IN HIS ‘LOOK to Norway’ speech on 16 September 1942, given at the handover ceremony of the Norwegian naval escort ship King Haakon VII, President Franklin D. Roosevelt honoured Norway with these words:

The Europeans began to look to Norway a long time ago. The Greek merchant, astronomer and explorer, Pytheas of Massilia (Marseilles) set out for the unknown north, and came to a land without night in Summer but filled with darkness in Winter. It was the land later called Ultima Thule, the remotest of all lands, the end of the world, Norway. It reflected tales from The Odyssey of the Laestrygonians living in eternal daylight and of the Cimmérians in eternal night at the gates of the underworld. It was a creative image of the Midnight Sun and mørketid(polar night, when the Goddess of the Dawn was absent). I was born and grew up there. The Greek intelligentsia at the time did not take Pytheas too seriously, even mocking him, but held on to the fictional and magic journey to a sunny land north of the cold northern wind where the happy Hyperboreanslived. Yes, happy, because war, injustice and disease did not exist and people lived to a ripe old age; at the end they simply committed poetic suicide and jumped into the sea to make room for a new generation. Pliny the elder also spoke of this land beyond the borders of the known world where the nights disappeared at midsummer. These ideas lingered for a long time in Greek and European imagination, ignoring new facts discovered by sailors, merchants and warlords. Caesar defeated the haruders - had they come from Hordaland in Norway? The Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus also mentions a tribe living further north than Denmark.

The first nomads settling in Norway had come from the north-eastern part of continental Europe and from the coast of Kattegat. They were hunters and gatherers. Sometimes they might be accompanied by a dog but they did not keep other animals.