59 Fun Facts About Scandinavia

Which three countries most commonly make up Scandinavia in its narrowest definition?

Denmark, Norway and Sweden are all monarchies whose languages are close enough to be mutually understood; Finland and Iceland are Nordic countries, only sometimes counted as Scandinavian.

Which Roman author left one of the earliest written mentions of the name Scandinavia?

Pliny the Elder, like the geographer Pomponius Mela a generation before him, took it for a large island in the north; the first 'n' of the name is thought to be a slip for an older Scadinavia.

Which is Sweden's southernmost province?

Skåne, or Scania in English, is thought to share its root with the name Scandinavia itself; one reading makes it 'dangerous island', after the sandbanks off its coast, though the first element's origin is uncertain.

The Scandinavian Peninsula is roughly how long?

About 1,850 km (1,150 mi) of land that is still rising: Ice Age glaciers kilometres thick pressed the peninsula down, and it has been springing back ever since.

What is the highest mountain in Norway and on the whole Scandinavian Peninsula?

Galdhøpiggen, at 2,469 metres, long had a rival in neighbouring Glittertinden, which counted as higher while its summit snow cap lasted but has sat below it since the turn of this century.

What is the highest mountain in Sweden?

Kebnekaise's ice-capped southern peak has melted so far that the bare-rock northern peak, at about 2,097 metres, is now Sweden's highest point.

The Kalmar Union, joining Denmark, Sweden and Norway from 1397, was the design of which ruler?

Queen Margaret I had her great-nephew Eric of Pomerania crowned king of all three realms at Kalmar in 1397, yet she stayed the real ruler until her death in 1412.

Whose election as King of Sweden in June 1523 marked Sweden's final exit from the Kalmar Union?

Gustav Vasa took up the revolt after Denmark's Christian II had his father executed in the bloodbath that followed the king's coronation in 1520.

About how high above sea level is Møllehøj, the highest natural point in Denmark?

About 171 m is all Denmark manages: Møllehøj only took the title in 2005, when a new survey put it centimetres above two rival hills, and a millstone from an old windmill marks its summit.

Roughly 40 percent of Denmark's population lives on which island, home to Copenhagen?

Zealand did not give New Zealand its name: the Dutch named that country after their own province of Zeeland.

Which two autonomous territories in the North Atlantic form part of the Kingdom of Denmark?

The Faroe Islands and Greenland run most of their own affairs, and Greenland's self-rule law of 2009 goes further: it gives Greenlanders the right to leave the kingdom if they choose.

Denmark's Constitution Day, 5 June, marks the 1849 document that ended which form of government?

Absolute monarchy ended when Frederick VII, met with demands for a constitution soon after taking the throne in 1848, agreed to give up his unchecked power; he signed the new charter the following June.

Which monarch succeeded Margrethe II as Denmark's head of state after her abdication?

King Frederik X was proclaimed from the balcony of Christiansborg Palace on 14 January 2024, two weeks after Margrethe II announced her abdication in a live New Year's Eve speech.

Denmark's Jelling stones were raised in the tenth century by King Gorm the Old and which son?

Harald Bluetooth lent his nickname to the wireless standard, whose logo merges the runes for his initials, H and B.

Legend says Denmark's flag, the Dannebrog, fell from the sky during a 13th-century battle in which present-day country?

Estonia is where legend says a white-cross banner dropped from the sky to rally King Valdemar II's struggling army; Guinness lists the Dannebrog as the oldest national flag in continuous use.

The Lego name comes from the Danish phrase 'leg godt', meaning what?

'Play well' became the company name in 1934, when Lego still made wooden toys; its first plastic bricks did not reach the shops until 1949.

The Lego Group is based in which Danish town, where it also built its first Legoland park?

Billund owes even its airport to the toymaker: the private airstrip Lego laid beside its factory in 1961 grew into an international airport.

Hans Christian Andersen was born in 1805 in which Danish city?

Odense was the home Andersen left at 14, a poor shoemaker's son setting off for Copenhagen to try his luck in the theatre.

Copenhagen Airport and part of the Danish capital sit on which island?

Amager became Copenhagen's kitchen garden in the early 1500s, when King Christian II invited Dutch farming families to settle the island and grow vegetables for the capital.

How does the Øresund Bridge crossing continue from Peberholm island to the Danish coast?

A tunnel: the famous bridge covers only about half the crossing, because on Peberholm the road and railway dive under the Drogden strait for about four kilometres.

The Øresund Bridge, opened in 2000, links Copenhagen with which Swedish city?

Malmö was a Danish city until 1658, so the bridge tied Copenhagen back to a shore that Denmark once ruled.

Which scientific scale was devised in 1909 at the Carlsberg brewery's Copenhagen laboratory?

The pH scale was introduced by Danish chemist Søren Sørensen, who ran the laboratory's chemistry department and wanted a handy way to express acidity in his work on proteins.

Which animal appears among Carlsberg's original logos and gives its name to some of its lagers?

An elephant also guards the old brewery's gate: brewer Carl Jacobsen had four giant granite ones built in 1901 to carry its tower on their backs.

Norway's Constitution Day, 17 May, is celebrated above all with street parades of whom?

Children took over the day after writer Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson organised a schoolboys' parade to the Royal Palace in 1870; the date itself marks the signing at Eidsvoll in 1814.

In referendums in 1972 and 1994, Norwegians voted against joining what?

The European Union, and its forerunner in 1972, lost both votes, yet Norway follows most single-market rules anyway through the European Economic Area.

Norway's sovereign wealth fund, among the world's largest, was built from the revenues of which industry?

Oil and gas money goes into the fund rather than the budget to shield Norway's economy from swings in oil prices; it now owns almost 1.5 percent of all listed shares in the world.

Norway has two official written forms of its language: Bokmål and what?

Nynorsk was pieced together in the 1800s by linguist Ivar Aasen from Norway's rural dialects, as a home-grown rival to a written language inherited from centuries of Danish rule.

Which fjord, reaching 205 km inland, is Norway's longest and deepest?

Sognefjord plunges more than 1,300 metres below sea level, yet a rock sill at its mouth leaves the entrance only 100 to 200 metres deep.

Norway's capital was known by what name before it became Oslo in 1925?

Christiania took its name from King Christian IV, who moved the town beside Akershus Fortress after a fire in 1624 and named the new city after himself.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, opened in 2008, sits on which island of the Arctic archipelago?

Spitsbergen's permafrost would keep the seeds frozen even without power, and the vault proved its worth when war shut a gene bank near Aleppo and scientists withdrew their backup seeds to rebuild it.

The 1920 Svalbard Treaty gave Norway the islands but banned it from building what?

Naval bases and fortifications are barred, while citizens of every signatory country may work and mine there on equal terms, which is why Russia runs a coal-mining settlement on Norwegian soil.

The Moskstraumen tidal eddies off the Lofoten islands gave the English language which word?

Maelstrom began as the name Dutch mapmakers gave this one whirlpool, and it became a word for any violent swirl around 1841, the year of Edgar Allan Poe's tale 'A Descent into the Maelström'.

Which Nordic capital is built on islands where Lake Mälaren meets the Baltic?

Stockholm is said to have begun as a stronghold barring sea raiders from Lake Mälaren; first named in 1252, it had grown from that fortification into a town within decades.

Which Swedish warship sank on its 1628 maiden voyage and was raised almost intact in 1961?

Vasa had sailed only minutes when a gust heeled her over and water poured in through her open gunports; she went down in full view of the crowd that had come to see her off.

Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, whose will founded the Nobel Prizes, is best known for inventing which explosive?

Dynamite made Nobel rich, and his will left most of that fortune to the prizes; his family opposed it, so the first awards had to wait until 1901, five years after his death.

Which Nobel Prize is the only one awarded in Norway rather than Sweden?

Peace is the one prize that Nobel's will handed to a committee picked by Norway's parliament; he never said why, though Norway and Sweden shared a king at the time.

Which prize, absent from Alfred Nobel's will, was added to the Nobel line-up in 1968?

Economic Sciences joined because Sweden's central bank marked its 300th anniversary by endowing a prize in Nobel's memory, and the bank, not Nobel's fortune, pays the prize money.

IKEA's name joins founder Ingvar Kamprad's initials to those of Elmtaryd and Agunnaryd, which were what?

His childhood farm and village supplied the E and the A; Kamprad was 17 when he started the firm in 1943, and at first it sold pens, wallets and picture frames by mail order, with no furniture at all.

Swedish carmaker Volvo takes its name from a Latin word meaning what?

'I roll' names a carmaker that began life as a subsidiary of SKF, Sweden's ball-bearing maker, and only became an independent company in 1935.

Sweden lost Finland, part of its kingdom for centuries, to which power in 1809?

Imperial Russia won Finland in the war of 1808-09, yet Tsar Alexander I made it a self-governing grand duchy and promised that Finns could keep their own laws and religion.

Sweden ended two centuries of military non-alignment to join NATO in 2024 in response to what?

Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 led Sweden to apply alongside Finland that May; Finland was admitted within a year, while Sweden had to wait until March 2024.

Which French marshal, made heir to Sweden's throne in 1810, founded its reigning dynasty?

Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte was approached by a young Swedish baron, Carl Otto Mörner, who admired his generalship and his kind treatment of Swedish prisoners in Germany; parliament then elected him crown prince.

Peter the Great crushed Charles XII of Sweden's army at which 1709 battle in present-day Ukraine?

Poltava ended Sweden's days as a great power: almost the whole Swedish army was killed or captured, and Charles XII escaped with about 1,500 men into Ottoman territory.

Which are Sweden's two largest lakes?

Vänern and Vättern are joined by the Göta Canal, so a boat can cross Sweden from Gothenburg on the west coast to the Baltic without ever putting out to sea.

Smörgåsbord joins smörgås, an open sandwich, to the Swedish word 'bord', which means what?

Table is 'bord', and smörgås itself joins smör, butter, to gås, goose, because gås was also a dialect word for the lumps of butter that floated up in the churn and ended on the bread.

Sápmi, the homeland of the indigenous Sámi people, has traditionally been called what in English?

Lapland is built on 'Lapp', an outsiders' word for the Sámi that is now felt to be derogatory, which is why the Sámi prefer their own name for the land, Sápmi.

Semi-nomadic herding of which animal is the best-known traditional livelihood of the Sámi?

Reindeer are the livelihood outsiders picture, yet only about one Sámi in ten herds them today, and those who do have swapped skis for snowmobiles.

The Nordic Council, founded in 1952, soon let Nordic citizens do what?

Travel passport-free came with agreements of the 1950s that opened the frontiers and the job market together, so a Dane could move to Sweden and start work there without asking for a permit.

The Viking Age is often dated from 793 to 1066, the year of which event?

The Norman conquest of England came within a month of a Norwegian invasion that ended with Norway's king dead at Stamford Bridge; the Normans themselves were descended from Viking settlers.

The Norse settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, dated to about 1000, is in which modern country?

Canada's Newfoundland holds the site, and wood the Norse cut there has been dated to exactly 1021, thanks to a cosmic-ray burst in 993 that left a marker in the tree rings to count from.

What is the capital and largest city of Greenland?

Nuuk grew from the mission of Hans Egede, a Norwegian pastor who sailed in 1721 to find Greenland's lost Norse settlers, found none, and stayed to preach to the Inuit instead.

In the Faroe Islands' centuries-old grindadráp, boats drive which animals into shallow bays?

Pilot whales are herded ashore by a half-circle of boats, and by old custom the meat and blubber are divided among local people; written records of the catch go back to 1584.

At Sweden's Midsummer celebrations, people traditionally dance in a ring around what?

A maypole, dressed in leaves and flowers, goes up on Midsummer's Eve, and the dance nobody skips is 'The Little Frogs', in which adults hop around it miming the ears and tails that frogs lack.

Which self-governing island group in the Baltic belongs to Finland yet has Swedish as its only official language?

Åland's islanders campaigned to join Sweden after Finland became independent in 1917, but the League of Nations ruled in 1921 that they stay Finnish, with their language and self-rule protected.

Which warm ocean current system helps keep Norway's coast far milder than Alaska at the same latitude?

The Gulf Stream system keeps Norway's coast free of winter ice, which is why Narvik, inside the Arctic Circle, grew up as the year-round port for iron ore from Sweden's Kiruna mines.

Which 1658 treaty, signed in a Danish cathedral town, made Denmark–Norway cede Blekinge and other provinces to Sweden?

The Treaty of Roskilde followed a famous gamble: Sweden's King Charles X marched his army across the frozen sea straits towards Copenhagen, and Denmark gave up a swathe of its provinces to end the war.

The Scandinavian Monetary Union, set up in 1873 around a shared gold-backed krone, was effectively ended by which event?

World War I ended it in practice: in 1914 the three countries stopped redeeming their money for gold, and crowns that had been worth exactly the same began to drift apart.

The dream of one Scandinavian kingdom collapsed in 1864, when Denmark was left alone to fight which power?

Prussia, with Austria at its side, took Schleswig and Holstein from Denmark; Sweden's Charles XV had championed the idea of union, yet no Swedish or Norwegian army came to help.

Which Danish word names the mood of cosy, contented togetherness that Danes prize as part of their culture?

Hygge is shared with Norwegian, where it is just an everyday word for cosiness; it was the Danes who turned it into a point of national identity.