Robert Ferguson tells the extraordinary – and relatively little-known – story of the occupation and its judicial aftermath. He focuses in particular on German attempts to use a Norwegian Nazi administration under Vidkun Quisling to impose a National Socialist revolution on the country, and on the many brave and ingenious ways in which the Norwegians resisted.

Ferguson describes the occupation in all its aspects – from Nazi terror to non-violent resistance, from censorship to sabotage – via a series of heterogeneous but interlinked narratives. Key players in the occupation and its wider story – including the pitiless Reichskommissar Josef Terboven, the Norwegian crime writer-turned-SS-strongman Jonas Lie, the principled Lutheran bishop Eivind Berggrav and the enigmatic double agent Gunnar Waaler – are drawn in memorably vivid colours.

A riveting account of the Second World War’s forgotten occupation, Norway’s War evokes in moving fashion the moral and physical courage of a people who, faced with the brutal tyranny of a totalitarian invader, refused to be cowed.

Turf-roofed and wooden-built, offering fresh air, breathtaking views and peaceful isolation, the wooden cabin home – or hytte – is a crucial part of Norwegian national identity. In 2016, Robert Ferguson and his wife bought a piece of land high up in the Hardangervidda, and on it they built a cabin.

As the cabin takes shape, Ferguson learns how native Norwegians have married a new-found urban affluence to their past as a tight-knit rural community-nation, and confronts his own ideas about the dream-tradition of the hytte, drawing an affectionate but unsentimental portrait of Norwegian culture, society and landscape.

‘Singular and captivating: the pursuit of a dream’ Professor John Carey

‘Illuminating’ TLS

‘An uncompromising journey into the dark cold north, to reveal the warmth that comes from deep community bonds’ Tim Ecott

Scandinavia is the epitome of cool: we fill our homes with cheap but stylish Nordic furniture; we envy their health-giving outdoor lifestyle; we glut ourselves on their crime fiction; even their strangely attractive melancholia seems to express a stoic, common-sensical acceptance of life’s many vicissitudes. But how valid is this outsider’s view of Scandinavia, and how accurate our picture of life in Scandinavia today?

Robert Ferguson digs down through two millennia of history to tell stories of extraordinary events, people and objects – from Norwegian Death Metal to Vidkun Quisling, from Agnetha Fältskog to Greta Garbo, from Lurpak butter to the Old Norse rune stones – that richly illuminate our understanding of modern Scandinavia, its society, politics, culture and temperament.

Robert Ferguson is a sure guide across what he calls ‘the treacherous marches which divide legend from fact in Viking Age history’. His long familiarity with the literary culture of Scandinavia – the eddas, the poetry of the skalds and the sagas – is combined with the latest archaeological discoveries and the evidence of picture-stones, runes, ships and objects scattered all over northern Europe, to make the most convincing modern portrait of the Viking Age in any language. The Hammer and the Cross ranges from Scandinavia itself to Kievan Rus and Byzantium in the east, to Iceland, Greenland and the north American settlements in the west. Beyond its geographical boundaries the book takes us on a journey to a misty region inhabited by Hallfred the Troublesome Poet, Harald Bluetooth, Ragnar Hairy-Breeches, Ivar the Boneless and Eyvind the Plagiarist, in which literature, history and myth dissolve into one another.