George Lakey - July 12,

I have been greatly helped by interviews with:

Eirikur Bergmann, Director of the Centre for European Studies at Bifrost University in Iceland.

Kristin Clemet, businesswoman, board chair of investment firm Norfund, formerly Conservative Party minister of education.

Jon Ivar Elstad, sociologist, Senior Researcher at Norwegian Social Research.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen, anthropology professor at University of Oslo.

Thorvaldur Gylfason, economics professor at University of Iceland.

Hken Haugli, Norwegian LGBT leader and deputy representative from city of Oslo to Parliament.

Knut Heidar, political science professor at University of Oslo.

Arne Jon Isachsen, economics professor at BI Norwegian Business School.

Jrgen Jrgensen, peace studies author and lecturer in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway.

Knut Kjeldstadli, history professor at University of Oslo, author of eight books on Norwegian history and specialist in the Labor Party.

Theo Koritzinsky, professor of education and international studies, Oslo Teachers College.

Mari Linlkken, former director of Norways Anti-Racism Center.

Kirsten Larsen Mhoja, social anthropologist, longtime resident in Christiana, Denmark.

Lars Mjset, professor of sociology and human geography at University of Oslo.

Hanna Ragnarsdottir, education professor, University of Iceland.

Dag Seierstad, a college lecturer and a leader in the Socialist Left Party.

Timothy Szlachetko, political scientist, Directorate of Minorities and Inclusion in the Norwegian government.

Hrdur Torfason, actor, leader of the Icelandic Pots and Pans revolution.

Asbjrn Wahl, elected officer of the International Transport Workers Federation and advisor to the Norwegian Union of Municipal and General Employees.

Kristian Weise, director, Cevea, an independent center-left think tank, Denmark.

Bo Wirmark, author, active in the Swedish Peace Council and World Council of Churches.

The book couldnt have happened without a strong support team: Berit M. Lakey and Liv Ingrid Lakey. Swarthmore College, particularly Director Joy Charlton and other colleagues at the Eugene M. Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, research assistants M. Schlotterbeck and Elowyn Corby, and Professor Lee Smithey; Nathan Schneider and my agent, Krista Ingebretson; and friends, Johnny Lapham, Viki Laura List, Antje Mattheus, and Daniel Hunter.

GEORGE LAKEY was the Eugene M. Lang Visiting Professor for Issues in Social Change at Swarthmore College, and is a Quaker. He has led 1,500 workshops on five continents, as well as activist projects on local, national, and international levels. He is the author of many books and articles and has written for Waging Nonviolence and Common Dreams, among other publications.

Im at the Viking Ship Museum in Bygdy, in Oslo, marveling at the open wooden shipsseventy-five feet and smallerthat braved storms and the bitter cold of the Northern seas, all without modern navigational aids.

In the 790s, Vikings swept out of Norway and across the North Sea to raid the British coast. They seized booty and killed anyone who resisted. With their light, shallow boats, which could navigate rivers as well as handle the waves of the sea, the Vikings also plundered villages upstream.

The ancient world knew the ancestors of ethnic Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes to be amazing sailors, and indeed, the very name Viking means, to go on an expedition. Between the ninth and eleventh centuries, Viking men and women ventured eastward to present-day Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, and even as far as Baghdad, and sailed west to Iceland, Greenland, and Canada.

The ancient Vikings tradeddepending on how willing the local people wereand they sometimes established farms and communities. They settled in such numbers in northern England and Scotland that their genes still show up in the local gene pools.

Which isnt to say that we should romanticize the Vikings and the scope of their achievements: these were people who raided and killed people near and far without provocation. They set farms afire, raped women, claimed as theirs the property of others.

Yet the positive aspects of those accomplishments have been a source of confidence to the moderns. Norwegians, Danes, Swedes and Icelanders have all looked to the ancient Vikings for inspiration. Today we still invoke a Viking spirit. It is part of the cultural DNA, still emboldening the Vikings descendents to try new thingseven when it means leaving the comforts of hearth and home.

Id never been outside the United States when, at twenty-one, I boarded a transatlantic steamer bound for Oslo. Id borrowed the money for a ticket from my grandfather, who recognized a lovesick young man when he saw one. I was determined to marry Berit Mathiesen, the Norwegian woman I met in Massachusetts, in a Quaker summer service project for students.

Five days after I got off the S.S. Stavangerfjord in Oslo, Berit and I were married in a red brick church with tall towers in her hometown of Skien, an old port city west of Oslo.

Berit was the first in her family to go to college, and she did it by venturing out, getting a scholarship to go to an American school. She earned her degree in Nebraska surrounded by prairie about as different from her Norwegian mountains as anything she could find.

When Berits three brothers were young, they did what many working-class boys did: took a turn at sea as crew members on Norwegian freighters. Einar, Kjell, and Leif Erik explored ports of call in Africa and Asia. (Tiny Norway is the sixth-largest owner of merchant ships, following Germany, Japan, China, Greece, and Russia.)

At the turn of the twentieth century, most Norwegians lived in economic hardship. It would have been even worse if hundreds of thousands werent emigrating, leaving the few jobs and farms to their other family members. Small farmers supplemented their meager income by fishing and logging. Industrial workers toiled for long hours in dangerous conditions for small wages and no security. The country as a whole had little in the way of natural resources: forests, waterfalls, fish. Only 3 percent of the country was even suitable for growing food.

The tiny population, about three million, was scattered over an area larger than Great Britain, and widely distributed in small valleys separated by mountains and fjords. Trying to build roads to knit the population together was daunting given all the tunnels and bridges that were necessary, and building railroads wasnt any easier. The nations internal market was tiny, and the dependence on global markets for the sale of commodities like timber and fish meant being at the mercy of rising and falling prices.

There were cultural limits as well. Aside from the small, indigenous Sami population in the far north, Norwegians were mostly white Lutherans. Cultural homogeneity tends to support economic stagnation.

Poverty was widespread in other Nordic countries, too. Sweden had significantly more natural resources and a larger population, yet it, too, hemorrhaged its white Lutheran population to other countries where prospects were better, including the United States.

Yet only seven decades later, Norway had achieved full employment, dramatically curbed poverty, built an efficient and modern infrastructure, and provided good free health care, retirement benefits, and free education for all of its citizens. That Norway achieved this before oil in the North Sea came online is remarkable, as is the fact that Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland all did the sameall of them without oil.