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The home pages for the Usenet newsgroup soc.culture.nordic

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These pages try to answer many questions foreigners to the Nordic countries could have. However, we have no intention what-so-ever to cover "all" questions. Basically, you here find topics which have been regular questions in the Usenet newsgroup SOC .CULTURE .NORDIC.

The contributions to these pages are made by the Usenet participants during the years, which make them less coherent than sites produced by a single person. The good thing is that different Nordic opinions often are represented.

Soc.culture.nordic FAQ

The Frequently Answered Questions (FAQ) document from the Usenet newsgroup SOC .CULTURE .NORDIC is a very good source of information about the Nordic countries.

As it was made available to the Internet in 1994, and web-ified in 1996, it was perhaps the best one. Today there are governmental sites which without questions are better in the sense that they cover the topics more completely and evenly. (See below for links to these governmental sites.) The niche of this FAQ is such topics which are commonly misunderstood by foreigners, and those topics which are commonly disputed inbetween Nordic people, although the first requirement to include a topic here is that some kind of consensus is established among (a large majority of) the participants of the newsgroup. Accordingly Finland's Civil War (1918) and Continuation War (1941-1944) are topics not yet covered.

The faq consists of the following parts:

• Big index
  
• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: Miscellaneous topics on Norden
• Part 3: Denmark
• Part 4: Finland
• Part 5: Iceland
• Part 6: Norway
• Part 7: Sweden
• Appendix:
  • Related texts (excerpts from the news group)

Whole parts of the faq can be obtained in text version.

The illustrations used to make the web-version of this FAQ more graphic (or maybe we should say "illustrative"?) are also available in a "juicier" manner in our illustration mine.

More sites:

For the other countries there are yet no clickable maps, but some good world wide web index exist for Iceland, the Faroe islands, Sweden. For tourist queries about Sweden there is a good commercial site at the Swedish Smörgåsbord. You can also find a fairly good tourist site for Greenland.

Information about Åland is for some mysterious reason very sparse in the faq on the following pages, but the link above to the site of Ålands Teknologicentrum is really a good one.

Old Norse (or Old Scandinavian) language, literature and history is discussed on the serious (and rather scholarly) mailinglist Oldnorse-Net, which has an archive at <http://www.hum.gu.se/arkiv/>.

Beautiful maps were made available by the University of Texas at Austin. That site has unfortunately disappeared from the www, but there are some Nordic maps mirrored by Lysator.

When speaking about Norden... A site covering all of Norden, is maintained by Nikos Markovits.

There are also governmental information sites for foreigners

• Official information about Denmark by the Royal Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs
• Official information about Finland by Finland's Ministry of Foreign Affairs
• Official information about Norway by ODIN - the central web-server for the Norwegian Government
• Official information about Sweden by The Swedish Institute
• Official statistics, economic indicators, for Sweden
• The Nordic Council & Nordic Councill of Ministers has its own web-site with official information about the Nordic co-operation.

• Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Latvia.
• Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Estonia.

Among the most popular entries to the rest of the world are the Virtual tourist's world map, presented by the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo together with Kinesava Geographics and CityNet. The United States' State Department informations about foreign countries (quite good although it's called "Travel Warnings and Consular Information Sheets" :-> ) are available from S:t Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota.

The US Department of the Army sponsors a series of books about foreign countries also available on the world wide web. Finland is the subject of one of these.

Finally the CIA World Factbook deserves to be mentioned, but of course you knew that one already, didn't you?

...and if nothing else helps, there is always:

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