Looking for adventure? Look no further than Canada’s beautifully diverse national parks. No matter the season, there’s a park that will offer not only stunning scenery, but also unique experiences — from luxurious camping to snowshoeing.

Spring is the perfect time to get outside and explore. And there’s no better place to do it than at one of Canada’s National Parks. From trails worth exploring to fresh flowers budding, here are five parks to visit as the weather warms up.

Alberta: Elk Island National Park
Elk Island Park was created in 1906, becoming Canada’s first wildlife sanctuary. In 1913, Canada’s Dominion Parks Service established Elk Island as Canada’s 6th and only entirely-fenced national park.

Just 40 minutes from Edmonton, Elk Island National Park is the perfect escape from the city hustle. The big draw here? Bison and elk of course! There’s also a festival and geocaching if you’re looking for something lively, as well as Parks Canada classics like hiking, camping, kayaking, sailing, and more.

Ontario: Point Pelee National Park
Located about 50 kilometres south-east of Windsor, Ontario, Point Pelee National Park of Canada is one of the country’s smallest national parks, and yet this tiny green oasis attracts approximately 300,000 visitors each year.

More south than Northern California, Point Pelee is just as stunning (in our humble opinion). A lush, forested oasis, this park is perfect for a getaway. Head into the greenery during the Festival of Birds, where visitors can witness the migration of several species of birds. Or, set out on a wildflower walk, where you can explore the colors of the wildflowers that bloom every spring. Looking for something low-key? Have a picnic, paddle the wetlands, or explore the trails.

Saskatchewan: Prince Albert National Park
To see one of Canada’s few remaining populations of free ranging plains bison within their historic range, follow the road signs to the west side of Prince Albert National Park.

Just under three hours outside of Saskatoon, you’ll be transported to stunning wilderness in Prince Albert National Park. Tucked in a boreal forest, become one with nature as you’re surrounded by towering trees, free-ranging plains bison, and all sorts of other wildlife. In the park, you can lounge on the beach (when the weather heats up), canoe, cycle, and even explore the town of Waskesiu within the park itself.

Newfoundland and Labrador: Torngat Mountains National Park
From the Inuktitut word Torngait, meaning “place of spirits,” the Torngat Mountains have been home to Inuit and their predecessors for thousands of years.

Rugged wilderness and breathtaking vistas are what you’ll find in this Newfoundland and Labrador park. Because this park is fairly remote, the sprawling fields and jagged mountains seem untouched. In the spring, popular activities are camping and hiking, and there are plenty of spots to do both. Other top contenders are photography and wildlife watching, which you’ll find no shortage of through the expanse of this almost 10,360-square-kilometre park. Just remember to register when entering the park so the rangers can keep track of those exploring.

Northwest Territories: Aulavik National Park
Aulavik is considered a polar desert. The total annual precipitation for the park is approximately 300 mm, one third of which falls as rain during the summer.

Located on Banks Island in the Northwest Territories, this rugged and fairly remote park is home to a variety of landscapes that are sure to please any adventurer or photographer. Picture fertile valleys, polar desert, rocky coastline, and badlands. You can hike, camp, and even canoe or kayak (though you’ll need to access the park by air to go, or book with an outfitter). Keep your eyes peeled for all sorts of unique Northern nature and wildlife too, like the Arctic fox, as well as archeological artifacts.

Canada is a big place, but it’s far from empty. In fact, it’s filled to the brim with incredible natural wonders that will leave any lover of the outdoors awe-struck, and you don’t have to fly to the far corners of the country to enjoy them. There are amazing wonders within close proximity to Canada’s biggest cities.

Here’s a look at a handful of Canadian natural wonders you can experience within two hours of a major urban centre.

Waterfalls
Less than a two-hour drive from Toronto sits Canada’s most renowned natural wonder: Niagara Falls. You might think that if you’ve seen it once, you’ve seen it all, but the sound of the water as you approach it, the mist you feel on your face as you look up 50m at a torrent of blue and white, and the sheer power of the falls that you can feel to your bones… those things never really get old. Plus, the district of Niagara Falls is a city in its own right, full of attractions, entertainment, and terrific dining. If you’re looking to experience a Canadian natural wonder, this is the one.

Many people are surprised to discover that a waterfall one and a half times higher than Niagara Falls sits just minutes from Quebec City. At 83m, the Montmorency Falls are a sight to behold, both from within the city, and up close and personal in the Montmorency Falls Park (Parc de la Chute-Montmorency in French). Hang out near the base or ride the gondola up to the top for a spectacular view. More adventurous visitors might choose to hike one of the three Via Ferrata trails, stopping at viewpoints along the way for some Instagram-worthy shots, or even zip line across the falls.

Then there’s Shannon Falls, a beautiful waterfall less than an hour’s drive from Vancouver. Located in the provincial park of the same name, the falls originate 300m above sea level and steadily tumble down between granite cliffs. Located just off the picturesque Sea to Sky Highway, this waterfall is incredibly accessible and well worth the quick drive from the city.

Northern Lights
Canada offers some of the best northern lights viewing in the entire world, and you often don’t have to leave the city to enjoy it.

The Northwest Territories provides some of, if not THE best aurora borealis viewing in the world. To see the bright reds, blues, greens, and yellows dance across the night sky, all you have to do is take a look through your hotel window in capital city Yellowknife—known as the “Aurora Capital of North America.” Within the city, you could also experience the Northern Lights by dog sled or while staying in a comfortable tipi.

The Yukon capital of Whitehorse is also a fantastic place to see this natural wonder in action. This city often finds itself underneath coloured skies. Only 20 minutes outside of the city, you can leave the lights behind and enjoy the aurora surrounded by nature before sleeping in a prospector-style tent.

If you can’t make it up to Canada’s territories, the Northern Lights have also been known to make a rare appearance in Edmonton, at the Torrance Barrens Dark Sky Preserve a couple of hours north of Toronto, and even in Prince Edward Island National Park half an hour north of the capital city Charlottetown.

Beaches
Often called the best beach in Canada, Singing Sands in Basin Head Provincial Park, just 75 minutes from Charlottetown, is a nine-mile white sand beach with some of the warmest waters in the province. In fact, the beach is said to have some of the warmest waters north of Florida, occasionally exceeding 21 degrees. The beach’s strange name is a result of its fine sand, which squeaks as your feet press into it—the result of a high concentration of silica and quartz. There are 23 beaches on Prince Edward Island, and all of them are within a couple of hours of one another, so you can enjoy a handful of these natural wonders in a day.

Forget near the city—how about directly within it! Vancouver has nine beautiful beaches within its boundaries, so you never have to stray far from your hotel to enjoy soft sand beneath your feet. In fact, National Geographic named Vancouver one of the 10 best beach cities in the world. The standout of the bunch is probably Wreck Beach, an 8-kilometre, clothing-optional beach near the campus of the University of British Columbia. If you prefer to keep your kit on, then English Bay with its volleyball courts, diving platform, and peerless people watching in the heart of the city’s West End neighbourhood comes a close second.

You only need to travel 10 minutes from the city of Toronto to enter a completely different, beachy world. Hop on a ferry and journey to Toronto Island, and their three beautiful beaches. Lay down your towel and enjoy the best of nature with beautiful views of the city.

Finally, about an hour north-east of Winnipeg, Manitoba, sits Grand Beach, often named one of the best beaches in Canada. There, on the shores of Lake Winnipeg, you’ll find dunes reaching nearly 12m in height, and ample opportunities for sunbathing and swimming.

Other natural wonders
Every single year, thousands upon thousands of skiers and snowboarders take to the mountains of Whistler to enjoy some of the best snow conditions anywhere. In the summer, these mountains become a world-class mountain biking and hiking destination. Throw in the area’s incredible hot springs, lakes, and rivers, and it isn’t hard to figure why people flock to this village 90 minutes north of Vancouver to immerse themselves in nature.

While on the topic of mountains, the Rocky Mountains are undoubtedly a natural wonder, and they can be enjoyed after just a short, 90-minute drive from Calgary. That quick jaunt will bring you into the unmatched Banff National Park, home to glaciers, forests, rivers, valleys, and of course, mountains, all of which will dazzle you with their scale and beauty. It’s in this park that you’ll find the picturesque Lake Louise, with its jaw-dropping turquoise blue waters set perfectly in front of the Victoria Glacier. Then there’s the beautiful Moraine Lake, equally photo-worthy and a great place for a hike or paddle.

About two hours from Calgary in the other direction is Dinosaur Provincial Park, one of the biggest dinosaur graveyards in the world. Fossils of nearly 500 species of animals and a remarkable 40 dinosaurs have been found amidst the park’s spires, pinnacles, and other formations.

Across the country, both Nova Scotia and New Brunswick host an internationally-known natural wonder: the Bay of Fundy. Home to the highest tides in the world, over 100 billion tonnes of seawater enter and leave the Bay twice every single day. The resulting 12m change in water level has shaped the unique landscape of the coastline and entire region, but is displayed most impressively at the unique Hopewell Rocks—only 30 minutes from Moncton, the second biggest city in New Brunswick.

Last but not least is Canada’s own tiny little Dead Sea, Little Manitou Lake. Located just over an hour’s drive from Saskatoon, this unique lake is filled with briny water that apparently possesses natural skin and body care properties. These properties take their origins in the concentrations of mineral salts, magnesium, silica, potassium, and other minerals found in the water. Go for a float to relax and rejuvenate your body.

Ready to recharge? Consider a holiday in Canada, a vast and varied country, filled with places of immense beauty, quiet, and all the room you need to unplug and rejuvenate your mind, body, and soul.

Try sitting on the deck of a century-old home in coastal Newfoundland, a glass of Screech rum in hand, perhaps watching an iceberg floating slowly just off shore. Or try a hot tub with a view of the snow-capped Canadian Rockies, a jade-green lake shimmering in the distance. Sound good? We’re just getting started. Here are more of Canada’s most incredible places to relax and unwind.

Cabana Desolation Eco Resort, British Columbia
On a quiet, uninhabited island in the heart of Desolation Sound off British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast, Cabana Desolation Eco Resort is surrounded by warm ocean teeming with marine life and imposing Coast mountains. This off-grid resort uses the latest in conservation techniques to preserve the unspoiled beauty of Kinghorn Island, including environmentally sensitive systems for water, renewable energy, solar powered lighting, sustainably harvested and recycled building materials, and locally grown and harvested foods.

A house in Bonavista and Cape Race Adventures, Newfoundland and Labrador
A place of soul-stirring beauty and foot-tapping Celtic music, Newfoundland and Labrador is special. Even if you’re looking for some time to yourself, you’ll soon discover how much you enjoy the big-hearted locals. And that’s where Cape Race Adventures comes in, connecting you with folks who can invite you to an authentic “kitchen party” or show you the best place to watch puffins perched atop stunning cliffs. Take up residence in a 100-year-old salt-box house on the windswept Bonavista Peninsula and wait for a friendly knock on the door.

Lake O’Hara Lodge, British Columbia and Alberta
Beloved Lake O’Hara Lodge isn’t the fanciest backcountry accommodation on the British Columbia side of the Canadian Rockies. But it is super-friendly, laidback, relatively accessible, and the setting is just spectacular. Not too far from Lake Louise, Lake O’Hara is so popular that regulars from around the world return year after year to hike or ski the trails, savour the outdoor grandeur, and play in or on the lake, depending on the season. Guides come with the deal, and visitors plan their adventures over a hearty breakfast.

Fairmont Le Château Montebello, Quebec
It may be the “world’s largest log cabin,” but Fairmont Le Château Montebello really is about finding sanctuary in an elegant, exclusive setting. Located in Montebello, Quebec, it’s a rustic-luxe resort on the Ottawa River, formerly a private 1930s club that has played host to numerous VIPs and world power brokers. Just rest and spa, or do as much or as little as you like. There’s certainly no need to leave the 65,000-acre property, which also happens to be a wildlife refuge. Onsite you’ll find a golf course, four dining options, three lounges, a health club with indoor and outdoor pools, and so many activities to keep you relaxed.

Lazy Bear Lodge, Manitoba
Head to Lazy Bear Lodge (of Lazy Bear Lodge Expeditions), located right in the town of Churchill. This may look like your classic log cabin, but there is nothing standard here. Built over 10 years by local resident Wally Daudrich, the hotel boasts windows recycled from an 1800s Hudson Bay Trading Post and the floor is recycled Douglas fir from a 1920 Canadian National Railway warehouse. Named as one of National Geographic Traveler’s top hotels, the lodge is your home base for polar bear tours and beluga whale viewing.

White Point Beach Resort, Nova Scotia
Sometimes it’s hard to have fun if your holiday is breaking the bank. Relax, and head to White Point Beach Resort on Nova Scotia’s south shore, a budget-friendly oceanfront resort near Halifax. The place looks like a postcard for summertime: a red-roofed 1920s pavilion with old-style charm on a white crescent beach right on the Atlantic. Stay in rustic cottages or the main lodge and join the nightly beach bonfire, or the occasional mussel bake. Stroll the long, sandy beach looking for the cute resident bunnies and take a surfing lesson. Or just sit and listen to the waves lap the shore — Nova Scotia-style therapy.

Langdon Hall, Ontario
Add a bit of the romantic to your relaxing getaway at Langdon Hall Country House Hotel and Spa, a prestigious Relais & Château property, also voted top in Canada by Condé Nast Traveler readers. With manicured grounds, elegant sitting rooms, walking trails, croquet, tennis, and a restaurant garden, the Georgian manor in Cambridge, Ontario is ready to cater to your any indulgence. Massage, food, fireside R&R — it’s all here. The six-course tasting menu features expert wine pairings and unexpected, but delicious desserts. Free wine tastings and cooking demos are on offer, too, if you decide to leave the cushy armchair by the crackling fire.

Are you long overdue for a relaxing holiday? Make it a Canadian holiday.

Aurora Borealis
One of the most remarkable features of Finland is light. When the endless sunshine of summer gives way to dark winter, the Northern Lights appear like magic and lighten up the sky.

The further north you go, the greater the chances of spotting the Aurora Borealis – in Finnish Lapland they can appear on 200 nights a year. In Helsinki and the south, the Aurorae can be seen on roughly 20 nights a winter, away from city lights.

Seeing the Northern Lights requires sufficient darkness and clear skies, which makes late autumn, the winter and early spring (September to March) the most favourable times. The best time of day is an hour or two before and after midnight. The display might last 20 seconds or go on for hours.

How do the Northern Lights come about? Sami legend says a Fox runs across the Arctic fells and lights up the sky with sparks flying from its tail, whirling up the snow. The modern Finnish term “revontulet”, the fox’s fires, derives from this myth.

A scientist’s explanation to the phenomenon would be something like “the solar wind sends charged particles towards the Earth, and upon colliding with its atmosphere they produce energy given off as light”. We prefer the Sami myth.

 

Midnight Sun
The white summer nights are perhaps Finland’s most iconic natural phenomena. The nighttime sun is at its strongest during the months of June and July but the further north you go, the longer and higher the sun stays above the horizon. In the very northernmost parts you can experience a full Midnight Sun from May to August.

In the northernmost parts of Finnish Lapland, the sun stays above the horizon for over 70 consecutive days.

Although the full Midnight Sun only shines above the Arctic Circle, nights are white all over the country. Late at night, the sun briefly dips beyond the horizon before rising again, blurring the boundaries between fading night and dawning day.

 

Finnish sauna
Sauna forms a great part of our country’s heritage and culture. It is estimated that there are over two million saunas in Finland. For a population of 5.3 million, this equals to an average of one per household – there’s even one inside parliament.

There are many traditions and practices concerning the sauna experience, but the most important one for the Finns is to relax, purifying both body and mind.

Did you know the word “sauna” is Finnish? Whether an electric sauna in a modern business environment or an old-fashioned wood-burning sauna by a lakeside cottage, a sauna is always near you.

 

Clean lakes – lots of them!
Finland is often called the Land of a Thousand Lakes. A modest name, considering that there are, in fact, 188 000 lakes in the country. As many of these lakes are very large in size, a great part of Finland is covered in water – making Finland distinguishably different from other European countries.

From the metropolitan area around Helsinki all the way up to the great Lake Inari in Lapland, Finland is filled with oases of the clean blue. Where Inari is known for its deep and crystal clear waters, Lake Saimaa’s ringed seal, one of the most endangered species in the world, is the country’s largest lake’s most memorable attraction.

A lakeside cottage is an essential part of Finnish summer and most summer activities revolve around water, such as swimming and going to the sauna, fishing, canoeing, rowing and sailing.

 

Wild nature
Finland is a country of vast green forests, beautiful Baltic Sea islands, windswept arctic fells and thousands of blue lakes. These untouched and beautiful landscapes provide habitat for thousands of wild animals and birds – many of which can be seen on arranged wildlife excursions and bird watching sanctuaries.

The King of the Finnish Forest – Finland’s vast forests are home to an estimated 1,500 brown bears. Though they may roam anywhere in mainland Finland, bears usually try hard to avoid people. However, on the bear-watching trips run between April and September in several localities in Finland’s Wild East sightings can be almost guaranteed.

In Finland you can find the world’s rarest seal, the Saimaa ringed seal. These inland seals have adapted to their freshwater home since they were cut off from the sea in Lake Saimaa – Finland’s largest lake – after the Ice Age. They are found only in Lake Saimaa. Thanks to conservation measures their numbers have recently risen to over 300, but they are still seriously endangered.

 

Ski resorts and routes
There are around 75 ski resorts in Finland, most of them small spots near cities and villages. The big ones, however, lie in the fells of Lapland and offer something very different from the usual European ski resorts. The surrounding landscapes are unspoilt, blanketed with pure snow from December to April. In the early winter the slopes are lit, later on in the spring the sun shines until very late in the evening.

The round fells of Finland’s main ski area, Lapland, offer varying terrain for skiers and snowboarders of all skill levels. The largest ski resorts are all found in Lapland with a skiing season lasting as long as six months – the last snow usually melting in early May.

The ski centres also offer activities like husky and reindeer rides, snowmobiling, snowshoeing and ice-fishing.

 

Finnish design
Finland is a true design nation. Some of the world’s most imitated and admired designers and architects come from Finland. From Eero Aarnio’s Ball Chair as James Bond’s favorite seat to Marimekko Poppies worn by Jackie O, Finland has been setting trends for decades. As these Finnish design icons are still worshipped worldwide, a whole new generation of innovative young designers are also taking hold.

Yet, Finnish design is more than what meets the eye – it is a way of being, delicately woven into everyday life and culture.

Finns take inspiration from nature and spin it into beloved objects, architecture and a blueprint for a way to live. The very essence of Finnish design is in its ability to take the natural world and seamlessly weave it into everyday life.

 

The Real Santa Claus
Everyone knows that Santa – the one and only – comes from Finland. Although the exact location of his private retreat in Korvatunturi, Lapland, is unknown, his official hometown is Rovaniemi, where he greets visitors all year round.

Santa Claus may only visit children in their homes once a year, but he is also delighted to welcome you into his own home and show you around his office. You might meet Rudolph the Reindeer too!

One of Santa’s most important jobs is reading letters, and the Arctic Circle Post Office receives more than half a million of them every year from all over the world. Santa replies to each one of them, as long as you include a clearly written address!

Respect, treasure, enjoy, love. Use these words as your mantra when you are in Finland and you will enrich your visit and help to preserve this beautiful country. Finland’s untouched and pristine nature is at the core of Finnish life and its sanctity is paramount. Living sustainably and in harmony with the environment is deep-rooted here and is an essential element of responsible travel. This includes not only a respect for nature and wildlife, but also people and their age-old customs

Sustainable tourism is committed to having a positive impact on nature, society and the economy, leaving a low ecological footprint and honouring local cultures. Keep nature clean by choosing environmentally-friendly options in modes of travel, and recycle, reuse and reduce your overall consumption and waste. Choose locally- produced and ethically-made food and products, and be respectful of local communities and traditions.

This section introduces you to the Finnish way of living ethically and sustainably. It will guide you to make all the best choices as an enlightened traveller in Finland.

By choosing Sustainable Travel Finland labelled provider, we know you respect and treasure the Finnish nature, its inhabitants and culture during your visit.

SLOW TRAVEL
Want to discover authentic Finland? Then we advise you to take your time and slow down. To get a true sense of place and people, one needs time.

Choose train over car if you can and explore your local surroundings on foot or by bike. All cities and most small towns have bikes for rent –Helsinki’s bike rental system is the most used by citizens in all of Europe! Traveling by bike is by far the best way to experience Finland, whether you are heading to the fells of Lapland, along the scenic routes of coastal Finland or exploring Lakeland’s beautiful waterways from the shore. And because Finns are so connected to nature, there is almost certainly a trail system nearby where you can walk, cycle or run and ski in winter.

Food – local, fresh, wild and pure
Finns take their food very seriously. As a nation, we grow up with a deep knowledge of the natural world and many Finns know how to identify most edible plants, berries and mushrooms found in nature. Fishing, hunting and foraging are still a natural part of the Finnish lifestyle and form the very basics of the modern food culture too. Aromatic, nutrient-rich, seasonal and very clean – that about sums up Finland’s unique, arctic wild food.

SLOW SHOPPING, GREEN DESIGN
Vintage, recycled, organic, fairtrade, home-made…the ethical list of “slow” products and fashion is long. Green design, on the other hand, can include anything from architecture to furniture – made from renewable sources, ethically. Finland is a leader in both slow fashion and slow design. Or what do you think of the fact that Helsinki Fashion Week 2018 was 100% sustainable?

Organic, fairtrade, green, ethical…oh yes, please!
By choosing products with an eco-label and traveling to destinations that take environmental protection seriously, you offset some of the burden traveling abroad puts on the planet.

10 SUSTAINABLE TRAVEL TIPS IN FINLAND
Are you planning to visit Finland but are worried about the environmental impacts of your travel? Yes, it is true that we are located off the beaten path – Finland is not the easiest location to reach by ecological travel options, like train. To get to Finland, air or boat travel is often necessary which will bump up your carbon footprint. But keep calm and read onwards: there are other ways to make your travel more eco-friendly and sustainable. Here are 10 effective tips that you can easily do before and during your trip. Enjoy your (green) stay in Finland!

1. TRAVEL LIGHTER
Before traveling to Finland, it is good to take a look of the weather forecast. We have four unique seasons and regions, and the temperature can change a lot even during one week. The weather is also often quite different between the south of Finland and Lapland. There is over 1100 kilometers between Helsinki and Inari – almost the same distance as going from Paris to Barcelona or Florence.

Layers of clothing are the best way to go. With layers, you can wear many things you already own, like warm sweaters. And if the weather gets warmer, simply take off a layer. This way you can also avoid buying a whole new wardrobe just for a single trip.

Before you fly, we recommend taking a look at your suitcase and thinking about ways to avoid packing unnecessary things. Lightweight luggage means that the airplane consumes less fuel – this is highly important in lowering carbon dioxide emissions. Many travel operators in Finland offer high-quality clothing and equipment for rent during winter time, such as skis, snow shoes and skates.

2. TRAVEL OUTSIDE PEAK SEASONS AND STAY LONGER
Think outside the box – would you be able to travel outside the peak season and perhaps stay a little longer since you made the trip all the way up to Finland? There’s more space to yourself, more calm, more relaxation. That’s food for thought!

Lapland is a very popular tourist destination during winter but it sure has a lot of magic – and often less visitors – during the other seasons as well. Spring and autumn are some of the best times to see the Northern Lights. Summer is the time of white nights, a phenomena comparable to the aurora.

When it comes to the rest of Finland, nature is usually at its best during summer, although all seasons have their perks. We suggest taking in the vivid greens of spring, admiring the inspiring autumn colors, or trying a warm sauna during the cold winter. There are things to experience in Finland all year round.

3. USE PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION
Alright, you have arrived – fantastic! In Finland, it is effortless and affordable to use our public transport systems. Most cities in Finland are well-connected by bus and train routes. Trains in Finland are operated by state-owned VR, well-known for the iconic rock statues in front of the Helsinki Central Train Station.

If you are in our capital, try the beautiful single-lined metro – you can’t get lost. In the older metro stations, the wooden benches were designed by famed Finnish designer Yrjö Kukkapuro already in 1979. Talk about sustainable design! There is also a vast tram system in Helsinki, great for sightseeing. The city of Tampere will also have its own trams soon.

The trains in Finland and the Helsinki metro use renewable energy, so you can be truly green when traveling with them.

Walking is a also great way to get to know a new city and in Finland the sidewalks go everywhere. Consider also renting a bicycle or even an electric scooter during the summer time – and let the soft summer breeze flow through your hair. After all, Finland has some of the purest air in the world.

4. RESPECT LOCALS
It is always considerate to respect the local residents and their customs while traveling. The easiest way to show your respect in Finland is to smile. We Finns are sometimes considered a little reserved but we might smile back. And if we don’t, don’t worry – your gesture warms our hearts regardless.

Using the word “kiitos”, which means thank you, and “moi” which means hello, will also go a long way.

If you want to take pictures of us Finns, both young and old, please remember to ask for a permission first.

5. GET TO KNOW LOCAL FOOD, DESIGN AND HANDICRAFTS
Nowadays we live in a world that is full of material things, overflowing in abundance. When there too much of something, it often loses meaning.

We suggest falling in love with two phrases beginning with L: “less is more” and “local”! Think food, design and handmade products. They’re more eco-friendly and there’s usually a heart-warming story behind the products.

There are lots of skilled craftspeople in Finland who are eager to acquaint you with authentic memories from our country, such as handmade jewellery and wooden items. You can also find many places around the country, especially in the Helsinki region, that sell clothes designed or made in Finland.

If you’re looking for local treats to take home, take a trip to a small Finnish winery making sweet wine of berries or apples, or visit a ironwork village or a wooden town, where local treats are plentiful.

6. RIGHT (AND RESPONSIBILITY) TO ROAM AS EVERYMAN AND WOMAN
In Finland, we have a very special thing called Everyman’s Rights (“jokamiehen oikeudet” in Finnish). They are called rights but in fact they also include responsibilities.

You can, for example, pick berries and mushrooms from forests for free. You don’t have to ask for a permission from anyone. Also you are allowed to spend a night in nature in a tent, ski and walk in forests as well as swim in lakes and the sea. But do bear in mind – no pun intended! – that nature should always be left as you found it. Clean, pristine and respected. National parks may have some restrictions, so please read the signs in the parks to be sure.

Remember not to set up your tent too close to someone’s garden, or walk in private gardens and fields. Don’t leave any rubbish to nature, always bring them back with you to the nearest rubbish pins. Disturbing animals or birds is naturally a no-no. Also, you should leave trees, moss and lichen undamaged.

In this way, we leave our beautiful nature for all to enjoy.

7. RECYCLE
We Finns have a healthy obsession with nature and eco-friendly life – and recycling! We want to be the best circular-economy country in the world and many cities are preparing for a carbon-neutral life during the next twenty years.

What’s the best way to recycle when you are visiting Finland? If an urgent need to buy a plastic bottle arises, remember to take it back to the store to a recycling machine after it’s empty. You will get money back in the form of a bottle deposit.

Most hotels have an eco-friendly policy for using towels – re-using your towel will save energy as it doesn’t have to be washed as often. You can also challenge your hotel and ask whether they are recycling your waste. Some of them may already, some are still in the midst of thinking. Encourage them to get to work!

8. DRINK TAP WATER
During your trip in Finland, you will probably hear at least once that we have the best tap water in the world. We actually do and it’s more pure than bottled water! So, we suggest forgetting about the single-use plastic bottles and filling your own bottle with clean water straight from the tap. It’s clean, refreshing – and by using your own bottle, it will help keep your carbon footprint down. Restaurants also serve tap water so be sure to order “still”.

9. TRY VEGETARIAN FOOD
The Finnish vegetarian food industry is booming! There are many options to replace your animal proteins with vegetarian ones. If you have the possibility to cook at your accommodation, visit almost any grocery store and ask for “Härkis” (a shredded protein made of broad bean) or “Nyhtökaura” (pulled oats). Fun words and great products to substitute meat, for example, in a sauce. For a new way of adding milk to your morning coffee, try Kaslink’s oat milk.

Almost every restaurant in Finland has a vegetarian, or even vegan, options so when dining out you can also go for the greener option.

1O. REMEMBER TO ENJOY LIFE, LIKE THE FINNS DO!
As you might have guessed already, nature is very important to us Finns. Most of us spend time in nature many times a week. Water and green areas are always surrounding us, even in cities. That’s one of the things that makes us the happiest nation in the world.

While you are here, try the Finnish way of life and connect with nature. Mute your phone. Take a walk. Visit a park. Go to a forest. Hug a tree. Swim in a lake. Take a deep breath of fresh air and walk slowly. Listen to what nature is telling you. Forget about everything else for a moment try what it feels to be like a Finn. Trust us, it’s good for the mind and the body.

Travelling to Utö by car and boat from Helsinki takes just as long as flying to New York from Helsinki, even though the distance is a mere fraction of a trip to the United States. Yet many Finns prefer to visit the island of Utö, especially during the winter or in the spring and autumn to watch the migration of the birds.

Koli in northern Karelia is Finland’s most well-known national landscape. Imagine the blue (white in winter) of Lake Pielisjärvi, speckled with its many islands and the rocky summit of the Ukko-Koli Mountain soaring above you. This is surrounded by beautiful hills covered with tall candle-shaped spruce trees. Over 100 years ago, Finnish artists and nature enthusiasts, such as classical composer Jean Sibelius, writer Juhani Aho and painter Eero Järnefelt, began elevating Koli’s status as an important national landscape.

PYHÄ-LUOSTO NATIONAL PARK
From the highest peak in the Pyhä mountains, the sky was a beautiful shade of pink one December afternoon. The last rays of light hit the peak of the Luosto Mountain 25 kilometres away. The fog descended into the valley and made the scenery dreamlike, almost like a painting. The snow-covered birch trees created the frames of the photographs.

ÅLAND
I had spent a weekend in November in Åland and now it was time to go home. I hopped on board a ship in Mariehamn and began the 5-6 hour trip towards Turku. In the afternoon around 4 pm, I went out on deck and watched the scenery of the Baltic Sea as we floated by. Windmills of a rugged yellow stood against the background of the sky on the rocky islets.

UTÖ ISLAND IN THE FINNISH ARCHIPELAGO
The island of Utö is the southernmost inhabited island in Finland. The free ferry takes five hours to reach this small island in the Baltic Sea. Utö is popular in both the winter, when it is freezing cold, and during the migration time of the birds in the spring and autumn. The photo of the ice and movement of the waves near the shore was taken late in the afternoon on a cold January day.

The rocky island is just over one square kilometre in size and only about 50 people live there all year round – the number triples during the summer. After the Finnish Armed Forces vacated the island in 2005, their premises were taken over by locals that are now rented out as accommodation for tourists.

PALLAS-YLLÄSTUNTURI NATIONAL PARK
It was still quiet at the top of the Ylläs ski resort on a Sunday morning in the middle of February, when this amazing view from the top of Ylläs Mountain appeared. Looking towards to the national park that begins just at the base of the mountain, you could see the Pallas Mountains in the distance, already bathed in bright sunlight. Right in front of me was the Kellostapuli Mountain, with the Kesänki Mountain behind it, and the mist just floated along the valley.

KOLI
This is a view from Koli in northern Karelia, famous for its tree-covered hill scenery. This particular hill is called the Mäkrävaara and in the distance is Ukko-Koli, the highest peak, soaring 253 metres above Lake Pielisjärvi. The famous painting “Autumn Landscape of Lake Pielisjärvi” by Finnish painter Eero Järnefelt captured this scenery back in 1899, so a friend and I climbed up to witness this amazing view ourselves one September afternoon.

OULANKA NATIONAL PARK
Oulanka National Park in Kuusamo, one of the most popular Finnish national parks, is known for its impressive rapids and falls. The most well-known are the Kiutaköngäs rapids in the Oulanka River, as well as the Myllykoski and the Jyrävä falls in the Kitka River. I use a slow shutter speed when photographing rapids to bring out their natural beauty. I am most taken with the glowing white beauty of the ice and snow. This photo of the Myllykoski rapids was taken in January 2012 (at 2 pm).

THE VILLAGE OF SARAMO
It was 6 pm at the beginning of October. I was driving from Kuusamo towards the tree-covered hills of Koli in northern Karelia. During the day, I had hiked for five hours at Hiidenportti National Park. As I drove along the small roads towards the south, I spotted a big field with a lake behind it. The lovely autumn landscape was reflected on the surface of the lake, so I walked to the shore to capture this vision lit by the last rays of the sun.

RIISITUNTURI NATIONAL PARK
It was about midday and the temperature was about minus 30°C as I parked my car in Riisitunturi National Park, which is less than a couple of kilometres from the summit (466 metres). At the top of the hill, it was much warmer and a lovely sunset illuminated the idyllic winter scenery. The snow-covered trees of Riisitunturi in mid-winter are known among nature photographers worldwide.

REPOVESI NATIONAL PARK
I was walking through Repovesi National Park one July afternoon. I had taken a tent and some provisions with me, since I was planning to spend the night there. In the evening, I ended up by the Olhava cliffs. I climbed up to admire the spectacular view when I noticed movement along the rock wall: climbers were making their way up the near-perpendicular rock face, 50 metres above the lake surface. It must be an amazing feeling!

KILPISJÄRVI
At Kilpisjärvi, there is a popular tourist attraction where the borders of Finland, Sweden and Norway meet. Not far from there is Saana Mountain. If you go further up to the north you will find Halti Mountain, which, at 1,324 metres, is Finland’s highest point. One August, I had the privilege of photographing the blue iridescence of Kilpisjärvi Lake from a helicopter.

WINTER IN GREENLAND
October – May

Seasons in Greenland are different to the seasons you probably know from back home. We only really have two definitive seasons – a long winter and a short summer.

Greenland’s winter may seem a little daunting according to our 8-month timespan of October to May. But do not fear – this doesn’t mean that we are freezing cold and off-limits for most of the year. On the contrary, every region of Greenland (except the National Park, which requires a permit) is easily accessible all year round.

Why visit Greenland in the winter?
Greenland is a true winter wonderland for most of the year. Snow carpets every city, town and settlement in fluffy white.

This, coupled with our trademark colourful houses poking out of the wintry landscape, completes the unique and iconic scene of Greenlandic winter. In the cities, short days mean warm lights in windows and long, cosy evenings enjoying local cuisine and culture. But Greenlanders love to be outside and don’t let the cold stop them – it is common to see locals zooming around town on their snowmobiles once the snow has set in. Further north, the water freezes in lakes and fjords to allow you to dogsled or ski across totally new terrain.

Of course, winter is cold. But winter temperatures vary greatly between regions, and in places where conditions are very dry and still, like Kangerlussuaq, -40ºC does not feel as bad as it sounds! As long as you dress right, you can enjoy the magic of Greenlandic winter in comfort and style.

TEMPERATURES
Because Greenland is so vast, it is hard to generalise about its weather and temperatures. They vary greatly between – and even within – regions. These temperatures represent the range of average temperatures throughout the winter season in the different regions of Greenland. These temperatures are only advisory and are averages over a period of years. You may encounter considerably colder or warmer temperatures on site.

During the winter, the wind can increase the effect of the cold and make it feel much colder than the thermometer shows. Always check the windchill when deciding how to dress.

SUMMER IN GREENLAND
June – September

Seasons in Greenland are different to the seasons you probably know from back home. We only really have two definitive seasons – a long winter and a short summer.

Greenland’s summer is short and changeable, and starts proper in June. There is a noticeable shift in the weather in April and May, but we do not really refer to it as Spring, as it’s not characterised by blooming flowers and trees leafing out – it’s more melting snow and higher temperatures. We usually say that summer finishes some time in early September, but sometimes the snow arrives earlier or later.

Why visit Greenland in the summer?
Summer in Greenland is a short burst of excitement. As the snow slides away, suddenly the landscape is revealed in a brand new light. The mountains go from white to grey and green, as waterfalls trickle down their sides to meet melting bodies of water. Sea ice breaks up and the fjords are decorated with magnificent floating icebergs. Flowers bloom and more wildlife comes out to play – birds fill the sky and the seas become alive with whales and fish. People move in new ways – we hike, run, cycle, sail, and kayak over the newly exposed terrain. And we have lots of time, as the days get long – they even never end in places!

TEMPERATURES
Because Greenland is so vast, it is hard to generalise about its weather and temperatures. They vary greatly between – and even within – regions. These temperatures represent the range of average temperatures throughout the summer season in the different regions of Greenland. These temperatures are only advisory and are averages over a period of years. You may encounter considerably colder or warmer temperatures on site.

Despite the relatively low average temperatures, the dry air in Greenland means that summer temperatures will often feel warmer than you might expect. Be prepared for T-shirt temperatures on a sunny summer day. However, the only sure thing about Greenland’s weather is that it is always unpredictable. So even in the summer, bring clothes that are suitable for heavy rain and wind.

Polar bears, humpback whales, musk oxen, walruses, reindeer and white-tailed eagles are just some of the many animals you can experience on land, at sea and in the air around Greenland.

Despite the dominance of the inland ice Sheet, Greenland’s wildlife has a much larger domain than we humans have access to. The mountain world does not pose the same obstacle to land mammals, birds have their own motorways in the sky across fjords, oceans and mountains, and sea animals are interconnected to a global, boundless ecosystem. Therefore, it is also less crucial that the Inland Ice Sheet takes up 80% of the landmass in Greenland, which is often presented as a unique Greenlandic challenge.

Greenland has the world’s largest national park, and this is one of the reasons for the widespread and abundant wildlife. Greenland National Park is an Arctic paradise and wilderness located in the northeast corner of the country. As the national park is so vast and relatively accessible, it is only frequented by a small handful of visitors, which allows the wildlife in the park to thrive and propagate undisturbed.

In other regions of the country, the Greenlandic population has made a living for thousands of years from the Greenlandic fauna. With a coastline of 44,087 km, the sea in particular is of crucial significance to human survival. The marine fauna is still a key resource to this day, where seafood is exported to other countries and where Greenlandic designs made of sealskin are internationally recognised.

There are still many locals who fish or hunt. Greenlandic ingredients such as seal meat, reindeer, musk ox, lamb, fish, whale and seafood are therefore the cornerstones of Greenlandic gastronomy. In an Arctic climate where access to agriculture has been limited, these ingredients are packed with nutrients and are today being reinterpreted by talented chefs across the country.

Similarly, wildlife has played a vital role in Greenlandic culture, with animals appearing in a variety of ways, for example, in mythology and art. Likewise, the fishing and hunting culture has left its mark on Greenland with, for instance, the kayak and sealskin details on the national costume.

Greenland is strongly linked to its wildlife, which is versatile and widespread across the country. Whether your interest is in whale watching, bird watching or angling, Greenland is packed with opportunities to experience nature up close. Here we have compiled the most well-known animals that you as a tourist have the chance to experience. It is our most extensive index so far where you can learn more about Greenlandic wildlife.

ARE THERE PENGUINS IN GREENLAND?
Despite Greenland’s Arctic climate, there are unfortunately no penguins in Greenland. Most penguin species live on the South Pole, and the only penguin that live in the northern hemisphere is the Galapagos penguin, which lives on the Galapagos Islands, 8500 km from Greenland. Therefore, visitors must suffice with the Atlantic Puffins in addition to all the other black and white wildlife in Greenland.

Early history
Settlement (c. 870–c. 930)
Iceland apparently has no prehistory. According to stories written down some 250 years after the event, the country was discovered and settled by Norse people in the Viking Age. The oldest source, Íslendingabók (The Book of the Icelanders), written about 1130, sets the period of settlement at about 870–930 CE. The other main source, Landnámabók (The Book of Settlements), of 12th-century origin but known only in later versions, states explicitly that the first permanent settler, Ingólfr Arnarson, came from Norway to Iceland to settle in the year 874. He chose as his homestead a site that he named Reykjavík, which he farmed with his wife, Hallveig Fródadóttir. The Book of Settlements then enumerates more than 400 settlers who sailed with their families, servants, and slaves to Iceland to stake claims to land. Most of the settlers came from Norway, but some came from other Nordic countries and from the Norse Viking Age settlements in the British Isles.

A layer of tephra (volcanic ash) that in many places coincides with the earliest remains of human habitation in Iceland has been identified in Greenland ice and dated to about 870. Archaeological finds also support the documentary evidence and place Iceland among Norse Viking Age settlements of the late 9th or early 10th century. The Icelandic language testifies to the same origin; Icelandic is a Nordic language and is most closely related to the dialects of western Norway.

Although the island was not populated until the Viking Age, Iceland probably had been known to people long before that time. The 4th-century-BCE Greek explorer Pytheas of Massalia (Marseille) described a northern country that he called Thule, located six days’ sailing distance north of Britain. In the 8th century Irish hermits who had begun to sail to Iceland in search of solitude also called the island Thule. It is unknown, however, if Pytheas and the hermits were describing the same island. According to the early Icelandic sources, some Irish monks were living in Iceland when the Nordic settlers arrived, but the monks soon left because they were unwilling to share the country with heathens.

Commonwealth (c. 930–1262)
At the time of Iceland’s settlement, Norse people worshipped gods whom they called æsir (singular áss), and this religion left behind an extensive mythology in Icelandic literature. Thor seems to have been the most popular of the pagan gods in Iceland, although Odin is thought to have been the highest in rank. It appears that heathen worship was organized around a distinct class of chieftains called godar (singular godi), of which there were about 40. In the absence of royal power in Iceland, the godar were to form the ruling class in the country.

By the end of the settlement period, a general Icelandic assembly, called the Althing, had been established and was held at midsummer on a site that came to be called Thingvellir. This assembly consisted of a law council (lögrétta), in which the godar made and amended the laws, and a system of courts of justice, in which householders, nominated by the godar, acted on the panels of judges. At the local level, three godar usually held a joint assembly in late spring at which a local court operated, again with judges nominated by the godar. All farmers were legally obliged to belong to a chieftaincy (godord) but theoretically were free to change their allegiance from one godi to another; the godar were allotted a corresponding right to expel a follower. Some scholars have seen in this arrangement a resemblance to the franchise in modern societies. On the other hand, there was no central authority to ensure that the farmers would be able to exercise their right in a democratic way. No one was vested with executive power over the country as a whole. In any case, no trace of democratic practice reached farther down the social scale than to the heads of farming households; women and workers (free or enslaved) had no role in the political system.

Christianization
By the end of the 10th century, the Norwegians were forced by their king, Olaf I Tryggvason, to accept Christianity. The king also sent missionaries to Iceland who, according to 12th-century sources, were highly successful in converting the Icelanders. In 999 or 1000 the Althing made a peaceful decision that all Icelanders should become Christians. In spite of this decision, the godar retained their political role, and many of them probably built their own churches. Some were ordained, and as a group they seem to have closely controlled the organization of the new religion. Two bishoprics were established, one at Skálholt in 1056 and the other at Hólar in 1106. Literate Christian culture also transformed lay life. Codification of the law was begun in 1117–18. Later the Icelanders began to write sagas, which were to reach their pinnacle of literary achievement in the next century.

Iceland under foreign rule
Late Middle Ages (1262–c. 1550)
To a large extent, Iceland was ruled separately from Norway. It had its own law code, and the Althing continued to be held at Thingvellir, though mainly as a court of justice. Most of the royal officials who succeeded the chieftains were Icelanders. In 1380 the Norwegian monarchy entered into a union with the Danish crown, but that change did not affect Iceland’s status within the realm as a personal skattland (“tax land”) of the crown.

Economic growth and decline
A fundamental change in Iceland’s economy took place in the early 14th century when Norwegian merchants began to import dried fish from Iceland to Bergen. English merchants in Bergen became acquainted with Icelandic fish supplies, and shortly after 1400 they themselves began sailing to Iceland to catch fish and buy it from local fishermen. The Danish crown repeatedly tried to stop English trade in Iceland but lacked the naval power with which to defend its remote possession. One of the royal governors was killed by the English when he tried to stop their trade, an event that led indirectly to clashes between Denmark and England (1468–73). In the early 16th century English interest in Iceland declined, partly because rich fishing grounds had been discovered off the North American coast of Newfoundland. Instead, Germans became the chief foreigners to fish and trade in Iceland.

In spite of the rise of a profitable export industry, it is generally believed that Iceland’s economy deteriorated in the late Middle Ages. The birchwood that had covered great parts of the country was gradually depleted, in part because it was excellent for making charcoal. The destruction of the woodland, together with heavy grazing, led to extensive soil erosion. The climate also became more severe, and grain growing was given up altogether. At the same time, more and more of the land was acquired by ecclesiastical institutions and wealthy individuals, to whom the farmers had to pay rent.

Twice in the 15th century, in 1402–04 and 1494–95, the plague visited Iceland and killed approximately half the population each time. Although the epidemics must have been a serious blow to the society, they presumably relieved the population pressure. This, in turn, probably postponed for centuries the emergence of permanent fishing villages on the coasts, which might have developed in the late Middle Ages from the seasonal fishing camps of the English and Germans.

The Reformation
The Lutheran Reformation, which was instituted in Denmark in the 1530s, met greater resistance in Iceland than anywhere else in the realm. In 1541 the bishop of Skálholt was captured by the governor, and Lutheranism was introduced in his diocese. In the northern diocese of Hólar, Bishop Jón Arason held out against Lutheranism for a decade longer. In 1550 he was finally captured and beheaded, without benefit of law or clergy, and all resistance to the Reformation ended. Jón’s death is traditionally understood to mark the end of the Middle Ages in Iceland.

Growth of Danish royal power (c. 1550–c. 1830)

After the Reformation the royal treasury confiscated all lands that had belonged to the Icelandic monasteries. German traders were ousted in the 16th century, and in 1602 all foreign trade in Iceland was monopolized by a royal decree and handed over to Danish merchants, who paid a rent on it to the crown. This arrangement remained intact for nearly two centuries, during which Iceland’s contacts with the outside world were almost exclusively restricted to Denmark. In this period the influence of earlier contacts with England and Germany seems mostly to have disappeared. In 1787 the monopoly was abolished. Only subjects of the Danish crown, however, were permitted to carry on foreign trade, a restriction that remained in force until 1855.

The Danish crown increased its hold on Iceland on the constitutional level as well—at least in formal terms. In 1661 Frederick III introduced an absolute monarchy in Denmark and Norway, and in the following year his absolutism was acknowledged in Iceland. This event was not of any great immediate significance in Iceland; local officials, most of whom were Icelanders, continued to make important political decisions. Danish officials in Copenhagen rarely had enough knowledge of or interest in Icelandic affairs to enforce their will if the Icelandic officials were unanimous on a different policy.

Nevertheless, the bureaucratic state, which formed the backbone of absolutism, was gradually introduced into Iceland. An essential part of that development was the emergence of a town nucleus in Reykjavík, the first one in this hitherto entirely rural country. In the 1750s a tiny village grew up in Reykjavík as a result of a semiofficial attempt to start a wool-processing factory there. Within half a century the two ancient bishoprics were united, with the bishop residing in Reykjavík. The Althing was abolished in 1800, and an appeals court was set up in Reykjavík to succeed it. A few years later the Danish governor also settled in the town, which by then had about 300 inhabitants.

In 1703, when the first census was taken, the population was 50,358. The main occupation was farming, though an important auxiliary occupation, undertaken mostly by rural labourers on the southern and western coasts in late winter and spring, was fishing. With few exceptions, labourers were obliged to stay in the domestic service of a farmer, and the establishment of permanent households in fishing stations was severely restricted. Thus, the landowners—with most of the native officials in their number—succeeded in monopolizing fishing and prevented it from becoming an independent industry.

The 18th century was a period of decline and increasing poverty in Iceland. Famine—caused by a volcanic eruption and subsequent years of cold weather—plagued the country in the 1780s and killed one-fifth of the population. However, these hardships bred little criticism in Iceland of the country’s status within the Danish realm. In 1809 Danish adventurer Jørgen Jørgensen seized power in Iceland for two months. When he was removed and Danish power restored, he received no support from the Icelandic population. Five years later, when Norway was severed from the Danish monarchy and given much greater autonomy under the Swedish crown, there was no push in Iceland to demand the same from Denmark.

Modern Iceland
Struggle for independence (c. 1830–1904)
In the 1830s Iceland was allotted two seats at a new consultative assembly for the Danish Isles established at Roskilde, Denmark. This arrangement kindled a desire in Iceland for a restoration of the Icelandic Althing as a consultative assembly for the nation. Christian VIII granted the Icelanders their wish, and in 1845 a restored Althing met for the first time—not at Thingvellir, as originally intended, but in Reykjavík. Franchise to the assembly was almost entirely restricted to officials and farmers.

In 1848 Christian’s successor, Frederick VII, renounced his absolute power, and a constitutional assembly was summoned to prepare a representative democracy in Denmark. This led inevitably to the question of what was to become of Iceland in the new form of government. By that time Iceland had a relatively undisputed political leader: Jón Sigurdsson, a philologist living in Copenhagen. Jón argued that the king could only give his absolute rule over Iceland back to the Icelanders themselves, since they were the ones who had surrendered it to him in 1662. This claim was met with a royal pledge that the constitutional status of Iceland would not be decided until the Icelanders had discussed the matter at a special assembly. This assembly met in 1851, but no agreement could be reached between the Icelandic representatives and the Danish government. The assembly was dissolved in disappointment. A stalemate of more than 20 years ensued, but the Althing decided to use the occasion of the millennium of Iceland’s settlement to accept the status that Danish authorities were by then willing to grant. Thus, in 1874 the king presented Iceland with a constitution whereby the Althing was vested with legislative power in internal affairs. As before, however, the cabinet minister responsible for Iceland was the minister of justice in the Danish government.

For an additional three decades the Icelanders continued to demand that executive power be transferred to Iceland. In 1901 the path was opened when rule by parliamentary majority was introduced in Denmark and the Liberals—always more positive than the Conservatives toward the Icelanders—came into power. In 1904 Iceland got home rule, and the first Icelandic minister opened his office in Reykjavík. At the same time, rule by parliamentary majority was introduced.

The high level of political activity in 19th-century Iceland stands in sharp contrast to its economic stagnation, which was considerable compared with the countries of western Europe. The significant growth of Iceland’s population put increasing strain on the badly eroded soil in rural areas, and for many people the only visible solution was emigration to North America. Some 15,000 Icelanders emigrated between 1870 and 1914, most of them to Canada. Virtually the only successful technical innovation during that period was the introduction of decked fishing vessels, which made it possible to catch fish farther offshore than could be done on open boats. Still, at the beginning of the 20th century, more than half the annual catch was still taken in open boats.

Home rule and sovereignty (1904–44)
The period of home rule (1904–18) was one of rapid progress. Motors were installed in many of the open fishing boats, and a number of steam-driven trawlers were acquired. The country was connected by telegraph cable with Europe. School attendance was made compulsory for children in towns and villages, and a number of schools were built. The University of Iceland was established (1911) in Reykjavík, which by 1918 had a population of 15,000. All restrictions on the freedom to move to the fishing villages were either abolished or quietly forgotten. There was a radical transformation in the occupational structure of the country, which in turn led to the advent of a labour movement. In 1916 a national organization of trade unions was established. By then unions were already widely accepted by employers as negotiating bodies, but their formal status was not legalized until 1938. In the political arena, democracy was extended to new groups. Women and propertyless men were given the franchise, subject to certain qualifications, in 1915. Four years earlier a law had been passed that gave women the right to attend schools of higher education, enter into the professions, and occupy any public office in the country.

The struggle for greater autonomy continued until the dispute with Denmark was solved. On December 1, 1918, Iceland became a separate state under the Danish crown, with only foreign affairs remaining under Danish control. Either party, however, had the right to call for a review of the treaty, and if negotiations about its renewal proved fruitless at the end of 25 years (i.e., 1943) it would be terminated.

The struggle for independence that had shaped Icelandic politics for almost a century now subsided, and in the 1920s a new system of political parties based on class divisions emerged. Class antagonism grew more severe during the Great Depression of the 1930s; the depression was prolonged in Iceland when the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 closed the important Spanish market for Icelandic fish. The problem of high unemployment persisted until after the outbreak of World War II.

The German occupation of Denmark in April 1940 effectively dissolved the union between Iceland and Denmark. A month later British forces occupied Iceland. In 1941 the United States took over the defense of Iceland and stationed a force of 60,000 in the country. The foreign forces brought employment, prosperity, and high inflation to the population, which then numbered about 120,000.

The war made it impossible for Iceland and Denmark to renegotiate their treaty. In spite of great resentment in Denmark, the Icelanders decided to terminate the treaty, break all constitutional ties with Denmark, and establish a republic. On June 17, 1944, now celebrated as National Day, the Icelandic republic was founded at Thingvellir, with Sveinn Björnsson as its first president.

The Icelandic republic
Since the prosperous years of World War II, Iceland has developed into a modern welfare state with growing production and consumption. A rapid restoration of the trawler fleet after the war prevented the return of prewar unemployment. Fish freezing became a highly technical industry and the mainstay of Iceland’s exports. The economy became characterized by expansion, full employment, high inflation, and much unprofitable investment. It became normal to work overtime and for women to enter the labour market. The advent of regular air service to both Europe and North America in the late 1940s revolutionized communication with the outside world, and the advent of the Internet at the turn of the 21st century meant that Iceland was more connected than ever before. By 2006 it had the world’s highest broadband Internet penetration.

Financial boom and bust
By the mid-1990s reforms to the financial market had significantly liberalized capital movements to and from other countries, transforming Iceland’s banks and markets into favoured destinations for international investors. This boom in foreign investment in the late 1990s and the 2000s, however, left Iceland’s economy especially vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the global credit markets. The country’s currency, the króna, showed signs of weakness beginning in 2005. Inflation skyrocketed, domestic interest rates more than doubled, and foreign investors flocked to króna-denominated bonds. The tide of capital reversed abruptly in 2008, when the so-called global “credit crunch” led foreign investors to flee Iceland’s bond market, leaving the country’s dangerously leveraged banks depleted and resulting in the collapse of a host of international investment banks. The effect on Iceland’s economy was swift and dramatic. The value of the króna plunged more than 70 percent before all currency trading was suspended, the domestic stock market shed 90 percent of its value, and interest rates fluctuated wildly. The central government took control of the three largest private banks, which held a combined liability equal to roughly 10 times the country’s pre-crisis GDP, and the economy was declared to be in a state of “national bankruptcy.” Relief was sought through appeals to Scandinavian neighbours, and a series of austerity measures was implemented to secure a $2 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund.

Ethnic groups and languages
The population of Iceland is extremely homogeneous. The inhabitants are descendants of settlers who began arriving in AD 874 and continued in heavy influx for about 60 years thereafter. Historians differ on the exact origin and ethnic composition of the settlers but agree that between 60 and 80 percent of them were of Nordic stock from Norway.

The rest, from Scotland and Ireland, were largely of Celtic stock. The dominant language in the period of settlement was Old Norse, the language spoken in Norway at the time. Through the centuries it has evolved into modern Icelandic, which is used throughout the country. Modern Icelanders can still read Icelandic sagas in Old Norse without difficulty. There are no ethnic distinctions. The early Nordic and Celtic stocks have long since merged, and the relatively small number of subsequent immigrants (the largest portion of whom are Poles) has had only a limited effect on the population structure.

Religion
The Lutheran faith has been the dominant religion since the mid-16th century. More than two-thirds of the population belongs to the state-supported Evangelical Lutheran church. There is freedom of religion.

Icelanders are proof that a small and homogeneous population can develop a rich and varied cultural life. The country’s literary heritage stems from writers of the 12th to 14th centuries who vividly recorded the sagas of Iceland’s first 250 years. Other traditional arts include weaving, silver crafting, and wood carving.

The Reykjavík area, which supports several professional theatres, a symphony orchestra, an opera, and a number of art galleries, bookstores, cinemas, and museums, has a cultural environment that compares favourably with those of cities several times its size. It also holds a biennial international art festival.

Daily life and social customs
Iceland’s character reflects both its homogeneity and its isolation, and its people take care to preserve their traditions and language by, among other things, using native terms for introduced objects—for example, the Icelandic word for computer, tölva, combines ancient terms for number and seer. Icelanders are generally reserved and confident, and, though sometimes wary of foreigners, they are friendly hosts. For centuries Iceland has been known for its traditional industries, which produce knitwear and other ancestral crafts. As in most Scandinavian countries, women have long occupied a prominent place in society, especially in government.

There are many national and local festivals. The largest is the annual Independence Day celebration marking the country’s independence in 1944. The Sumardargurinn Fyrsti festival celebrates the first day of summer, and each June the Sjómannadagurinn pays tribute to Iceland’s seafaring past. The Reykjavík Arts Festival attracts many to the city.

Icelandic cuisine centres on the country’s fishing industry. Hákarl (carefully putrefied shark) is a pungent traditional food. Cod, haddock, whale blubber, and seal meat are available. Other traditional dishes include gravlax (salmon marinated in salt and dill), hangikjöt (smoked lamb), hrútspungar (rams’ testicles), and slátur, a haggis-like dish made of sheep entrails. The skyr, which is made of cultured skim milk, is a distinctive Icelandic dessert, served with fresh bilberries in summer. Coffee seems omnipresent, and a unique Icelandic liquor is brennivín, which is made from potatoes and caraway.

The arts
Art in Iceland was long connected with religion, first with the Roman Catholic church and later with the Lutheran church. The first professional secular painters appeared in Iceland in the 19th century. Gradually increasing in number, these painters—such as Jóhannes Sveinsson Kjarval, famed for his portraits of Icelandic village life—highlighted the character and beauty of their country. Painting continues to thrive in Iceland, where artists have fused foreign influences with local heritage. The work of 20th-century sculptor Ásmundur Sveinsson is also a source of pride for Icelanders. The old traditions in silver working have been retained, the most characteristic of which is the use of silver thread for ornamentation.

Icelanders are a highly literate people who prize their country’s outstanding tradition of prose and poetry. People of all ages study the ancient Icelandic sagas and, particularly in rural parts of the country, enjoy composing and performing rímur, or versified sagas. A unique contribution to Western literature, the Icelanders’ sagas of the late 12th to 13th century include the Njáls saga, a prose account of a vendetta that swept the island three centuries earlier, costing dozens of lives; it is one of the longest and arguably the finest of the island’s sagas. In the Laxdæla saga a love triangle unfolds disastrously, and the medieval tales of the Edda recount the doings of the gods and goddesses of the ancient Norse pantheon. Comprising two volumes—the Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda—it is the fullest and most detailed source for modern knowledge of Germanic mythology. Iceland has often been the setting of 19th- and 20th-century European literature; the volcano Snæfellsjökull, for example, figures in Jules Verne’s popular novel Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), and the English poets W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice drew on their travels around the country for their book Letters from Iceland (1937). Several Icelandic writers have received international acclaim, such as Halldór Laxness, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955 and whose novel Sjálfstætt fólk (1934–35; Independent People) is a touchstone of modern Icelandic literature. Other native writers, such as Thor Vilhjálmsson, Einar Kárason, and Einar Már Gudmundsson, have written for the theatre and film, and their work has grown more international in theme and setting.

Music enjoyed a tremendous upsurge after World War II. The programs of the Iceland Symphony are drawn from a classical repertoire and the work of modern Icelandic composers, and one or more operas or musicals are performed every year at the National Theatre and the Icelandic Opera. Popular music by Icelandic performers, such as Björk and Sigur Rós, has gained international commercial success and critical acclaim, and at the end of the 1990s Reykjavík was becoming an important recording and performing centre for popular musicians from throughout Europe. Funded by grants from the Icelandic government, a small but influential film industry also emerged in the 1990s.

National folk traditions in applied art have achieved a new popularity. Old designs and forms have been revived, some modified to please modern tastes. Icelandic wool, knitted or woven, is the most commonly used material. It is lower in lanolin and consists of two types of fibres—one fine, soft, and insulating and the other long and water-repellent. Many people in the country participate in this industry, creating high-quality goods.

Cultural institutions
The National Library of Iceland (founded in 1818) and the University Library (1940) merged in 1994. The National Archives were founded in 1882. The National Museum of Iceland, dating from 1863, has collections representing native Icelandic culture beginning in the Viking Age. Many old houses and ruins throughout the country are preserved under its auspices. The Árni Magnússon Institute houses a large collection of the Icelandic sagas. The National Gallery of Iceland was founded in 1884, and the great majority of its works are by modern Icelandic artists. The Natural History Museum was founded in 1889.

The National Theatre began operation in 1950. It performs Icelandic as well as foreign classical and modern plays, operas, ballets, and musicals. The Reykjavík Theatre is the other full-time professional repertory theatre. Several theatre groups present numerous plays and musicals, both in Reykjavík and the countryside.

The earliest traces of human occupation in Norway are found along the coast, where the huge ice shelf of the last ice age first melted between 11,000 and 8000 BCE. The oldest finds are stone tools dating from 9500 to 6000 BCE, discovered in Finnmark in the north and Rogaland in the southwest. Theories of a “Komsa” type of stone-tool culture north of the Arctic Circle and a “Fosna” type from Trøndelag to Oslo Fjord were rendered obsolete in the 1970s. More recent finds along the entire coast revealed to archaeologists that the difference between the two can simply be ascribed to different types of tools and not to different cultures. Coastal fauna provided a means of livelihood for fishermen and hunters, who may have made their way along the southern coast about 10,000 BCE when the interior was still covered with ice. It is now thought that these so-called “Arctic” peoples came from the south and followed the coast northward considerably later. Some may have come along the ice-free coast of the Kola Peninsula, but the evidence of this is still poor.

In the southern part of the country are dwelling sites dating from about 5000 BCE. Finds from these sites give a clearer idea of the life of the hunting and fishing peoples. The implements vary in shape and mostly are made of different kinds of stone; those of later periods are more skillfully made. Rock carvings have been found, usually near hunting and fishing grounds. They represent game such as deer, reindeer, elk, bears, birds, seals, whales, and fish (especially salmon and halibut), all of which were vital to the way of life of the coastal peoples. The carvings at Alta in Finnmark, the largest in Scandinavia, were made at sea level continuously from 6200 to 2500 BCE and mark the progression of the land as it rose from the sea after the last ice age.

Earliest peoples
Between 3000 and 2500 BCE new immigrants settled in eastern Norway. They were farmers who grew grain and kept cows and sheep. The hunting-fishing population of the west coast was also gradually replaced by farmers, though hunting and fishing remained useful secondary means of livelihood.

From about 1500 BCE bronze was gradually introduced, but the use of stone implements continued; Norway had few riches to barter for bronze goods, and the few finds consist mostly of elaborate weapons and brooches that only chieftains could afford. Huge burial cairns built close to the sea as far north as Harstad and also inland in the south are characteristic of this period. The motifs of the rock carvings differ from those typical of the Stone Age. Representations of the Sun, animals, trees, weapons, ships, and people are all strongly stylized, probably as fertility symbols connected with the religious ideas of the period.

Little has been found dating from the early Iron Age (the last 500 years BCE). The dead were cremated, and their graves contain few burial goods. During the first four centuries CE the people of Norway were in contact with Roman-occupied Gaul. About 70 Roman bronze cauldrons, often used as burial urns, have been found. Contact with the civilized countries farther south brought a knowledge of runes; the oldest known Norwegian runic inscription dates from the 3rd century. At this time the amount of settled area in the country increased, a development that can be traced by coordinated studies of topography, archaeology, and place-names. The oldest root names, such as nes, vik, and bø (“cape,” “bay,” and “farm”), are of great antiquity, dating perhaps from the Bronze Age, whereas the earliest of the groups of compound names with the suffixes vin (“meadow”) or heim (“settlement”), as in Bjorgvin (Bergen) or Saeheim (Seim), usually date from the first centuries CE.

Ethnic groups
In most parts of Norway the nucleus of the population is Nordic in heritage and appearance. Between 60 and 70 percent have blue eyes. An influx of people from southern Europe has been strong in southwestern Norway. Nord-Norge has about nine-tenths of the estimated 30,000 to 40,000 Sami—the country’s first inhabitants—living in Norway. Only a small number of them still practice traditional reindeer herding on the Finnmark Plateau. The Sami arrived in Norway at least 10,000 years ago, perhaps from Central Asia. Formerly subject to widespread, even official ethnic discrimination, the Sami are now legally recognized as a distinct culture and have been granted some measure of autonomy through the Sami Parliament.

In the first decades of the 21st century, an increasing number of immigrants from Africa and the Middle East began to transform Norway’s largely homogeneous population into a more ethnically diverse one.

Languages
The Norwegian language belongs to the North Germanic branch of the Germanic language group. The Norwegian alphabet has three more letters than the Latin alphabet—æ, ø, and å, pronounced respectively as the vowels in bad, burn, and ball. Modern Norwegian has many dialects, but all of them, as well as the Swedish and Danish languages, are understood throughout all three of these Scandinavian countries. Until about 1850 there was only one written language, called Riksmål, or “Official Language,” which was strongly influenced by Danish during the 434-year union of the two countries. Landsmål, or “Country Language,” was then created out of the rural dialects. After a long feud, mostly urban-rural in makeup, the forms received equal status under the terms Bokmål (“Book Language”) and Nynorsk (New Norwegian), respectively. For more than four-fifths of schoolchildren, Bokmål is the main language in local schools, and it is the principal language of commerce and communications. In daily speech Bokmål is predominant in the area around Oslo and the eastern Norwegian lowland, while Nynorsk is widely spoken in the mountainous interior and along the west coast.

More than 15,000 Norwegians, mostly in scattered pockets of northern Norway, speak North Sami as a first language. A Uralic language, Sami is the official language of a number of municipalities.

Almost all educated Norwegians speak English as a second language. Indeed, so widespread is its use that some commentators have voiced concern that English may displace Norwegian in commerce and industry.

Religion
More than four-fifths of all Norwegians belong to the Evangelical Lutheran national church, the Church of Norway, which is endowed by the government. The largest groups outside this establishment are Pentecostals, Roman Catholics, Lutheran Free Church members, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Methodists, and Baptists. As a result of Asian immigration, there also are small groups of Muslims and Buddhists.

Located on the outskirts of Europe and with much of its inland population almost completely isolated until the 20th century, Norway has been able to preserve much of its old folk culture, including a large body of legends concerning haugfolket (pixies), underjordiske (subterraneans), and vetter (supernatural beings). On the other hand, as seafarers and traders, the Norwegians have always received fresh cultural stimuli from abroad. A number of Norwegians have made important contributions in return, notably the playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) and the composer Edvard Grieg (1843–1907). The Norwegian recipients of the Nobel Prize for Literature are Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1903), Knut Hamsun (1920), and Sigrid Undset (1928).

Daily life and social customs
Although Norway is in most ways very modern, it has maintained many of its traditions. Storytelling and folklore, in which trolls play a prominent role, are still common. On festive occasions folk costumes are worn and folk singing is performed—especially on Grunnlovsdagen (Constitution Day), commonly called Syttende Mai (May 17), the date of its celebration. Other popular festivals include Sankhansaften (Midsummer’s Eve), Olsok (St. Olaf’s Day), and Jul (Christmas), the last of which is marked by family feasts whose fare varies from region to region but that are traditionally marked by the presence of seven kinds of cake.

The national costume, the bunad, is characterized by double-shuttle woven wool skirts or dresses for women, accompanied by jackets with scarves. Colourful accessories (e.g., purses and shoes) complete the outfit. The bunad for men generally consists of a three-piece suit that also is very colourful and heavily embroidered. Traditionally, Norwegians had two bunader, one for special occasions and one for everyday wear.

The country’s natural landscape—its Arctic environment and vast coasts—has shaped Norway’s customs and history, as outdoor activities are central to the life of most Norwegians. In particular, the country’s cuisine reflects its environment. Fish dishes such as laks (salmon) and torsk (cod) are popular. Lutefisk, cod soaked in lye, is common during the Christmas holidays. Rømmegrøt (sour-cream porridge), pinnekjøtt (dried mutton ribs), reker (boiled shrimp), meatcakes, lefse (griddlecakes), geitost (a sweet semihard cheese made from cow’s or goat’s milk), and reindeer, moose, elk, and other wildlife also are popular traditional delicacies. The strong liquor called aquavit (also spelled akevitt), made of fermented grain or potatoes, is also widely used.

In northern Norway the Sami maintain a distinct culture. Long known as reindeer herders, they maintain their own national dress. While many Sami have modernized and few continue to practice traditional nomadic life, a variation of that lifestyle continues. Where once the whole family followed the herd, now only the men do, with women and children remaining behind in towns and villages. Sami Easter festivals include reindeer races and chanting (joik).

The arts
In Viking days storytellers (skalds) of skaldic poetry wove tales of giants, trolls, and warlike gods. Drawing on this tradition, centuries of Norwegian authors have created a rich literary history, in both spoken and written form. Yet it was not until the 19th century, following Norway’s separation from Denmark, that Norwegian literature firmly established its identity. Especially important were the poetry of Henrik Wergeland and the plays of Ibsen, whose realistic dramas introduced a new, politically charged moral analysis to European theatre. The works of novelists Hamsun and Undset remain influential, though modern Norwegians are more likely to read contemporaries such as Bjørg Vik, Kim Småge, and Tor Åge Bringsværd, who write fantasy, existential detective novels, and philosophical treatises, respectively.

Although Norway comprises one of the world’s smaller language communities, the country is among the leaders in books published per capita. Several thousand new titles appear annually, of which some three-fifths are of Norwegian origin. Literature is subsidized through a variety of means, including tax exemption, grants to writers, and government purchasing for libraries. In all, there are about 5,000 public or school libraries.

Norwegian painters of the 20th century excelled in murals to such an extent that they are rivaled only by the Mexican tradition in this sense. Other artists are world-renowned for their multimedia assemblages, pictorial weaving, and nonfigurative art in sculpture as well as painting. The works of Gustav Vigeland have been assembled in Oslo’s Vigeland sculpture park (Frogner Park) in a spectacular display centred around a granite monolith nearly 60 feet (18 metres) high containing 121 struggling figures.

Medieval stave churches of upright logs and houses of horizontal logs notched at the corners have inspired much Norwegian architecture. Private houses, almost all of wood, are made to fit snugly into the terrain. For larger buildings, steel and glass are supplemented by concrete that often is shaped and textured with considerable imagination.

Arts and crafts and industrial design flourish side by side, often inspired by archaeological finds from the Viking Age, the culture of the northern Sami, and advanced schools of design. Norway has markedly increased its exports of furniture, enamelware, textiles, tableware, and jewelry, much of which incorporates design motifs reflecting these cultural heritages as well as avant-garde styles. A distinctive Scandinavian decorative art form called rosemaling, widely practiced in Norway, involves painting objects such as furniture with floral designs; special schools called folkehøgskoler offer classes in this and other crafts.

Norwegian composers Grieg and, to a lesser extent, Johan Svendsen and Geirr Tveitt have earned acclaim. Contemporary composers such as Åse Hedstrøm, Nils Henrik Asheim, and Cecilie Ore frequently employ themes drawn from ancient folklore, developing work performed by such ensembles as the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra. Musical festivals in Oslo, Trondheim, Bergen, and other cities honour genres ranging from jazz to heavy metal, hip-hop, and even Norway’s version of country music.

Whereas its Scandinavian neighbours Denmark and Sweden have long-established filmmaking traditions, the film industry in Norway did not achieve international success until the 1970s. The production of Norwegian-made feature films is subsidized, but they usually number about 10 each year. Many of those films are derived from Norwegian literature, including an adaptation of Undset’s novel Kristin Lavransdatter (1995), directed by internationally renowned Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann, and a film version of Jostein Gaarder’s best-selling novel Sofies Verden (1991; Sofie’s World), directed by Egil Gustavsen. Based on an ancient legend, Nils Gaup’s Ofelas (1987; Pathfinder)—most of the dialogue of which is in the Sami language—was nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign language film in 1988. Films in Norway are subject to censorship, primarily on grounds of violence and, to a lesser extent, erotic content.

Cultural institutions
Permanent theatres have been established in several cities, and the state traveling theatre, the Riksteatret, organizes tours throughout the country, giving as many as 1,200 performances annually. The Norwegian Opera, opened in 1959, receives state subsidies (as do most other theatres).

From the beginnings to c. 1700

Prehistory and the rise of the Rus

Indo-European, Ural-Altaic, and diverse other peoples have occupied what is now the territory of Russia since the 2nd millennium BCE, but little is known about their ethnic identity, institutions, and activities. In ancient times, Greek and Iranian settlements appeared in the southernmost portions of what is now Ukraine. Trading empires of that era seem to have known and exploited the northern forests—particularly the vast triangular-shaped region west of the Urals between the Kama and Volga rivers—but these contacts seem to have had little lasting impact. Between the 4th and 9th centuries CE, the Huns, Avars, Goths, and Magyars passed briefly over the same terrain, but these transitory occupations also had little influence upon the East Slavs, who during this time were spreading south and east from an area between the Elbe River and the Pripet Marshes. In the 9th century, as a result of penetration into the area from the north and south by northern European and Middle Eastern merchant adventurers, their society was exposed to new economic, cultural, and political forces.

The scanty written records tell little of the processes that ensued, but archaeological evidence—notably, the Middle Eastern coins found in eastern Europe—indicates that the development of the East Slavs passed through several stages.

From about 770 to about 830, commercial explorers began an intensive penetration of the Volga region. From early bases in the estuaries of the rivers of the eastern Baltic region, Germanic commercial-military bands, probably in search of new routes to the east, began to penetrate territory populated by Finnic and Slavic tribes, where they found amber, furs, honey, wax, and timber products. The indigenous population offered little resistance to their incursions, and there was no significant local authority to negotiate the balance between trade, tribute, and plunder. From the south, trading organizations based in northern Iran and North Africa, seeking the same products, and particularly slaves, became active in the lower Volga, the Don, and, to a lesser extent, the Dnieper region. The history of the Khazar state is intimately connected with these activities.

About 830, commerce appears to have declined in the Don and Dnieper regions. There was increased activity in the north Volga, where Scandinavian traders who had previously operated from bases on Lakes Ladoga and Onega established a new centre, near present-day Ryazan. There, in this period, the first nominal ruler of Rus (called, like the Khazar emperor, khagan) is mentioned by Islamic and Western sources. This Volga Rus khagan state may be considered the first direct political antecedent of the Kievan state.

Within a few decades these Rus, together with other Scandinavian groups operating farther west, extended their raiding activities down the main river routes toward Baghdad and Constantinople, reaching the latter in 860. The Scandinavians involved in these exploits are known as Varangians; they were adventurers of diverse origins, often led by princes of warring dynastic clans. One of these princes, Rurik, is considered the progenitor of the dynasty that ruled in various portions of East Slavic territory until 1598 (see Rurik dynasty). Evidences of the Varangian expansion are particularly clear in the coin hoards of 900–930. The number of Middle Eastern coins reaching northern regions, especially Scandinavia, indicates a flourishing trade. Written records tell of Rus raids upon Constantinople and the northern Caucasus in the early 10th century.

In the period from about 930 to 1000, the region came under complete control by Varangians from Novgorod. This period saw the development of the trade route from the Baltic to the Black Sea, which established the basis of the economic life of the Kievan principality and determined its political and cultural development.

The degree to which the Varangians may be considered the founders of the Kievan state has been hotly debated since the 18th century. The debate has from the beginning borne nationalistic overtones. Recent works by Russians have generally minimized or ignored the role of the Varangians, while non-Russians have occasionally exaggerated it. Whatever the case, the lifeblood of the sprawling Kievan organism was the commerce organized by the princes. To be sure, these early princes were not “Swedes” or “Norwegians” or “Danes”; they thought in categories not of nation but of clan. But they certainly were not East Slavs. There is little reason to doubt the predominant role of the Varangian Rus in the creation of the state to which they gave their name.

Ethnic groups and languages
Although ethnic Russians comprise more than four-fifths of the country’s total population, Russia is a diverse, multiethnic society. More than 120 ethnic groups, many with their own national territories, speaking some 100 languages live within Russia’s borders. Many of these groups are small—in some cases consisting of fewer than a thousand individuals—and, in addition to Russians, only a handful of groups have more than a million members each: the Tatars, Ukrainians, Chuvash, Bashkir, Chechens, and Armenians. The diversity of peoples is reflected in the 21 minority republics, 10 autonomous districts, and autonomous region contained within the Russian Federation. In most of these divisions, the eponymous nationality (which gives its name to the division) is outnumbered by Russians. Since the early 1990s, ethnicity has underlain numerous conflicts (e.g., in Chechnya and Dagestan) within and between these units; many national minorities have demanded more autonomy and, in a few cases, even complete independence. Those parts of Russia that do not form autonomous ethnic units are divided into various territories (kraya) and regions (oblasti), and there are two federal cities (St. Petersburg and Moscow).

Linguistically, the population of Russia can be divided into the Indo-European group, comprising East Slavic speakers and smaller numbers speaking several other languages; the Altaic group, including Turkic, Manchu-Tungus, and Mongolian; the Uralic group, including Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic; and the Caucasian group, comprising Abkhazo-Adyghian and Nakho-Dagestanian. Because few of the languages of the smaller indigenous minorities are taught in the schools, it is likely that some will disappear.

The Indo-European group
East Slavs—mainly Russians but including some Ukrainians and Belarusians—constitute more than four-fifths of the total population and are prevalent throughout the country. The Slavs emerged as a recognizable group in eastern Europe between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD, and the first Slav state, Kievan Rus, arose in the 9th century. After the Mongol invasions the centre of gravity shifted to Moscow, and the Russian Empire expanded to the Baltic, Arctic, and Pacific, numerically overwhelming the indigenous peoples. Despite its wide dispersal, the Russian language is homogeneous throughout Russia. Indo-Iranian speakers include the Ossetes of the Caucasus. In addition, there are sizable contingents of German speakers, who mainly populate southwestern Siberia, and Jews (recognized as an ethnolinguistic group rather than a religious one), who live mainly in European Russia; the numbers of both groups have declined through emigration.

The Altaic group
Turkic speakers dominate the Altaic group. They live mainly in the Central Asian republics, but there is an important cluster of Turkic speakers between the middle Volga and southern Urals, comprising the Bashkir, Chuvash, and Tatars. A second cluster, in the North Caucasus region, includes the Balkar, Karachay, Kumyk, and Nogay. There also are numerous Turkic-speaking groups in southern Siberia between the Urals and Lake Baikal: the Altai, Khakass, Shor, Tofalar, and Tyvans (Tuvans; they inhabit the area once known as Tannu Tuva, which was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1944). The Sakha (Yakut) live mainly in the middle Lena basin, and the Dolgan are concentrated in the Arctic.

Manchu-Tungus languages are spoken by the Evenk, Even, and other small groups that are widely dispersed throughout eastern Siberia. The Buryat, who live in the Lake Baikal region, and the Kalmyk, who live primarily to the west of the lower Volga, speak Mongolian tongues.

The Uralic group
The Uralic group, which is widely disseminated in the Eurasian forest and tundra zones, has complex origins. Finnic peoples inhabit the European section: the Mordvin, Mari (formerly Cheremis), Udmurt (Votyak) and Komi (Zyryan), and the closely related Komi-Permyaks live around the upper Volga and in the Urals, while Karelians, Finns, and Veps inhabit the northwest. The Mansi (Vogul) and Khanty (Ostyak) are spread thinly over the lower Ob basin (see Khanty and Mansi).

The Samoyedic group also has few members dispersed over a vast area: the Nenets in the tundra and forest tundra from the Kola Peninsula to the Yenisey, the Selkup around the middle Ob, and the Nganasan mainly in the Taymyr Peninsula.

The Caucasian group
There are numerous small groups of Caucasian speakers in the North Caucasus region of Russia. Abaza, Adyghian, and Kabardian (Circassian) are similar languages but differ sharply from the languages of the Nakh group (Chechen and Ingush) and of the Dagestanian group (Avar, Lezgian, Dargin, Lak, Tabasaran, and a dozen more).

Other groups
Several Paleo-Siberian groups that share a common mode of life but differ linguistically are located in far eastern Siberia. The Chukchi, Koryak, and Itelmen (Kamchadal) belong to a group known as Luorawetlan, which is distinct from the Eskimo-Aleut group. The languages of the Nivkh (Gilyak) along the lower Amur and on Sakhalin Island, of the Yukaghir of the Kolyma Lowland, and of the Ket of the middle Yenisey are completely isolated, though it is likely that Yukaghir is a relative of the Uralic languages.

Religion
Although ethnic differences in Russia have long contained a religious element, the position of religious organizations and of their individual adherents has varied with political circumstances. In the 10th century Prince Vladimir I, who was converted by missionaries from Byzantium, adopted Christianity as the official religion for Russia, and for nearly 1,000 years thereafter the Russian Orthodox church was the country’s dominant religious institution. After the communists took power in 1917, religious institutions suffered. The church was forced to forfeit most of its property, and many monks were evicted from their monasteries. The constitution of the former Soviet Union nominally guaranteed religious freedom, but religious activities were greatly constrained, and membership in religious organizations was considered incompatible with membership in the Communist Party. Thus, open profession of religious belief was a hindrance to individual advancement. More-open expression of Christian beliefs was permitted during World War II, when the government sought the support of Christians and Jews in the fight against fascism, but restrictions were reimposed when the war ended. In the 1980s, under the reformist regime of Mikhail Gorbachev, a policy of glasnost (“openness”) was declared, allowing greater toleration for the open practice of religion. The subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union made religious freedom a reality and revealed that large sections of the population had continued to practice a variety of faiths. Indeed, Russian nationalists who emerged beginning in the 1990s identified the Russian Orthodox church as a major element of Russian culture.

Today Russian Orthodoxy is the country’s largest religious denomination, representing more than half of all adherents. Organized religion was repressed by Soviet authorities for most of the 20th century, and the nonreligious still constitute more than one-fourth of the population. Other Christian denominations are much smaller and include the Old Believers, who separated from the Russian Orthodox church in the 17th century, and Baptist and Evangelical groups, which grew somewhat in membership during the 20th century. Catholics, both Western rite (Roman) and Eastern rite (Uniate), and Lutherans were numerous in the former Soviet Union but lived mainly outside present-day Russia, where there are few adherents. Muslims constitute Russia’s second largest religious group. In 1997 legislation was enacted that constrained denominations outside five “traditional” religions—Russian Orthodoxy, several other Christian denominations, Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism—restricting the activities of groups not registered in the country for at least 15 years. For example, groups not meeting this requirement at the time the law was implemented (such as Roman Catholics and Mormons) were unable to operate educational institutions or disseminate religious literature.

Although there is some degree of correlation between language and religion, the two do not correspond entirely. Slavs are overwhelmingly Orthodox Christian. Turkic speakers are predominantly Muslim, although several Turkic groups in Russia are not. For example, Christianity predominates among the Chuvash, Buddhism prevails among large numbers of Altai, Khakass, and Tyvans, and many Turkic speakers east of the Yenisey have retained their shamanistic beliefs (though some have converted to Christianity). Buddhism is common among the Mongolian-speaking Buryat and Kalmyk.

Jews long suffered discrimination in Russia, including purges in the 19th century, repression under the regime of Joseph Stalin, and Nazi atrocities on Russian soil during World War II. Beginning with Gorbachev’s reformist policies in the 1980s, Jewish emigration to Israel and elsewhere was permitted on an increasing scale, and the number of Jews living in Russia (and all parts of the former Soviet Union) has decreased. Prior to the breakup of the Soviet Union, about one-third of its Jewish population lived in Russia (though many did not practice Judaism), and now about one-tenth of all Jews in Russia reside in Moscow. In the 1930s Stalin established the Jewish Autonomous Region in the Soviet Far East as a Jewish province, though by the early 21st century only about 5 percent of the province’s population was Jewish.

The development of Russian culture
Russia’s unique and vibrant culture developed, as did the country itself, from a complicated interplay of native Slavic cultural material and borrowings from a wide variety of foreign cultures. In the Kievan period (c. 10th–13th century), the borrowings were primarily from Eastern Orthodox Byzantine culture. During the Muscovite period (c. 14th–17th century), the Slavic and Byzantine cultural substrates were enriched and modified by Asiatic influences carried by the Mongol hordes. Finally, in the modern period (since the 18th century), the cultural heritage of western Europe was added to the Russian melting pot.

The Kievan period
Although many traces of the Slavic culture that existed in the territories of Kievan Rus survived beyond its Christianization (which occurred, according to The Russian Primary Chronicle, in 988), the cultural system that organized the lives of the early Slavs is far from being understood. From the 10th century, however, enough material has survived to provide a reasonably accurate portrait of Old Russian cultural life. High culture in Kievan Rus was primarily ecclesiastical. Literacy was not widespread, and artistic composition was undertaken almost exclusively by monks. The earliest circulated literary works were translations from Greek into Old Church Slavonic (a South Slavic dialect that was, in this period, close enough to Old Russian to be understandable). By the 11th century, however, monks were producing original works (on Byzantine models), primarily hagiographies, historical chronicles, and homilies. At least one great secular work was produced as well: the epic The Song of Igor’s Campaign, which dates from the late 12th century and describes a failed military expedition against the neighbouring Polovtsy. Evidence also exists (primarily in the form of church records of suppression) of a thriving popular culture based on pre-Christian traditions centring on harvest, marriage, birth, and death rituals. The most important aspects of Kievan culture for the development of modern Russian culture, however, were not literary or folkloric but rather artistic and architectural. The early Slavic rulers expressed their religious piety and displayed their wealth through the construction of stone churches, at first in Byzantine style (such as the 11th-century Cathedral of St. Sophia, which still stands in Kiev, Ukraine) and later in a distinctive Russian style (best preserved today in churches in and around the city of Vladimir, east of Moscow). The interiors of many of these churches were ornately decorated with frescoes and icons.

The Muscovite period
The Mongol (Tatar) invasions of the early 13th century decimated Kievan Rus. By the time Russian political and cultural life began to recover in the 14th century, a new centre had arisen: Muscovy (Moscow). Continuity with Kiev was provided by the Orthodox church, which had acted as a beacon of national life during the period of Tatar domination and continued to play the central role in Russian culture into the 17th century. As a result, Russian cultural development in the Muscovite period was quite different from that of western Europe, which at this time was experiencing the secularization of society and the rediscovery of the classical cultural heritage that characterized the Renaissance. At first the literary genres employed by Muscovite writers were the same as those that had dominated in Kiev. The most remarkable literary monuments of the Muscovite period, however, are unlike anything that came before. The correspondence between Tsar Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible) and Andrey Mikhaylovich, Prince Kurbsky during the 1560s and ’70s is particularly noteworthy. Kurbsky, a former general in Ivan’s army, defected to Poland, whence he sent a letter critical of the tsar’s regime. Ivan’s diatribes in response are both wonderful expressions of outraged pride and literary tours de force that combine the highest style of Muscovite hagiographic writing with pithy and vulgar attacks on his enemy. Similarly vigorous in style is the first full-scale autobiography in Russian literature, Avvakum Petrovich’s The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum, by Himself (c. 1672–75).

As in the Kievan period, however, the most significant cultural achievements of Muscovy were in the visual arts and architecture rather than in literature. The Moscow school of icon painting produced great masters, among them Dionisy and Andrey Rublyov (whose Old Testament Trinity, now in Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery, is among the most revered icons ever painted). Russian architects continued to design and build impressive churches, including the celebrated Cathedral of St. Basil the Blessed on Moscow’s Red Square. Built to commemorate the Russian capture of Kazar, the Tatar capital, St. Basil’s is a perfect example of the confluence of Byzantine and Asiatic cultural streams that characterizes Muscovite culture.

The emergence of modern Russian culture
The gradual turn of Russia toward western Europe that began in the 17th century led to an almost total reorientation of Russian interests during the reign of Peter I (1682–1725). Although Peter (known as Peter the Great) was not particularly interested in cultural questions, the influx of Western ideas (which accompanied the technology Peter found so attractive) and the weakening of the Orthodox church led to a cultural renaissance during the reigns of his successors. In the late 1730s poets Mikhail Lomonosov and Vasily Trediakovsky carried out reforms as far-reaching as those of Peter. Adapting German syllabotonic versification to Russian, they developed the system of “classical” metres that prevails in Russian poetry to this day. In the 1740s, in imitation of French Neoclassicism, Aleksandr Sumarokov wrote the first Russian stage tragedies. In the course of the century, Russian writers assimilated all the European genres; although much of their work was derivative, the comedies of Denis Fonvizin and the powerful, solemn odes of Gavrila Derzhavin were original and have remained part of the active Russian cultural heritage. Prose fiction made its appearance at the end of the century in the works of the sentimentalist Nikolay Karamzin. By the beginning of the 19th century, after a 75-year European cultural apprenticeship, Russia had developed a flexible secular literary language, had a command of modern Western literary forms, and was ready to produce fully original cultural work.

Daily life and social customs
During the Soviet era most customs and traditions of Russia’s imperial past were suppressed, and life was strictly controlled and regulated by the state through its vast intelligence network. Beginning in the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms eased political and social restrictions, and common traditions and folkways, along with the open practice of religion, began to reappear.

Many folk holidays, which are often accompanied by traditional foods, have gained popularity and have become vital elements of popular culture. Festivities generally include street carnivals that feature entertainers and children in traditional Russian dress. Boys usually wear a long-sleeved red or blue shirt with a round, embroidered collar, while girls wear a three-piece ensemble consisting of a red or green sarafan (jumper), a long-sleeved peasant blouse, and an ornate kokoshnik (headdress).

Maslyanitsa, the oldest Russian folk holiday, marks the end of winter; a purely Russian holiday, it originated during pagan times. During Maslyanitsa (“butter”), pancakes—symbolizing the sun—are served with caviar, various fish, nuts, honey pies, and other garnishes and side dishes. The meal is accompanied by tea in the ever-present samovar (tea kettle) and is often washed down with vodka.

Baked goods are ubiquitous on Easter, including round-shaped sweet bread and Easter cake. Traditionally, pashka, a mixture of sweetened curds, butter, and raisins, is served with the cake. Hard-boiled eggs painted in bright colours also are staples of the Easter holiday.

The Red Hill holiday is observed on the first Sunday after Easter and is considered the best day for wedding ceremonies. In summer the Russian celebration of Ivan Kupalo (St. John the Baptist) centres on water, and celebrants commonly picnic or watch fireworks from riverbanks.

Another popular traditional holiday is the Troitsa (Pentecost), during which homes are adorned with fresh green branches. Girls often make garlands of birch branches and flowers to put into water for fortune-telling. In the last month of summer, there is a cluster of three folk holidays—known collectively as the Spas—that celebrate honey and the sowing of the apple and nut crops, respectively.

Russia also has several official holidays, including the Russian Orthodox Christmas (January 7), Victory Day in World War II (May 9), Independence Day (June 12), and Constitution Day (December 12). Women’s Day (March 8), formerly known as International Women’s Day and celebrated elsewhere in the world by its original name, was established by Soviet authorities to highlight the advances women made under communist rule. During the holiday women usually receive gifts such as flowers and chocolates.

Although a wide array of imported packaged products are now found in Russian cities, traditional foods and ingredients remain popular, including cabbage, potatoes, carrots, sour cream, and apples—the principal ingredients of borsch, the famous Russian soup made with beets. Normally, Russians prefer to finish their daily meals with a cup of tea or coffee (the latter more common in the larger cities). Also popular is kvass, a traditional beverage that can be made at home from stale black bread. On a hot summer day, chilled kvass is used to make okroshka, a traditional cold soup laced with cucumbers, boiled eggs, sausages, and salamis.

Vodka, the national drink of Russia, accompanies many family meals, especially on special occasions. The basic vodkas have no additional flavouring, but they are sometimes infused with cranberries, lemon peel, pepper, or herbs. Vodka is traditionally consumed straight and is chased by a fatty salt herring, a sour cucumber, a pickled mushroom, or a piece of rye bread with butter. It is considered bad manners and a sign of weak character to become visibly intoxicated from vodka.

The growth of the Russian middle class has generated dramatic changes in Russia’s lifestyles and social customs. Travel abroad has become popular, and consumption, particularly of imported luxury goods, has increased. Many wealthy individuals have purchased private land and built second homes, often of two or three stories. Russia’s middle class has adopted values that are distinctly different from Soviet practice. The new values include self-reliance and viewing work as source of joy and pride; the middle class also tends to avoid political extremes, to participate in charitable organizations, and to patronize theatres and restaurants. Estimates of the size of the middle class vary (as do definitions of it), but it is generally assumed that it constitutes about one-fourth of Russian society, and much of that is concentrated in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other urban areas.

The rebirth of religion is another dimension of the changed lifestyles of new Russia. Although a majority of Russians are nonbelievers, religious institutions have filled the vacuum created by the downfall of communist ideology, and even many nonbelievers participate in the now-ubiquitous religious festivities.

The arts
Literature
The 19th century
The first quarter of the 19th century was dominated by Romantic poetry. Vasily Zhukovsky’s 1802 translation of Thomas Gray’s “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” ushered in a vogue for the personal, elegiac mode that was soon amplified in the work of Konstantin Batyushkov, Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky, and the young Aleksandr Pushkin. Although there was a call for civic-oriented poetry in the late 1810s and early ’20s, most of the strongest poets followed Zhukovsky’s lyrical path. However, in the 1820s the mature Pushkin went his own way, producing a series of masterpieces that laid the foundation for his eventual recognition as Russia’s national poet (the equivalent of William Shakespeare for English readers or Dante for Italians). Pushkin’s works include the Byronic long poems The Prisoner of the Caucasus (1820–21) and The Gypsies (1824), the novel in verse Yevgeny Onegin (published 1833), and the Shakespearean tragedy Boris Godunov (1831), as well as exquisite lyrical verse. Pushkin’s poetry is remarkable for its classical balance, brilliant and frequently witty use of the Russian literary language, and philosophical content.

During the 1830s a gradual decline in poetry and a rise of prose took place, a shift that coincided with a change in literary institutions. The aristocratic salon, which had been the seedbed for Russian literature, was gradually supplanted by the monthly “thick journals,” the editors and critics of which became Russia’s tastemakers. The turn to prose was signaled in the work of Pushkin, whose Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin (1831), The Queen of Spades (1834), and The Captain’s Daughter (1836) all appeared before his death in 1837. Also in the 1830s the first publications appeared by Nikolay Gogol, a comic writer of Ukrainian origin, whose grotesquely hilarious oeuvre includes the story The Nose, the play The Government Inspector (both 1836), and the epic novel Dead Souls (1842). Although Gogol was then known primarily as a satirist, he is now appreciated as a verbal magician whose works seem akin to the absurdists of the 20th century. One final burst of poetic energy appeared in the late 1830s in the verse of Mikhail Lermontov, who also wrote A Hero of Our Time (1840), the first Russian psychological novel.

In the 1840s the axis of Russian literature shifted decisively from the personal and Romantic to the civic and realistic, a shift presided over by the great Russian literary critic Vissarion Belinsky. Belinsky desired a literature primarily concerned with current social problems, although he never expected it to give up the aesthetic function entirely. By the end of the 1840s, Belinsky’s ideas had triumphed. Early works of Russian realism include Ivan Goncharov’s antiromantic novel A Common Story (1847) and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Poor Folk (1846).

From the 1840s until the turn of the 20th century, the realist novel dominated Russian literature, though it was by no means a monolithic movement. In the early period the favoured method was the “physiological sketch,” which often depicted a typical member of the downtrodden classes; quintessential examples are found in Ivan Turgenev’s 1852 collection A Sportsman’s Sketches. In these beautifully crafted stories, Turgenev describes the life of Russian serfs as seen through the eyes of a Turgenev-like narrator; indeed, his powerful artistic depiction was credited with convincing Tsar Alexander II of the need to emancipate the serfs. Turgenev followed Sketches with a series of novels, each of which was felt by contemporaries to have captured the essence of Russian society. The most celebrated is Fathers and Sons (1862), in which generational and class conflict in the period of Alexander II’s reforms is described through the interactions of the Kirsanov family (father, son, and uncle) with the young “nihilist” Bazarov.

The two other great realists of the 19th century were Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy. Dostoyevsky, who was arrested in 1849 for his involvement in a socialist reading group, reentered the literary scene in the late 1850s. He experienced a religious conversion during his imprisonment, and his novels of the 1860s and ’70s are suffused with messianic Orthodox ideas. His major novels—Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868–69), The Possessed (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80)—are filled with riveting, often unstable characters and dramatic scenes. While Dostoyevsky delves into the psychology of men and women at the edge, Tolstoy’s novels treat the everyday existence of average people. In both War and Peace (1865–69) and Anna Karenina (1875–77), Tolstoy draws beautifully nuanced portraits filled with deep psychological and sociological insight.

By the early 1880s the hegemony of the realist novel was waning, though what would replace it was unclear. Russian poetry, notwithstanding the civic verse of Nikolay Nekrasov and the subtle lyrics of Afanasy Fet, had not played a central role in the literary process since the 1830s, and drama, despite the able work of Aleksandr Ostrovsky, was a marginal literary activity for most writers. The only major prose writer to appear in the 1880s and ’90s was Anton Chekhov, whose specialty was the short story. In his greatest stories—including The Man in a Case (1898), The Lady with a Lapdog (1899), The Darling (1899), and In the Ravine (1900)—Chekhov manages to attain all the power of his great predecessors in a remarkably compact form. Toward the end of his career, Chekhov also became known for his dramatic work, including such pillars of the world theatrical repertoire as Uncle Vanya (1897) and The Cherry Orchard (first performed 1904). Chekhov’s heirs in the area of short fiction were Maxim Gorky (later the dean of Soviet letters), who began his career by writing sympathetic portraits of various social outcasts, and the aristocrat Ivan Bunin, who emigrated after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1933.

The 20th century
The beginning of the 20th century brought with it a new renaissance in Russian poetry and drama, a “Silver Age” that rivaled, and in some respects surpassed, the Pushkinian “Golden Age.” The civic orientation that had dominated Russian literature since the 1840s was, for the moment, abandoned. The avant-garde’s new cry was “art for art’s sake,” and the new idols were the French Symbolists. The first, “decadent” generation of Russian Symbolists included the poets Valery Bryusov, Konstantin Balmont, and Zinaida Gippius. The second, more mystically and apocalyptically oriented generation included Aleksandr Blok (perhaps the most talented lyric poet Russia ever produced), the poet and theoretician Vyacheslav Ivanov, and the poet and prose writer Andrey Bely. The Symbolists dominated the literary scene until 1910, when internal dissension led to the movement’s collapse.

The period just before and immediately following the Russian Revolution of 1917 was marked by the work of six spectacularly talented, difficult poets. Anna Akhmatova’s brief, finely chiseled lyrics brought her fame at the outset of her career, but later in life she produced such longer works as Requiem, written from 1935 to 1940 but published in Russia only in 1989, her memorial to the victims of Joseph Stalin’s purges (particularly her son, who was imprisoned in 1937). The Futurists Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky engaged in innovative experiments to free poetic discourse from the fetters of tradition. Marina Tsvetayeva, another great poetic experimenter, produced much of her major work outside the country but returned to the Soviet Union in 1939, only to commit suicide there two years later. Boris Pasternak, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, produced lyrics of great depth and power in this period, and Osip Mandelshtam created some of the most beautiful and haunting lyric poems in the Russian language.

Many of the writers who began to publish immediately after the 1917 revolution turned to prose, particularly the short story and the novella. Those who had been inspired by the recent revolution and the subsequent Russian Civil War (1918–20) included Boris Pilnyak (The Naked Year [1922]), Isaak Babel (Red Cavalry [1926]), and Mikhail Sholokhov, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1965. Others described life in the new Soviet Union with varying degrees of mordant sarcasm; the short stories of Mikhail Zoshchenko, the comic novels of Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, and the short novel Envy (1927) by Yury Olesha fall into this category. Writing in Russian also flourished in communities of anticommunist exiles in Germany, France, Italy, and the United States, as represented by writers as various as the novelists Vladimir Nabokov and Yevgeny Zamyatin and the theologian-philosophers Vladimir Nikolayevich Lossky, Sergey Bulgakov, and Nikolay Berdyayev.

In the first decade after the revolution, there were also advances in literary theory and criticism, which changed methods of literary study throughout the world. Members of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and of OPOYAZ (Obshchestvo Izucheniya Poeticheskogo Yazyka; Society for the Study of Poetic Language) in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) combined to create Formalist literary criticism (see Formalism), a movement that concentrated on analyzing the internal structure of literary texts. At the same time, Mikhail Bakhtin began to develop a sophisticated criticism concerned with ethical problems and ways of representing them, especially in the novel, his favourite genre.

By the late 1920s the period of Soviet experimentation had ended. Censorship became much stricter, and many of the best writers were silenced. During the late 1920s and the ’30s, there appeared what became known as the classics of Socialist Realism, a literary method that in 1934 was declared to be the only acceptable one for Soviet writers. Only a few of these works produced in this style—notably Fyodor Gladkov’s Cement (1925), Nikolay Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered (1932–34), and Valentin Katayev’s Time, Forward! (1932)—have retained some literary interest. The real masterpieces of this period, however, did not fit the canons of Socialist Realism and were not published until many years later. They include Mikhail Bulgakov’s grotesquely funny The Master and Margarita (1966–67) and Andrey Platonov’s dark pictures of rural and semiurban Russia, The Foundation Pit (1973) and Chevengur (1972).

With Stalin’s death in 1953 and the subsequent “thaw,” new writers and trends appeared in the 1950s and early ’60s. Vibrant young poets such as Joseph Brodsky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Andrey Voznesensky exerted a significant influence, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn emerged from the Soviet prison-camp system (Gulag) and shocked the country and the world with details of his brutal experiences as depicted in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). “Youth” prose on the model of American writer J.D. Salinger’s fiction appeared as well, particularly in the work of Vasily Aksyonov and Vladimir Voynovich. By the late 1960s, however, most of these writers had again been silenced. Solzhenitsyn—who was charged with treason shortly after the publication of the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago in 1973—and Brodsky, Aksyonov, and Voynovich had all been forced into exile by 1980, and the best writing was again unpublishable.

Practically the only decent writing published from the late 1960s through the early 1980s came from the “village prose” writers, who treated the clash of rural traditions with modern life in a realistic idiom. The most notable members of this group were the novelist Valentin Rasputin and the short-story writer Vasily Shukshin. The morally complex fiction of Yury Trifonov, staged in an urban setting (e.g., The House on the Embankment [1976]), stands somewhat apart from the works of Rasputin and Shukshin that praise Russian rural simplicity. Nevertheless, as in the 1930s and ’40s, the most important literature of this period was first published outside the Soviet Union. Notable writers included Varlam Shalamov, whose exquisitely artistic stories chronicled the horrors of the prison camps; Andrey Sinyavsky, whose complex novel Goodnight! appeared in Europe in 1984, long after he had been forced to leave the Soviet Union; and Venedikt Yerofeyev, whose grotesque latter-day picaresque Moscow-Petushki—published in a clandestine (samizdat) edition in 1968—is a minor classic.

Some of the best work published in the 1980s was in poetry, including the work of conceptualists such as Dmitry Prigov and the meta-metaphoric poetry of Aleksey Parshchikov, Olga Sedakova, Ilya Kutik, and others. The turbulent 1990s were a difficult period for most Russian writers and poets. The publishing industry, adversely affected by the economic downturn, struggled to regain its footing in the conditions of a market economy. Nonetheless, private foundations began awarding annual literary prizes, such as the Russian Booker Prize and the Little Booker Prize. The so-called Anti-Booker Prize—its name, a protest against the British origins of the Booker Prize, was selected to emphasize that it was a Russian award for Russian writers—was first presented in 1995 by the Nezavisimaya Gazeta. Tatyana Tolstaya began to occupy a prominent role following the publication of her novel The Slynx (2000), a satire about a disastrous hypothetical future for Moscow. Some critics considered the decade the “twilight period in Russian literature,” because of the departure from traditional psychological novels about contemporary life in favour of detective novels. Indeed, such novels were among the best-selling fiction of the period, particularly the work of Boris Akunin, whose Koronatsiia (“Coronation”) won the Anti-Booker Prize in 2000.

Earliest settlements
The thick ice cap that covered Sweden during the last glacial period began to recede in the southern region about 14,800 years ago. A few thousand years later the earliest hunters in the region began following migratory paths behind the retreating ice field. The stratified clay deposits that were left annually by the melting ice have been studied systematically by Swedish geologists, who have developed a dependable system of geochronology that verifies the dates of the thaw. The first traces of human life in Sweden, dating from about 9000 BCE, were found at Segebro outside Malmö in the extreme southern reaches of Sweden, but earlier settlement could have been facilitated by land bridges between present-day Denmark and southern Sweden that existed from about 13,100–12,700 and 12,100–10,300 years ago. Finds from the peat at Ageröd in Skåne dated to 6500 BCE reveal a typical food-gathering culture with tools of flint and primitive hunting and fishing equipment, such as the bow and arrow and the fishing spear. New tribes, practicing agriculture and cattle raising, made their appearance about 2500 BCE, and soon afterward a peasant culture with good continental communications was flourishing in what are now the provinces of Skåne, Halland, Bohuslän, and Västergötland. The so-called Boat-Ax culture (an outlier of the European Battle-Ax cultures) arrived about 2000 BCE and spread rapidly. During the Neolithic Period, southern and central Sweden displayed the aspects of a homogeneous culture, with central European trade links; in northern Sweden the hunting culture persisted throughout the Stone and Bronze ages.

Settlers became familiar with copper and bronze around 1500 BCE. Information about Sweden’s Bronze Age has been obtained by studying rock carvings and relics of the period, as, for example, the ornate weapons of chieftains and other decorative items preserved in the earth. The early Bronze Age (c. 1500–1000 BCE) was also characterized by strong continental trade links, notably with the Danube River basin. Stone Age burial customs (skeleton sepulture, megalithic monuments) were gradually replaced by cremation. Rock carvings suggest a sun cult and fertility rites. Upheavals on the continent, combined with Celtic expansion, seem to have interrupted (c. 500 BCE) bronze imports to Scandinavia, and a striking poverty of finds characterizes the next few centuries. The climate, comparatively mild since the Neolithic Period, deteriorated, necessitating new farming methods. At this time, iron reached the north.

For the early Iron Age (c. 400 BCE–c. 1 CE) the finds are also relatively scanty, showing only sporadic contacts with the La Tène culture, but they become more abundant from the Roman Iron Age (c. 1 CE–400) onward. The material from this period shows that Sweden had developed a culture of its own, although naturally reflecting external influences.

Trade links between the Roman Empire and Scandinavia gave Rome some knowledge of Sweden. The Germania (written 98 CE) of Tacitus gives the first description of the Svear, or Suiones (Swedes), stated to be powerful in men, weapons, and fleets. Other ancient writers who mention Scandinavia are Ptolemy, Jordanes, and Procopius.

The Viking Age
At the beginning of this period a number of independent tribes were settled in what is now Sweden, and their districts are still partly indicated by the present divisions of the country. The Swedes were centred in Uppland, around Uppsala. Farther south the Götar lived in the agricultural lands of Östergötland and Västergötland. The absence of historical sources makes it impossible to trace the long process by which these provinces were formed into a united and independent state. The historical events leading to unification are reflected darkly in the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf—which gives the earliest known version of the word sveorice, svearike, sverige (Sweden)—and also in the Old Norse epic Ynglingatal, contained in the Heimskringla of Snorri Sturluson.

As a result of Arab expansion in the Mediterranean area in the 8th and 9th centuries, the trade routes along the Russian rivers to the Baltic Sea acquired enhanced importance. In the second half of the 9th century, Swedish peasant chieftains secured a firm foothold in what is now western Russia and Ukraine and ruthlessly exploited the Slav population. From their strongholds, which included the river towns of Novgorod and Kiev, they controlled the trade routes along the Dnieper to the Black Sea and Constantinople (now Istanbul) and along the Volga to the Caspian Sea and the East. Trade in slaves and furs was particularly lucrative, as the rich finds of Arab silver coins in Swedish soil demonstrate. Swedish Vikings also controlled trade across the Baltic; and it was for this activity that Birka, generally regarded as Sweden’s oldest town, was founded (c. 800). Swedish Vikings took part in raids against western Europe as well. From the 10th century, however, control of the Russian market began to slip from Swedish hands into those of Frisian, German, and Gotland merchants.

Christianization
The first attempt to Christianize Sweden was made by the Frankish monk Ansgar in 830. He was allowed to preach and set up a church in Birka, but the Swedes showed little interest. A second Frankish missionary was forced to flee. In the 930s another archbishop of Hamburg, Unni, undertook a new mission, with as little success as his predecessors. In Västergötland to the southwest, Christianity, introduced mainly by English missionaries, was more generally accepted during the 11th century. In central Sweden, however, the temple at Uppsala provided a stronghold for pagan resistance, and it was not until the temple was pulled down at the end of the 11th century that Sweden was successfully Christianized.

The struggle between the old and new religions strongly affected the political life of Sweden in the 11th century. Olaf (Olof Skötkonung), who came from Västergötland but proclaimed himself ruler of all Sweden during the early 11th century, was baptized in Skara about the year 1000. He supported the new religion, as did his sons Anund Jakob (reigned c. 1022–c. 1050) and Edmund (c. 1050–60). The missionaries from Norway, Denmark, and even Russia and France, as well as from Hamburg, won converts, especially in Götaland, the area where the royal dynasty made its home and where early English missionaries had prepared the ground. Many pagans refused to abandon their old faith, however, and civil wars and feuds continued. Claimants vied for the throne until the mid-13th century, when a stable monarchy was finally achieved.

The 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries
When and where Sweden originated have long been matters of debate. Some historians contend that the cradle of Sweden is located in Västergötland and Östergötland—i.e., in the southwestern and southeastern parts of the country. Others maintain that Sweden was founded in the Lake Mälar region in Uppland by the Svear, who subjugated the central provinces and eventually conquered the provinces of Götaland. Evidence indicates, however, that, at the end of the Viking era in the 11th century, Sweden remained a loose federation of provinces. The local chieftains from time to time proclaimed themselves rulers over all Sweden, when in reality each formally exerted power only over his own province. It appears that the Swedish provinces were first united in the 12th century. The oldest document in which Sweden is referred to as a united and independent kingdom is a papal decree, by which Sweden in 1164 became a diocese with its own archbishop in Uppsala.

Sweden in the 12th century consisted of Svealand and Götaland, which were united into a single kingdom during the first half of that century, while the provinces of Skåne, Halland, and Blekinge in the south belonged to Denmark; Bohuslän in the west, along with Jämtland and Härjedalen in the north, were part of Norway. About 1130 Sverker, a member of a magnate family from Östergötland, was acknowledged as king, and this province now became the political centre of Sweden. Sverker sided with the church and established several cloisters staffed by French monks; he was murdered about 1156. During the later years of Sverker’s reign, a pretender named Erik Jedvardsson was proclaimed king in Svealand; little is known about Erik, but according to legend he undertook a crusade to Finland, died violently about 1160, and was later canonized as the patron saint of Sweden.

Civil wars
Erik’s son Knut killed Sverker’s son (1167) and was accepted as king of the entire country. Knut organized the currency system, worked for the organization of the church, and established a fortress on the site of Stockholm. After his death in 1196, members of the families of Erik and Sverker succeeded each other on the throne for half a century. While the families were battling for the throne, the archbishopric at Uppsala was established, and the country was organized into five bishoprics. The church received the right to administer justice according to canon law and a separate system of taxation, protected by royal privileges, and the pretenders sought the church’s sanction for their candidacies. The first known coronation by the archbishop was that of Erik Knutsson in 1210. The church also gave its sanction to the “crusades” against Finland and the eastern Baltic coast; the action combined an attempt at Christianization with an attempt at conquering the areas.

By the mid-13th century the civil wars were drawing to an end. The most important figure in Sweden at that time was Birger Jarl, a magnate of the Folkung family. The jarls (earls) organized the military affairs of the eastern provinces and commanded the expeditions abroad. Birger was appointed jarl in 1248 by the last member of the family of St. Erik, Erik Eriksson, to whose sister he was married. Birger’s eldest son, Valdemar, was elected king when Erik died (1250). After Birger defeated the rebellious magnates, he assisted his son in the government of the country and gave fiefs to his younger sons. Birger was in fact ruler of the country until he died in 1266. During this time central power was strengthened by royal acts that were binding throughout Sweden, in spite of the existence of local laws in the provinces. The acts promulgated included those giving increased protection to women, the church, and the thing (“courts”) and improving the inheritance rights of women. By a treaty with Lübeck in 1252, Birger promoted the growth of the newly founded city of Stockholm. At the same time, the Hanseatic merchants received privileges in Sweden, and the establishment of towns blossomed.

In 1275 Valdemar was overthrown by his brother Magnus I (Magnus Ladulås) with the help of a Danish army. In 1280 a law was accepted establishing freedom from taxes for magnates who served as members of the king’s cavalry, creating a hereditary nobility; the following year Magnus Ladulås exempted the property of the church from all taxes. Under Magnus’s reign the position of jarl disappeared and was replaced by the drots (a kind of vice king) and the marsk (marshall), together with the established kansler (chancellor). The export of silver, copper, and iron from Sweden increased trade relations with Europe, especially with the Hanseatic cities.

Magnus died in 1290 and was succeeded by his 10-year-old son, Birger. The regency was dominated by the magnates, especially by the marsk, Torgils Knutsson; even after Birger’s coronation in 1302, Torgils retained much of his power. The king’s younger brothers Erik and Valdemar, who were made dukes, attempted to establish their own policies and were forced to flee to Norway (1304), where they received support from the Norwegian king; the following year the three brothers were reconciled. A new political faction was created by the leaders of the church, whom Torgils had repressed, together with a group of nobles and the dukes, and in 1306 the marsk was executed. Birger then issued a new letter of privileges for the church, but his brothers captured and imprisoned him. Two years later the kings of Denmark and Norway attacked Sweden on his behalf. Birger was again recognized king of Sweden at a peace concluded in 1310 with Denmark and Norway, but he was forced to transfer half of the kingdom to his brothers as fiefs. Erik’s territory, together with his earlier acquisitions, then consisted of western Sweden, northern Halland, southern Bohuslän, and the area around Kalmar and stretched across the borders of the three Scandinavian kingdoms. In 1312 the dukes married two Norwegian princesses, increasing their power and dynastic position; but in December of 1317 the dukes were imprisoned by their brother following a family dinner, and they died in prison. The nobility rebelled against Birger, who was forced to flee to Denmark in 1318, and the king’s son was executed.

Code of law
The magnates now seized control of Sweden and reasserted their power to elect a king. They chose Magnus, the three-year-old son of Duke Erik, who had shortly before inherited the crown of Norway. In connection with the election, the privileges of the church and the nobility were confirmed, and the king was not to be allowed to raise taxes without the approval of the council and the provincial assemblies. The magnates now revised the laws of Svealand and, by the Treaty of Nöteborg (1323), established the Finnish border with Russia. The Danish province of Skåne was bought and put under the Swedish king; by 1335 Magnus ruled over Sweden, including Skåne and Blekinge, Finland, and Norway, to which he soon added Halland. During Magnus’s reign a national law code was established (c. 1350), providing for the election of the king, preferably from among the royal sons, and a new town law code was written that gave the German merchants considerable privileges. In 1344 Magnus’s elder son Erik was elected heir to the Swedish throne, one year after his younger brother Haakon received the crown of Norway. Erik made common cause with the nobility and his uncle, Albert of Mecklenburg, against his father; and in 1356 Magnus was forced to share the kingdom with his son, who received Finland and Götaland. Two years later Erik died, and the kingdom was again united under Magnus’s rule.

In his struggles with the nobles, Magnus received the support of the Danish king, Valdemar Atterdag, and in 1359 Magnus’s son Haakon of Norway was engaged to Valdemar’s daughter Margaret. The following year Valdemar attacked Skåne, and Magnus relinquished Skåne, Blekinge, and Halland in return for Valdemar’s promise of help against Magnus’s Swedish enemies. In 1361 Valdemar attacked Gotland and captured Visby, an important Baltic trading centre. Haakon, who had been made king of Sweden in 1362, and Margaret were married in 1363. Magnus’s opponents among the nobility went to Mecklenburg and persuaded Duke Albert’s son, also named Albert, to attack Sweden; Magnus was forced to flee to Haakon’s territory in western Sweden. In 1364 the Folkung dynasty was replaced by Albert of Mecklenburg (1363–89). Albert joined in a coalition of Sweden, Mecklenburg, and Holstein against Denmark and succeeded in forcing Valdemar Atterdag from his throne for several years. Albert was not as weak as the nobles had hoped, and they forced him to sign two royal charters stripping him of his powers (1371 and 1383). At the end of the 1380s Albert had plans to reassert his power, primarily by recalling the royal lands that had been given to the nobles; in 1388 the Swedish nobles called upon Margaret, now regent of Denmark and Norway, for help. In 1389 her troops defeated and captured Albert, and she was hailed as Sweden’s ruler. Albert’s allies harried the Baltic and continued to hold out in Stockholm, and it was only in 1398 that Margaret finally won the Swedish capital. In 1396 her great-nephew Erik of Pomerania, then about age 16, became nominal king of Sweden, and the following year he was hailed and crowned king of Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, marking the beginning of the Kalmar Union.

The Kalmar Union
Sweden had entered the Kalmar Union on the initiative of the noble opponents of Albert of Mecklenburg. After Margaret’s victory over Albert and his allies, the national council announced its willingness to return those royal estates that had been given to its members during Albert’s reign, and Margaret succeeded in carrying out the recall of this property. She remained popular with the Swedes throughout her reign, but her successor, Erik, who took real power after her death in 1412, appointed a number of Danes and Germans to administrative posts in Sweden and interfered in the affairs of the church. His bellicose foreign policy caused him to extract taxes and soldiers from Sweden, arousing the peasants’ anger. His war with Holstein resulted in a Hanseatic blockade of the Scandinavian states in 1426, cutting off the import of salt and other necessities and the export of ore from Sweden, and led to a revolt by Bergslagen peasants and miners in 1434. The rebel leader, Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson, formed a coalition with the national council; in 1435 a national meeting in Arboga named Engelbrekt captain of the realm. Erik agreed to change his policies and was again acknowledged as king of Sweden by the council. Erik’s agreement was not fulfilled to the Swedes’ satisfaction, however, and in 1436 a new meeting at Arboga renounced allegiance to Erik and made the nobleman Charles (Karl) Knutsson captain of the realm along with Engelbrekt. Soon after, Engelbrekt was murdered by a nobleman; Charles Knutsson became the Swedish regent, and in 1438 the Danish council deposed Erik, followed in 1439 by the Swedish council.

The Danish council elected Christopher of Bavaria as king in 1440, and Karl Knutsson gave up his regency, receiving, in return, Finland as a fief, whereupon the Swedish council also accepted Christopher. He died in 1448 without heirs, and Charles Knutsson was elected king of Sweden as Charles VIII of Sweden. It was hoped that he would be accepted as the union king, but the Danes elected Christian of Oldenburg. The Norwegians chose Charles as king, but a meeting of the Danish and Swedish councils in 1450 agreed to give up Charles’s claims on Norway, while the councils agreed that the survivor of Charles and Christian would become the union king or, if this was unacceptable, that a new joint king would be elected when both were dead. Charles refused to accept this compromise, and war broke out between the two countries. In 1457 the noble opposition, led by Archbishop Jöns Bengtsson Oxenstierna, rebelled against Charles, who fled to Danzig. Oxenstierna and Erik Axelsson Tott, a Danish noble, became the regents, and Christian was hailed as king of Sweden. Christian increased taxes, and in 1463 the peasants in Uppland refused to pay and were supported by Oxenstierna, whom Christian then imprisoned. The bishop of Linköping, a member of the Vasa family, led a rebellion to free the archbishop, and Christian’s army was defeated. Charles was recalled from Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland) and again became king, but within six months difficulties between him and the nobles, especially Oxenstierna and the bishop of Linköping, forced him to leave the kingdom. Oxenstierna served as regent from 1465 to 1466 and was succeeded by Tott; the battles between the two families led to the recall of Charles, who ruled from 1467 to his death in 1470.

Ethnic groups
Although different groups of immigrants have influenced Swedish culture through the centuries, the population historically has been unusually homogeneous in ethnic stock, language, and religion. It is only since World War II that notable change has occurred in the ethnic pattern. From 1970 to the early 1990s, net immigration accounted for about three-fourths of the population growth. By far, most of the immigrants came from the neighbouring Nordic countries, with which Sweden shares a common labour market.

In the 1980s Sweden began to receive an increasing number of asylum seekers from Asian and African countries such as Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey, Eritrea, and Somalia, as well as from Latin American countries that were suffering under repressive governments. Then from 2010 to 2014 the number of people seeking asylum in Sweden expanded dramatically, reaching more than 80,000 in 2014, and that number doubled to more than 160,000 in 2015. Many of these people were fleeing the Syrian Civil War. From the beginning of that conflict, Sweden had granted residency to any Syrian seeking asylum (some 70,000 in total). Thus, by 2016 one in six Swedish residents had been born outside the country, and Sweden, feeling the strain of the mass influx of migrants, enacted new and more stringent immigration restrictions.

Sweden has two minority groups of indigenous inhabitants: the Finnish-speaking people of the northeast along the Finnish border, and the Sami (Lapp) population of about 15,000 scattered throughout the northern Swedish interior. Once a hunting and fishing people, the latter group developed a reindeer-herding system that they still operate. Most of the Sami in Sweden have other occupations as well.

Languages
Swedish, the national language of Sweden and the mother tongue of approximately nine-tenths of the population, is a Nordic language. It belongs to the North Germanic (Scandinavian) subgroup of the Germanic languages and is closely related to the Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faeroese languages. It has been influenced at times by German, but it has also borrowed some words and syntax from French, English, and Finnish. A common standard language (rikssvenska) has been in use more than 100 years. The traditionally varying dialects of the provinces, although homogenized rapidly through the influences of education and the mass media, are still widely spoken. Swedish is also spoken by about 300,000 Finland-Swedes. Swedish law recognizes Sami and Finnish (both of which belong to the Uralic language group), as well as Meänkieli (the Finnish of the Torne Valley), Romani, and Yiddish as national minority languages, along with sign language. About 200 languages are now spoken in Sweden, owing to immigrants and refugees.

Religion
Prehistoric archaeological artifacts and sites—including graves and rock carvings—give an indication of the ancient system of religious beliefs practiced in Sweden during the pre-Christian era. The sun and seasons figured largely, in tandem with fertility rites meant to ensure good harvests. These practices were informed by a highly developed mythic cycle, describing a distinctive cosmology and the deeds of the Old Norse gods, giants, and demons. Important gods included Odin, Thor, Freyr, and Freyja. Great sacrificial rites, thought to have taken place every eight years at Old Uppsala, were described by the author Adam of Bremen in the 11th century.

Sweden adopted Christianity in the 11th century, and for nearly 500 years Roman Catholicism was the preeminent religion. Sweden was the home to St. Bridget, founder of the Brigittine convent at Vadstena. As the first waves of the Protestant Reformation swept Europe in the mid-1500s, Lutheranism took hold in Sweden and remained dominant. The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Sweden was the official state church until 2000, and between three-fifths and two-thirds of the population remains members of this church. Since the late 1800s a number of independent churches have emerged; however, their members can also belong to the Church of Sweden. Immigration has brought a steady increase to the membership of the Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Islamic religions. Judaism is the country’s oldest global non-Christian religion, practiced in Sweden since 1776. After Christianity, Islam is the largest religion in Sweden, with about 100,000 active practitioners at the turn of the 21st century, although the number of Swedes of Muslim heritage was nearly three times that number.

Cultural milieu
Sweden’s cultural heritage is an interweaving of a uniquely Swedish sensibility with ideas and impulses taken from other, larger cultures. As a result, Swedish culture has long been characterized by a push and pull. Swedish art, poetry, literature, music, textiles, dance, and design are deeply infused with a primal relationship with the Nordic landscape and climate, but Swedes also have long been attracted to the greatness of the cultures of such countries as France and Germany, and influences from these and other European cultures have contributed to the development of Swedish literature, fashion, and cultural debate, as well as to the Swedish language itself.

As Swedish political influence grew, particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries, so did a desire among prominent Swedes for their country to take a place at centre stage with other important European cultures. This refusal to be classified as a cultural backwater remains a strong force today. At the same time, simplicity is a hallmark of Swedish culture, as is openness to new thoughts and trends. There is also a sense of wit and playfulness combined with candor and sincerity that is apparent not only in the works of Swedish cultural icons such as Selma Lagerlöf, August Strindberg, Ingmar Bergman, Astrid Lindgren, and Carl Larsson but also in Swedish folk music and folk art.

War-weary and largely nonaligned since the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century, Sweden embraced a neutrality and peacefulness that permitted the state in the 20th century to broadly support arts and culture politically, educationally, and economically. During the last half of the 20th century, Sweden welcomed immigrants and refugees who brought with them their own cultural traditions, which have informed the broader Swedish culture. The effects of American popular culture have also been widely felt in Sweden. A rebirth of contemporary Swedish creativity has attracted worldwide attention both in those art forms in which Swedes have traditionally thrived—literature and film—and in design, popular music, photography, fashion, gastronomy, and textiles.

Genuine rural folk traditions are disappearing in urban areas as a result of increasing settlement; however, since the 1990s there has been a resurgence of interest in those traditions among many Swedes who live in towns and cities. Still vital in Gotland, Dalarna, and various other areas are special national costumes, dances, folk music, and the like. Spring is celebrated on the last night of April with bonfires and song across the country. This is a great students’ festival in university towns such as Uppsala and Lund. The bright Midsummer Eve is celebrated around June 21, about the time of the year’s longest day (see solstice). In the ceremony a large pole, decorated with flowers and leaves, is placed into the ground and danced around. Some celebrations have a religious association: Advent, St. Lucia’s Day, Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide. Pagan elements are still sometimes evident in these holiday ceremonies. The Lucia candlelights are a relatively recent but very popular custom performed for St. Lucia’s Day on the morning of December 13, at almost the darkest time of year; the ceremony features a “Light Queen,” who, wearing a white gown and a crown of lighted candles, represents the returning sun.

Immigration, travels abroad, and imports have changed and internationalized the Swedish cuisine. However, the original Swedish buffet of appetizers known as a smörgåsbord remains a national favourite. The typical Swedish kitchen reflects the harsh northern climate, with fresh food available only during the short but intense summer season. In the words of the mother of Swedish cuisine, 18th-century cook Cajsa Warg, “You take what you get.” Swedish culinary traditions reflect the importance of being able to preserve and store food for the winter. Lutefisk (dried cod soaked in water and lye so it swells), pickled herring, lingonberries (which keep well without preservatives), knäckebröd (crispbread), and fermented or preserved dairy products such as the yogurtlike fil, the stringy långfil, and cheeses all reflect this need for foods that will keep through the colder parts of the year. Twisted saffron-scented buns called lussekatter and heart-shaped gingersnaps are served along with coffee in the early morning. Christmas is celebrated on December 24 with the traditional Julskinka ham. Glogg, a mulled, spiced wine, is also enjoyed during this season.

The arts
J.H. Roman, an 18th-century composer, has been called the father of Swedish music, but the Romantic composer Franz Berwald received wider acclaim for his 19th-century symphonies and other works. Notable 20th-century composers include the “Monday group,” who were inspired by the antiromantic Hilding Rosenberg in the 1920s and drew also upon leading modern composers from abroad. The vital Swedish folk song has been developed further by a number of musicians. The lively and often moving ballads and “epistles” of Carl Michael Bellman, an 18th-century skald, are still widely performed and enjoyed in contemporary Sweden. A number of Swedish opera singers, among them Jenny Lind, Jussi Björling, and Birgit Nilsson, gained renown throughout the world. Popular music, especially the Europop of the internationally celebrated group ABBA, and music production, editing, and advertising were major Swedish exports from the late 1970s on. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Swedish songwriter and producer Max Martin played a pivotal role in the success of several American hitmakers, including the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears. Moreover, in addition to making a national specialty of the heavy metal genre of “death” metal in the late 1980s and early ’90s, Sweden also produced a number of other performers and groups who achieved international pop music success in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, among them Ace of Base, the Hives, I’m from Barcelona, Peter Bjorn and John, and the Tallest Man on Earth.

Few names in Swedish literature were well known internationally until the 19th century, when the writings of August Strindberg won worldwide acclaim. He is still generally considered the country’s greatest writer. In the early 20th century, novelist Selma Lagerlöf became the first Swedish writer to win the Nobel Prize. A favourite poet in Sweden is Harry Martinson, who, writing in the 1930s, cultivated themes and motifs ranging from the romantic Swedish countryside to those concerned with global and cosmic visions. Other poets such as Karin Boye and Tomas Tranströmer have international reputations. In contemporary Swedish literature such authors as Kerstin Ekman, P.C. Jersild, Lars Gustafsson, Sara Lidman, Canadian-born Sven Delblanc, Henning Mankell, and Mikael Niemi have found a wide audience. Activist and journalist Stieg Larsson did not start writing fiction until later in his life, and though his literary career was cut short by his death by heart attack in 2004, he dazzled readers worldwide with a series of detective novels that included Män som hatar kvinnor (2005; “Men Who Hate Women”; Eng. trans. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), helping to set the stage for international appreciation of Swedish and Scandinavian crime fiction. One of the most widely published and translated modern Swedish writers is Astrid Lindgren, noted for her children’s books, including the famous Pippi Longstocking series. (For more information on Swedish literature, see the article Scandinavian literature.)

Swedish theatre, opera, and ballet are multifaceted. Birgit Cullberg attained international fame as director of the Swedish Royal Ballet in Stockholm. The Swedish cinema was pioneered in the silent and early sound eras by actor-director Victor Sjöström. Like Sjöström, director Ingmar Bergman moved from the stage to motion pictures, gaining critical acclaim outside Sweden with his film Wild Strawberries (1957). Subsequently, as many of both his earlier and later films became classics of international cinema, Bergman was hailed as one of the most important filmmakers of all time. Among other Swedes who have made major contributions to the art of filmmaking are actors Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman, Bibi Andersson, and Max von Sydow, cinematographer-director Sven Nykvist, and director Lasse Hallström. In the last decades of the 20th century, Lars Norén shouldered the mantle of Sweden’s national dramatist.

Modern Swedish visual art was inspired by late 19th-century romantic nationalism, originating with such painters as Carl Larsson, Anders Zorn, and Bruno Liljefors. Carl Milles dominated monumental sculpture in the 1920s. At the Paris World’s Fair in 1925, an important connection was established between Swedish industry and designers who had both academic art education and popular handicraft tradition. Superb results have been achieved in ceramics, woodwork, textiles, silver, and stainless steel. Sweden is also renowned for its leadership in glass and furniture design. Many famous glass designers such as Bertil Vallien, Ingegerd Råman, and Ulrica Hydman-Vallien (part of the Orrefors Kosta Boda group) and independent glass artists such as Ulla Forsell, Mårten Medbo, and Frida Fjellman have won international acclaim. Moreover, Sweden has been a world leader in industrial design, blending sound ergonomics, aesthetics, and high functionality. IKEA, perhaps Sweden’s best-known company, disseminates design in a thoroughly “Swedish” way all over the world.

Cultural institutions
The country’s cultural institutions are subsidized through state funding. Cultural activities reach all parts of the country through traveling companies devoted to theatre, concerts, and exhibitions. Despite state support, the majority of these cultural offerings are also dependent on private funding.

Every municipality has a public library where books are loaned free of charge. The libraries are often centres for other cultural events as well. Scientific libraries, including the largest ones, like the University of Uppsala library and the Royal Library, are also open to the public. Sweden has one of the highest library lending rates in the world.

There are about 300 museums and local heritage centres in Sweden. About 20 museums are run by the state; most of them are national museums in Stockholm. Besides the national museums for art, history, natural history, and folklore, the open-air Skansen historical park (founded in 1891) enjoys worldwide interest. In addition, there are county museums with regional responsibility. Sweden has a number of institutional theatres, including Stockholm’s Royal Opera and Royal Dramatic Theatre, both of which have held performances since the 1780s.

Several major professional symphony orchestras and chamber orchestras, along with many smaller musical institutions, form the backbone of musical life. The state supports the production of literature, films, and sound recordings, as well as art for public buildings.

Learned societies play an important role as independent promoters of arts and sciences. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, founded in 1739, is engaged in worldwide cooperative programs. It also selects Nobel laureates in chemistry and physics. The Nobel Prize for Literature is awarded by the Swedish Academy, which was inaugurated together with the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities by King Gustav III in 1786. The Nobel Prize award ceremony, held on December 10 each year, is the single most heralded annual event held in Sweden. It is arranged by the Nobel Foundation, which administers the funds and other properties from the estate of Alfred Nobel, who died in 1896.