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Norway has been called the Scotland of Scandinavia, and its people share the Highlander's hardihood, serenity and national pride. After 91 years of enforced "union" with Sweden, Norwegians won their independence in 1905 and actually elected their King, the late Haakon VI, who led its valiant wartime resistance movement. Ruled for 29 years by the Labor Party, Norway has an economy-model welfare state known as the Golden Mean that costs 5.5% of national income, v. 8.2% in Sweden.
Scandinavia's smallest, most thinly settled population (3,600,000) is in Norway, a beautiful land that is 75% lakes, mountains and glaciers. To sustain its people, Norway exports lumber products, aluminum and 90% of the catch from rich fishing grounds such as the Lofoten Islands. But the nation's most vital resource is its merchant fleet. With 2,833 freighters in operation, Norway has more tonnage afloat than the U.S. One man who controls much of Norway's shipping is Niels Onstad, who lives in a spacious white mansion outside Oslo with his wife, onetime Skating Star Sonja Henie. Many of Norway's ships are local inventions such as "parcel" tankers, which can carry up to 40 different liquids simultaneously.
Norwegians are the most democratic and bourgeois of northerners, regard ostentation as a cardinal sin. They are also Scandinavia's most proficient athletes; everyone from five to 90 skis, swims and hikes. And many of them have summer cottages on the shores of the endless fjords; often businessmen commute to work by hydrofoil. Though 96% of the population is nominally Lutheran, the church plays little part in the nation's life. Says one churchman: "We are suffused with a pale benevolence instead of the antagonism we used to know."
Next to drunkenness, the national vice, Norway's biggest problem is that it has too many languages. Riksmal, of Danish origin, is spoken by educated townsfolk; nationalists have promoted an invented "Norwegian" tongue called Landsmal, based on rural speech. Both Riksmal and Landsmal are now official languages and taught in school. "If a man knows eight languages," they say, "seven of them are Norwegian."
Finland, a Swedish colony for 650 years, became a grand duchy of Russia in 1809, prompting the ringing plea: "Swedes we are no longer. Russians we can never be. Therefore we must be come Finns." Finland finally proclaimed its independence in 1917, has been Finnish ever since. An earthy, engaging, moody people who have fought war after war, and always started again from the ruins, they regard sisu, plain guts, as the highest virtue. For, say Finns, "Whatever happens, we will be on the wrong side."
On the losing side against the Red army in World War II, the Finns in 1944 were forced to pay an exorbitant reparations bill: 17,680 square miles of territory and $300 million worth of goods, including industrial products that they had no means of producing. It took know-how as well as sisu, but they did it. The Russians, who had also occupied the naval stronghold of Porkkala just west of Helsinki, finally withdrew in 1956.