historically referred to as a sommerfjøs — a summer livestock shelter. During the summer, the animals were milked here in the morning and early evening, and sheltered from predators at night.

From the summer shelter, the animals had easy access to the surrounding landscape, where they grazed throughout the day. While grazing, they were usually watched over by one or two of the older children on the farm.

The cultivated meadows close to the farm were fenced off to keep livestock and wild animals out. The meadow grass was needed to make hay for winter fodder, so it had to be protected.

In some places, summer livestock shelters may still be in use today.

More From Norwegian Roots