Norvegia

The stave churches, stavkirker, blend Viking carpentry with a Christian plan. Christianisation by Olaf II, who died at Stiklestad in 1030, gave the kingdom its patron saint and its law. The Nobel Peace Prize, awarded in Oslo since 1901, stems from Nobel's will entrusting Norway with that single category.

The Viking age, from the eighth to the eleventh century, projected Norwegians towards Iceland, Greenland and North America. Christianisation, completed in the eleventh century, unified the kingdom around a written law.

After the Black Death and the Kalmar Union, Norway passed under Danish rule for four centuries, then Swedish in 1814 — but with its own constitution, adopted at Eidsvoll on 17 May, one of the most liberal in Europe at the time.

Independent in 1905, occupied from 1940 to 1945, Norway co-founded NATO in 1949. The discovery of North Sea oil in 1969 transformed its economy and gave birth to the world's largest sovereign wealth fund. Two referendums, in 1972 and 1994, rejected accession to the Communities and then the Union; the country nonetheless takes part in the internal market via the EEA and in Schengen.