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Misunderstood Cultural Markers

As a Norwegian, I find it quite hard to find a specific cultural stereotype or marker that the world has of us, as we are a small and not very well known country. So instead, I will address a few misconceptions and/or stereotypes about us. I'll start off with one that applies to all of the Scandinavian countries: That we have a sort of rivalry or dislike of each other going on. While we will make fun of each other a lot (e.g. How do you sink a Swedish submarine? Just knock on the door), this is done as more of a sibling thing. In fact, the countries are really quite close these days, basically like siblings. To be honest, I'm not really sure if this is even something that people actually believe and if so it is probably not widespread, but at least you now have some background knowledge. And to be fair, Denmark-Norway and Sweden have fought many wars from the 1500s to the early 1800s. I guess we ended up like Britain and France or France and Germany (France seems to change their opinion of countries at the same rate they change government types). Another fairly obvious one is that we aren't vikings anymore. Despite the impression you may get from listening to Black Metal (pretty much our only contribution to modern music apart from a-ha), we aren't vikings anymore. The vikings happened around a thousand years ago, and we haven't felt the need to pillage other countries since. Also, almost no one worships the old Norse gods like Thor and Odin. The Scandinavian countries are mostly Lutheran. Something that is often said, of the Nordic countries in general, is that they are Socialist. Basically, we use free market capitalism with a big welfare state (if you want to learn more you can start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model ). 

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