I have been working on this book for a long time, and on various aspects of Scandinavian history for much longer. I can now appreciate what Professor W. R. Mead meant when he wrote in the preface to his Historical Geography of Scandinavia (1981) of ‘the recurrent fear that it is over ambitious – indeed naïve – to embark on such an undertaking’. I can also sympathise with his other reasons for writing more slowly than he had intended: the difficulty of keeping pace with Scandinavian scholarship, and concern for the opinion of colleagues in the Nordic countries and elsewhere. In some sections of the book I have been able to draw upon my own earlier publications. I owe much, however, to the work of others in the field, and am only too well aware of the limits of my own knowledge and expertise (my inability to read Finnish or Russian remains the most nagging defect).

During the writing of this book I have incurred many debts of gratitude. Research in foreign countries always involves expense, in the Nordic countries more than most. When I first visited Norway in 1976, as a penurious research student, Great Britain was in the grip of a sterling crisis and Norway was at the height of the oil boom. I recall going without food for longer periods than I could manage now. Since then I have become more affluent; the disparities between the British and Nordic currencies have diminished; and Norwegian cuisine has improved. At an age when I would not mind losing some weight, I can now visit Scandinavia without doing so.