Both geographically and in the European imagination, Scandinavia lies on the northern margin of Europe. Havelock Ellis conveyed a characteristic nineteenth-century image when he described Norway as ‘a land having, in its most characteristic regions, a year of but one day and night – the summer a perpetual warm sunlit day filled with the aroma of trees and plants, and the rest of the year a night of darkness and horror; a land which is on the extreme northern limit of European civilisation’. The facts of Scandinavian life are harsh by European standards: Scandinavia is ‘the western part of Siberia’. It is a Siberia tempered by the Gulf Stream, and this moderating influence has made civilised existence possible in such high latitudes for centuries. Nevertheless, until very recent times the physical environment imposed rigid constraints on human activity in the far north of Europe.

Since the resources which could be exploited by primitive technology were so meagre, much of the population lived on the very edge of subsistence. In the late nineteenth century the Scandinavian countries were still among the poorest in Europe in terms of per capita income. It is only within the last hundred years that the physical constraints have been decisively overcome through the application of modern technology to every field of activity: communications, housing, agriculture and extractive and manufacturing industry. The tyrannies of climate and terrain have to a large extent been overcome, but the habits of isolation and detachment have persisted into the late twentieth century. Scandinavians still feel different from, and sometimes superior to, other Europeans; the rest of Europe still takes notice of Scandinavia only intermittently.