Norway

Norway was a heartland of the Viking Age, its seafarers raiding, trading, and settling across the North Atlantic from Ireland to Newfoundland between the eighth and eleventh centuries. Harald Fairhair is traditionally credited with unifying the kingdom around 872, and Christianity took hold under Olaf II, killed at Stiklestad in 1030 and made the country's patron saint. The Black Death of 1349 gutted the medieval kingdom, and from 1397 Norway became the junior partner in a union dominated first by Denmark for some four centuries.

At the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1814, Denmark ceded Norway to Sweden. Norwegians seized the moment to write a liberal constitution at Eidsvoll on 17 May — still the national day — but were forced into a looser union with Sweden that lasted until it was peacefully dissolved in 1905, when Norway chose a Danish prince as King Haakon VII.

Germany invaded neutral Norway in April 1940; the king and government led resistance from exile in London while the collaborator Vidkun Quisling ran a puppet regime and the retreating Germans burned the far north. After the war Norway helped found NATO and built a Nordic welfare state. The 1969 discovery of North Sea oil transformed it: the state took the bulk of the revenue and channelled the surplus into what is now the world's largest sovereign wealth fund, making Norway one of the richest and most equal countries. In 2011 a far-right terrorist killed 77 people, most of them teenagers at a Labour Party youth camp, in the country's worst peacetime atrocity.

At the centre of Norwegian life is friluftsliv, "open-air life" — an almost moral value placed on hiking, skiing, foraging, and cabin weekends, underpinned by the legal right to roam and camp on uncultivated land. Cross-country skiing is close to national identity, and Norway wins Winter Olympic medals out of all proportion to its size.

Social norms lean egalitarian and understated. The "Law of Jante" frowns on thinking yourself better than others; hierarchies are flat, first names are universal, social trust is very high, and reserve thaws slowly. Dugnad, communal volunteer work, keeps sports clubs and housing blocks running, and 17 May is a day of children's parades, marching bands, and national costume, with no military display.

Culturally Norway punches hard: Ibsen and modern drama, the novelists Hamsun and Undset and today's Scandi-noir, Munch and "The Scream", Grieg's music, and the "Slow TV" experiments that broadcast a train journey or a coastal voyage in real time. The country still commercially hunts minke whales, an international controversy that stirs little debate at home.

Most Norwegians live along the coast and in the milder southeast, with about a quarter in the Oslo region and the rest in Bergen, Trondheim, Stavanger, Tromsø, and the towns. Wages and prices are both high; alcohol is sold through a state monopoly and taxed heavily, as are cars and sugar.

Public services are generous — long shared parental leave, subsidised childcare, five weeks' holiday, strong unions — and the hytte, the holiday cabin, is a national institution, with weekends and holidays given over to "going to the cabin". Electricity is almost entirely hydropower, and Norway now leads the world in electric cars, which make up the large majority of new sales.

The country's contradictions are live political issues: Western Europe's biggest oil and gas supplier trying to hold a climate-leader image, a debate over opening the Arctic seabed to mining, and rows over electricity prices and the cables that link cheap Norwegian power to a more expensive European market. In the north, the Indigenous Sámi have their own parliament and a recent official reckoning with a long assimilation policy.

Norwegian food is the food of the sea. Salmon — Norway is by far the world's largest producer — cod fresh in winter or dried as stockfish in a trade older than the nation, herring, trout, king crab, and shrimp are the foundation, in dishes from creamy Bergen fish soup to simple boiled cod. Lamb and mutton give the official national dish, fårikål (mutton and cabbage), and the salt-cured, steamed lamb ribs of a west-coast Christmas.

Brown cheese — a sweet, caramel-coloured whey cheese sliced thin with a cheese slicer — goes on bread and on heart-shaped waffles served with jam and sour cream. Lefse flatbread, sour-cream porridge, and, in the north, cloudberries with cream are traditional treats.

Aquavit, a caraway spirit aged in oak, is the classic partner to heavy festive food, and Oslo has become an unlikely fine-dining capital, home to the three-Michelin-star Maaemo and a wider New Nordic movement built on foraging and fermentation. Coffee is drunk in enormous quantities.

The western fjords are the signature. Geirangerfjord and Nærøyfjord are on the World Heritage list; the Sognefjord is the longest and deepest, reached by the spectacular Flåm Railway; and the Hardangerfjord, blossoming in spring, lies near the cliff-edge hikes of Trolltunga and Preikestolen. Bergen, the "gateway to the fjords", has the Hanseatic wharf of Bryggen, a fish market, and a funicular up its rainy hills.

Oslo has the Munch Museum, the new National Museum with "The Scream", the Vigeland sculpture park, an opera house you can walk over, and the polar-exploration museums on the Bygdøy peninsula. Trondheim is built around the medieval Nidaros Cathedral, and Stavanger is the base for the Lysefjord hikes and the country's oil museum.

Far to the north, the Lofoten and Vesterålen islands throw jagged peaks straight out of the sea above red fishing cabins and white beaches; Tromsø is a lively Arctic city and a base for whale-watching and the Northern Lights, best seen from September to March. The midnight sun shines north of the Arctic Circle from late May to late July, and the coastal ferry from Bergen to Kirkenes, calling at 34 ports, is billed as the world's most beautiful voyage. Svalbard, at nearly 78°N, offers glaciers, polar bears, and the Global Seed Vault.