Mappa Mia

Most maps that explain European history leave out Norway. I can understand an English empire obsessed with its own navel, Greenwich and Westminster, its centre of the empire as the center of the world. Historians, though, I expect more from them.

Norway is the Scandinavian ridge, the division between the Baltic Sea, the North Sea and the North Atlantic, it is where the Atlantic Gulf Stream comes to shore. Norway is the way north, to the North East Passage and into the Pacific. From The North Cape and round the Varangr Peninsula we tavelled south to Novgorod and on to Istanbul. Norway is the full eastern coastline of the North Atlantic. We are the base for voyages to the North Pole, Iceland, Greenland and the Americas. We sailed west across the sea to Shetland, Orkneys, Scotland and Ireland. Some of us hailed from those places. Norway was the chosen land for people who left the British Isles, of their own will, or forced to flee.

Our ships sailed all seas when our fleet was the third largest commercial fleet in the world, in war and in peace. We even played in the colonial conquests as in The Antartic, Greenland, Svalbard and Jan Mayen.

This must be the reason why Norway does not appear on important maps of European history.

We are the Magnetic North People.