Reddit mentions: The best norway history books

My husband and I honeymooned in Norway and Sweden in December a few years back. We were coming from Washington, D.C., and the climate and darkness in Oslo/Stockholm was indeed very similar to DC (it will be darker the further north you go, of course). We had a great time! Who knew we'd end up living here a few years later... I think you'll have a wonderful visit, even if you're here when it's cold and dark. The special things to do in Norway mostly relate to the outdoors (hiking, cross-country skiing, floating around the fjords) or seeing the famous Stave churches or museums relating to Viking culture, though there are excellent art and music venues in the larger cities (you can see Munch's "The Scream" in Oslo!).

Even in the snow and rain, the fjords are gorgeous, so I would look into visits in Bergen or Stavanger. These are also two of the largest cities in Norway (and very charming), so you will have good lodging options if you stay there a bit. Oslo is a fun city with great museums, outdoor spaces and parks (we went to the Vigeland sculpture garden after it had snowed and it was gorgeous, if freaking cold), and a pretty thriving cultural scene.

Epic scenery describes most of Norway and the outdoors isn't far from anywhere you'll go. The country is fairly rural and there's a robust hiking/outdoor culture, so you can find great opportunities to hike, ski, etc. no matter where you go - I mean, you end up in the woods if you take the tram 15 minutes north in Oslo, which is the most built-up part of Norway. So any place you choose is probably going to meet your scenery requirements, both from the train window and once you arrive.

The Arctic Circle is not trivial to get to and will be really dark in Jan/Feb. If you want to go (it's during the season for the Northern Lights), note that the train will only go as far as Bodø, so you'll likely need to fly if you want to see Svalbard or Tromsø. (I mean, you could drive, but it's a 24 hour drive from Oslo to Tromsø - quite a commitment for a time-limited trip.)

Overall, it's pretty easy to travel around Norway without a car. Most towns are pretty pedestrian-friendly and there's an excellent train system linking most of the country together. Buses are affordable, there's a 130 year-old boating company (Hurtigruten) that connects the cities along the coast, etc. However, traveling between cities will take some time: Norway is about 1500 miles long and 250 miles across with mountains in between, so although the view is gorgeous, it will take a while to get from one place to another unless you fly. Both Norwegian and SAS fly between Norwegian cities, so if you're short on time or don't want to spend half a day on the train, look into flights.

I loved visiting here on our honeymoon and really enjoy living here. It's a country with a spectacular landscape, a very enthusiastic outdoor culture, and charming little towns. A few things to consider: it is a slightly expensive place to visit (on par with Manhattan in terms of food and lodging), so plan out your expenses accordingly; the quality of the food is good but Norwegian food culture is much simpler than you'll find in southern Europe (in fact, you might be surprised by the number of Italian restaurants in Oslo - I was); and basically everything is closed on Sunday, so plan accordingly.

Honestly, if your prep time is limited, I'd recommend buying a good travel book (I like the DK series) and seeing what catches your eye. Rick Steves also has good recs for visiting Norway, so check out his site. Otherwise, I read a few histories of Norway and Oslo before we came, which helped guide what I found most interesting here.

Good luck and congratulations! I'm sure you'll have a fantastic trip.

All Scandinavian countries have been in the process of decentrilization for the last 4-5 decades. Its been a slow transition from nationalized industries and companies to privatized markets with strong welfare programs. The changes in the tone of the red greens from revolutionary to just a left-wing party with regards to Danish politics, is not only a clear sign of this phenomenon, but also indicative of the fact that not only are they not revolutionary, but they're moving further and further away from it. This goes for all the other parties in Denmark, and most of Scandinavia. There is nobody who wants to de-privatize the entire market and turn it into stateless communes, nothing even close. They're all toying with different versions of welfare states, in which the grand majority of the nation's GDP will be private and allocated on free-market systems.


This has been the story of the Scandinavians over the past 40-50 years. They were always close leaders of Marx and other revolutionaries, and had been applying their ideas for a long time. I'm from Canada, and our early labour movements in the late 1800s and early 1900s benefitted from Fins migrating to Canada, who were already very radical communists. Nonetheless, over the years, with advancements in the social sciences, sciences and technology, they started to notice that Marx's criticism of capitalism was spot on! However, his solution wasn't as well formed as we thought. The path to prosperity, they learned was, letting the markets do their jobs because their way better at allocating goods and services, and then taxing the living crap out of the wealthy (and middle class), so that we see literally no homelessness or poverty (which they virtually don't when compared to their OECD counterparts). I mean, its not the craziest thing to believe that some old philosophers of revolutionaries from the 1800s might not know how to properly protect the proletariat in a world run by computers, automated machines, jets and planes that fly across the world in a few hours, wireless communication and algorithms shaping our decisions in a world 8x bigger than their's. Also, Marx was actually a fan of capitalism and read Adam Smith carefully. He himself didn't even offer a clear solution, because he believed it was a deterministic process (historical materialism) and that communism was an inevitability, not something that was necessarily going to be forced through activism. The means of production will advance and become so productive that we will have to allocate resources top-down, rather than some invisible hand. But along the path, he did believe, communist societies actually wouldn't be ideal.


I think this inkling that you have, that there is a strong revolutionary spirit among working classes across the West to bring about full-fledged communism or socialism, I think you have it overblown. There are young college educated kids who's lives are in good condition who tend to want that, but most super poor people in the West will look at you funny if you go, "Hey, what if we took every owner, took the company away from them, and made ourselves the owners!" They would look at you funny. Most people you're talking about within these parties simply have different views on how a welfare-state should be run, but they all deeply believe in markets. You can be anti-capitalist and still believe in markets, they're not mutually inclusive. There's nothing wrong with trading things, its about which types of trading/exchange/economic system leads to suffering and oppression for the working class. I think the Scandinavians found they still had a lot of hunger and oppression under nationalist/communist societies they evolved out from. They saw welfare states actually bring the goods in more effectively. And the red greens, along with most Danish parties that have been around for decades, have completely changed their tone on communism and revolution.

I would recommend you read this book, its a staple on the history of the Nordic Model, it outlines in details how the parties (and other Scandinavian ones) have evolved over the past century, - https://www.amazon.ca/Nordic-Model-Welfare-Historical-Reappraisal/dp/8763503417


And this is a good paper that condenses this books info - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20004508.2018.1429768

Side-note, this is an interesting passage -

>in a thought-provoking essay, Terry Eagleton, a visiting professor at Lancaster University, in England; the National University of Ireland; and the University of Notre Dame, explains that Marx's view of capitalism was more nuanced than simple hatred. He writes:

>"This is not to suggest for a moment that Marx considered capitalism as simply a Bad Thing, like admiring Sarah Palin or blowing tobacco smoke in your children's faces. On the contrary, he was extravagant in his praise for the class that created it, a fact that both his critics and his disciples have conveniently suppressed. No other social system in history, he wrote, had proved so revolutionary. In a mere handful of centuries, the capitalist middle classes had erased almost every trace of their feudal foes from the face of the earth. They had piled up cultural and material treasures, invented human rights, emancipated slaves, toppled autocrats, dismantled empires, fought and died for human freedom, and laid the basis for a truly global civilization. No document lavishes such florid compliments on this mighty historical achievement as The Communist Manifesto, not even The Wall Street Journal."

The book that I found most useful is Freya Aswynn's Northern Mysteries and Magick.

A great source is also Diana Paxson's Taking Up the Runes.

Love your set. Enjoy your journey!

Edit: You may also find this site useful.

Norse occultism is some cool stuff. I'm not super familiar with the structure of ritual used traditionally-or if we know enough to say what total structure was-but I've got a couple of links for you.

http://www.northernpaganism.org/shrines/freya/praising-freya/invocation-to-freya.html

http://norse-mythology.org/concepts/seidr/

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004G5YQNW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

These are what come to mind from what I've looked into before. I'll say that from my experience, any deity can be called upon and invoked using an image, candles and incense, a meditative relaxed state, and an official spoken invitation like the first link. Hope this helps.

Here are all the local Amazon links I could find:


amazon.co.uk

amazon.ca

amazon.com.au

amazon.in

amazon.com.mx

amazon.de

amazon.it

amazon.es

amazon.com.br

amazon.nl

amazon.co.jp

Beep bloop. I'm a bot to convert Amazon ebook links to local Amazon sites.
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I am sure there are a few books but the one she is in is http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sea-Dog-Bamse-World-Canine/dp/1841588490

Bamse actually allowed my grandad to strike up his very first conversation with my granny :) she worked in Woolworths at the time and my grandad was aboard the NordhavII ship. He came into her shop with Bamse and my granny was right over there to see Bamse and he jumped at this chance to talk to her and eventually ask her out!

Apparently, he's reading Viking Myths and Sagas. Excellent read, though.

Because of Vidkun Quislings treason against Norway during the second World War, Vidkun is still barely used as a first name in Norway.

Today, there's 14 citizens in Norway with the name (Source, Statistics Norway), and according to the public tax lists there are only eight people born after the war that has the name.

Quisling is still a word for for traitor in Norway (it was used internationally earlier, but not certain how normal it is now).

Edit: Double checked the rules, switched my Wikipedia link.

He's unique because we have lots of information on his abusive upbringing and that the abuse came from his mother. He somehow also stayed with his mother after all of that.

She exposed him to her sexuality and sexualised him when he was very young ( ~ 4 years old ). She constantly told him she wished he was dead and considered him an adult violent person despite being very young. This actually started when he was still being breastfed. Some psychologists have said that she suffered from borderline personality disorder.

There are many indicators that Anders was suffering from severe mental problems and his father launched a bid to take custody from his mother which ultimately failed.

>After Breivik's father Jens Breivik lost a child custody case with Ms Behring, social workers recommended that the boy nonetheless be removed from his mother to prevent "more severe psychopathology" from developing, a request that was ignored.

He was a failure in a prosperous country whose own mother hated him.

A good book.

edit: I gotta add, I think the people replying are just butthurt right wing terrorism isn't a daily occurrence.