About dominance of Sweden. Fortunately our relation to Scandinavian neighbors was always much better than what Ireland had with England. My brother lived in Ireland for some time and got to know their history and culture. The way the English treated the Irish was absolutely horrendous. I get why there is so much bitterness there.

Our history could not be more different. We were ruled by Denmark for 400 years until 1814. While it was certainly exploitative, they never treated Norway in the bad way England treated Scotland and Ireland. We have no history of Danish massacres of Norwegians or bloody crushing of revolts. Quite the contrary. Norwegians had more freedom and lower taxes than Danes. Although that was in part because Norway was much poorer than Denmark.

From 1814 to 1905 we entered union with Sweden. So this was different from the Danish arrangement and the relation between Ireland and England.

Norway had fought a war with Sweden and inflicted enough damage on Swedish forces that they accepted our demand to be an autonomous country with our own elected parliament. In exchange we had to accept the Swedish king as our king.

Thus Norway was actually in a pretty good position in those years. Sweden controlled our foreign policy but we ran Norway as we pleased. We had our own members of parliament and government.

There was however constant quarrels with Sweden. We could not agree how independent Norway was and we basically kept asserting more autonomy to the annoyance of the Swedes.

Thus while formally part of Sweden we kept expanding our fortresses on the Swedish border and improving our military to make sure they could not boss us around.

When Norway had enough of Sweden and left in 1905, it was bloodless. That says a lot about how different our relationship was with Sweden compared to Ireland with England.

To the Swedish king it was unthinkable to invade us to force us to stay in the union. He was bitter about being rejected but considered that two brother people could not go to war. He did not want Norwegians to hate Swedes.

The English kings and queens never seemed to care about such matters at all. Whether the Irish loved the English or not seemed irrelevant to them.

So I think Norway and Sweden has been blessed with a good relation of mutual respect… even if they are the butt of all our jokes ;-)