Norway’s Early Stamps

orway has a territorial area of approximately 150,000 square miles; roughly the same size as the whole of the British Isles. Its coastline, on the other hand, stretches to 63,000 miles, or more than six times the length of ours, mainly thanks to more than a thousand fjords on its western seaward side where it meets the Norwegian Sea. Its eastern border, which butts up against Sweden, Finland and Russia, has rugged mountain roads, forests, rivers and lakes, with few towns and a scattering of agricultural settlements. To the south a narrow channel (The Skagerrak) divides it from Denmark. In 1855, when Norway issued its first adhesive postage stamps, the total number of people living within Norway’s borders had barely reached 1,000,000.