The first Oslo
Founded around 1040 at the mouth of the Alna, below the Ekeberg ridge — a kilometre and a half east of the modern centre. Traditionally credited to Harald Hardrada, though the archaeology suggests a settlement a little earlier.
A bishopric around 1070. The capital under Håkon V from 1299, who built Akershus Fortress.
Then the Black Death in 1349, which killed perhaps half to two-thirds of Norway’s population, and union with Denmark from 1380 — which lasted 434 years.
The fire
Oslo burned repeatedly. The fire of 1624 finished it.
Christian IV moved the city west under the fortress guns, laid it out on a grid, ordered it built in brick and stone, and named it Christiania after himself.
The medieval site was abandoned and its ruins are still there.
The name Oslo was restored in 1925.
1814 and 1905
Denmark backed Napoleon and lost Norway to Sweden under the Treaty of Kiel. Norway refused, wrote a constitution at Eidsvoll and adopted it on 17 May 1814 — still the national day.
The compromise was a personal union with Sweden, which lasted until 1905, when it was dissolved peacefully after a referendum that went 368,208 to 184.
Norway then voted to remain a monarchy and imported a Danish prince as Haakon VII. Women got the vote in 1913.
The occupation
Germany invaded on 9 April 1940. At Oscarsborg, an obsolete fort with fifty-year-old guns, Colonel Birger Eriksen fired without orders and sank the cruiser Blücher.
The hours that bought let the King, government and gold reserves escape. Norway had a legitimate government in exile rather than a surrender, and Haakon VII was able to refuse to appoint Quisling.
The five years cost around 770 of Norway’s Jewish citizens, of whom fewer than forty survived, thousands of Soviet prisoners of war, and the burning of Finnmark in 1944. The Resistance Museum covers it.
Quisling was executed at Akershus in October 1945.
The oil
Ekofisk was confirmed on 23 December 1969.
Norway created a state company, taxed petroleum profits at around 78 per cent, and — decisively — set up the oil fund in 1990 and a fiscal rule in 2001 limiting government to spending only the fund’s expected return.
The fund is now the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. Almost everything built in Oslo since — the tunnels, the Opera House in 2008, MUNCH in 2021, the National Museum in 2022 — is downstream of it.
Norway has voted against joining the EU twice, in 1972 and 1994.
22 July 2011
A Norwegian far-right terrorist bombed the government quarter and then shot dead sixty-nine people, most of them teenagers, at a Labour youth camp on Utøya. Seventy-seven died in total.
The 22 July Centre is the country’s account of it.
The longer version is The City That Oil Built, and the dated version is the timeline.