Norway

Norwegian Christianity was a project of the crown, and its founding figure lost. Olaf Haraldsson was killed at Stiklestad in 1030 fighting an alliance of Norwegian magnates who did not want him or his religion, and within a year of the battle he was being venerated as a saint. That reversal is the whole shape of the thing: a king who lost his war became Rex Perpetuus Norvegiae, the eternal king of Norway, and his shrine at Nidaros became the seat of an archbishopric whose province covered Iceland, Greenland, the Faroes, Orkney, Shetland and the Isle of Man. Pilgrims walked to Trondheim from across the North Atlantic for four centuries.

The Reformation reversed the direction of travel. It arrived in 1537 by decree from Copenhagen, the shrine was stripped, the relics disappeared and the pilgrim roads went out of use. What replaced the shrine was a state church of unusual reach, which registered births, ran the parish schools and, from the eighteenth century, required confirmation before a young person could marry or take up a trade.

Separation came slowly and recently. The constitution was amended in 2012 to remove the Evangelical Lutheran faith as the official religion of the state, and the Church of Norway became a legally independent body in 2017, taking over its own employment of clergy. The financial arrangement that survived is the more interesting inheritance: the state funds the Church of Norway and pays every other registered religious and life stance community an equivalent grant per registered member, so the Humanist Association is funded on the same head count basis as a diocese.

Sources From Viking Stronghold to Christian Kingdom: State Formation in Norway, c. 900-1350Sverre Bagge with The Early Reformation in Denmark and Norway 1520-1559 (in The Scandinavian Reformation, ed. Grell)Martin Schwarz Lausten, in Ole Peter Grell (ed.), A Legitimate Church Democracy? Legitimacy Work and Democratic Reform during the Separation of Church and State in NorwayHelge Nylenna and Stephen Sirris, Norway: State and Church Separate After 500 Years (Global Legal Monitor)Law Library of Congress staff

The suppression of Sami religion in Norway was organised, documented and comparatively late. Thomas von Westen, appointed to lead the Seminarium Lapponicum from 1716, travelled the northern districts collecting the drums of the noaidi and recording what he was told about their use. Sacred sites were destroyed, offerings at sieidi stones were forbidden, and the drums were shipped south. Many were burned. Others were catalogued and entered European collections, which is why the surviving instruments are held mostly in museums outside Sapmi and why a good deal of what is known about the practice comes from the records of the men who ended it.

Two things follow from that, and they pull against each other. The mission archive is a genuine source, the fullest one there is for pre Christian Sami cosmology, and it is also a hostile witness that recorded the practice in order to identify and eradicate it. Reading it requires holding both facts at once.

Suppression of Sami language and religion continued through the Norwegianisation policy that ran into the second half of the twentieth century. Norway established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to examine it, and the commission delivered its report to the Storting in 2023. Alongside that, Sami institutions have pressed for the return of drums and other material from national collections, and repatriations have been made to Sami museums in the north.

Reclamation is real but it is not restoration. Nobody claims an unbroken line of noaidi practice. What exists is a living Sami relationship with sieidi places, joik as a form that was itself condemned as sinful and is now central to Sami public culture, and a body of scholarship written increasingly by Sami researchers rather than about them.