Norwegians II

Who Were the Norwegians?

The Norwegians of the high medieval period lived in the long shadow of the Viking age. Harald Hardrada's death at Stamford Bridge in 1066, three weeks before the Norman conquest of England, is conventionally taken as the end of the Viking era, and the Norway that emerged afterward was a Christian kingdom struggling to define itself. The old raiding culture gave way to dynastic politics, civil wars between rival claimants, and eventual absorption into the Kalmar Union under Danish leadership. Norway entered this period as an independent kingdom and left it as a junior partner in someone else's project.

The loss of independence was gradual rather than catastrophic. The Black Death hit Norway harder than almost any other European country, killing perhaps half the population and devastating an aristocracy too small to absorb the losses. When the last native Norwegian king died in 1387, the crown passed to the Danish queen Margaret, and Norway did not regain full sovereignty until 1905.

Homeland and Way of Life

Norway's geography was its character: a long, narrow strip of mountainous coast cut by fjords, with arable land confined to small pockets of valley floor and coastal plain. Farming was marginal in most of the country. Barley grew in the south and along sheltered fjords; further north, livestock and fishing sustained the population. The sea was always closer than the next village, and boats remained the primary means of transport along a coastline so convoluted that overland travel was often impossible.

A fisherman on the Lofoten coast, drying cod on wooden racks in the cold Arctic wind, processed stockfish that would travel to Bergen, then to Hanseatic warehouses in Lubeck, and eventually to dinner tables across Catholic Europe where Lenten fish was a weekly requirement. The stockfish trade was Norway's single most important export, and Bergen, the kingdom's largest city, owed its prosperity almost entirely to the Hanseatic merchants who dominated its waterfront. A Norwegian fisherman caught the cod; a German merchant sold it. The profit split was not in Norway's favor.

Warfare, Power, and Limits

Norwegian military power was naval by necessity. The leidang, the coastal levy that obligated free men to provide ships and crews for royal service, was the descendant of the Viking-age fleet system. Norwegian ships patrolled the North Sea, the Norwegian Sea, and the waters around the Atlantic colonies in Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroes. The kingdom's reach across the North Atlantic was extraordinary for a state with such a small population and limited resources.

On land, Norway could not compete with its Scandinavian neighbors. The population was too dispersed and the terrain too fragmented for large armies. Civil wars between rival royal claimants consumed much of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, weakening the crown and enriching the church and the aristocracy at its expense. By the time the civil wars ended, the kingdom was too exhausted to resist the gravitational pull of Danish and Swedish power.

Beliefs, Customs, and Society

The Norwegian church was wealthy and influential, its power built on land grants, tithes, and the spiritual authority of an institution that controlled access to baptism, marriage, and burial. The cathedral at Nidaros, built over the tomb of Saint Olav, was the northernmost great pilgrimage site in Christendom. A pilgrim climbing the last hill before Nidaros in July, catching sight of the cathedral's stone towers above the rooftops, had walked weeks or months to reach a shrine at the edge of the habitable world.

Norwegian society was relatively egalitarian by European standards. The free farmer, the bonde, was a more significant social figure than in most feudal kingdoms, and the Thing tradition of local assemblies survived as a check on both royal and aristocratic power. Serfdom never took hold in Norway as it did in Denmark. A free farmer attending the local Thing, speaking his mind on a matter of taxation or land rights, exercised a political voice that his counterpart in most of Europe did not possess.

Contacts, Conflicts, and Legacy

Norway's North Atlantic empire was unique in medieval Europe. Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands all fell under the Norwegian crown, connected by sailing routes that required the same navigational skill and physical endurance that had carried the Vikings to North America two centuries earlier. The Greenland colony, the westernmost outpost of European civilization, survived into the fifteenth century before contact was lost and the settlers vanished.

The Hanseatic presence at Bergen represented both an opportunity and a humiliation. German merchants brought capital, commercial expertise, and access to European markets. They also dominated Bergen's economy so thoroughly that Norwegian merchants were marginalized in their own city. The tension between dependence on foreign trade and resentment of foreign control would persist for centuries. Norway's medieval legacy was a kingdom that produced sailors, fishermen, and farmers of remarkable toughness, governed by institutions that preserved a degree of popular participation unusual in medieval Europe, but too small and too poor to maintain independence in a world where size and wealth determined sovereignty.