Norway National Anthem

Ja, vi elsker dette landet

Yes, We Love This Country

Written 1859

Adopted 1864

Lyrics Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson

Music Rikard Nordraak

❤ Love of homeland 🌿 Nature 🏺 Ancestors / Heritage ✝ God / Faith ☮ Peace | Proud

Key Facts

1. Composer Rikard Nordraak, a cousin of Bjørnson, died of tuberculosis in March 1866 at just 23, less than two years after the first performance; his friend Edvard Grieg wrote a Funeral March in Memory of Rikard Nordraak.
2. The melody spans an octave and a fourth, an unusually wide range for a national anthem; in 1900 Edvard Grieg called it a "seeming impossibility" for a crowd to sing, yet said it captures the poem's feelings exactly.
3. The final text has eight stanzas, but usually only the first and the last two are sung.
4. The first version, printed in 1859 for the opening of the Storting, had six stanzas and was dedicated to Charles XV, king of the union of Sweden and Norway; in the revised version Bjørnson published in December 1863, the king was gone.

Norway National Anthem Lyrics

Ja, vi elsker dette landet, som det stiger frem, furet, værbitt over vannet, med de tusen hjem, elsker, elsker det og tenker på vår far og mor og den saganatt som senker drømme på vår jord. Norske mann i hus og hytte, takk din store Gud! Landet ville han beskytte, skjønt det mørkt så ud. Alt, hva fedrene har kjempet, mødrene har grett, har den Herre stille lempet, så vi vant vår rett. Ja, vi elsker dette landet, som det stiger frem, furet, værbitt over vannet, med de tusen hjem. Og som fedres kamp har hevet det av nød til seir, også vi, når det blir krevet, for dets fred slår leir.

Translations are non-official and intended to convey meaning, not replace originals

Analysis

Editorial

Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson wrote the first version of the text in 1859 and revised it until it reached its final eight-stanza form in 1870; Rikard Nordraak set it to music around 1863 to 1864, and the song was first performed in public on 17 May 1864, the 50th anniversary of the Constitution. Bjørnson won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1903. The anthem celebrates Norway's landscape and heritage. It served as a rallying song during the late-19th-century dispute over the union with Sweden and during the German occupation of 1940 to 1945. Long used as the national anthem by custom, it was recognised by a unanimous vote of the Storting as Norway's official national anthem only on 11 December 2019.