Qualla: Namsskogan Municipality

Namsskogan Municipality: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JIP, CC BY-SA 3.0. When Namsskogan needed a symbol, it did not have to look far. A pair of unusually large moose antlers hangs in the municipal hall, and in 1984 those antlers, rendered in gold on a black field, became the municipality's coat of arms. It is an honest piece of heraldry. Namsskogan is 1,417 square kilometres of spruce, bog and river holding roughly 800 people, which works out at six-tenths of a person per square kilometre — and rather better odds than that if you are a moose.

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Image: JIP | CC BY-SA 3.0

Namsskogan Municipality: The Woodlands Around the Namsen

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mr. Trond Henningsen, CC BY-SA 3.0. The name did not exist before 1923. On 1 July of that year this territory was cut loose from the very large Grong Municipality, and a name had to be invented for it on the spot: Nams-, from the river Namsen, plus the plural of skog, woods. The woodlands around the Namsen. It bega...

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Image: Mr. Trond Henningsen | CC BY-SA 3.0

Namsskogan Municipality: Seventy Degrees of Weather

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bernt Rostad from Oslo, Norway, CC BY 2.0. The land here ranks 64th in size among Norwegian municipalities and 345th in population, a mismatch that tells you most of what you need to know. The Namsen runs south through the Namdalen valley, taking the E6 highway and the Nordlandsbanen railway with it; away from that corrid...

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Image: Bernt Rostad from Oslo, Norway | CC BY 2.0

Namsskogan Municipality: Pyrite, Then Silence

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bernt Rostad, CC BY 2.0. For thirty-two years this was a mining district. Copper was found near Skorovatn in 1910 and a workable pyrite deposit in 1915, but the Skorovass mine did not open until 1952. It worked a body of roughly ten million tonnes, and until 1976 the ore travelled out on a 45-kilometre a...

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Image: Bernt Rostad | CC BY 2.0

Namsskogan Municipality: Reindeer, Guldbagge, and a Data Centre

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Henning J. Lund, CC BY-SA 3.0. Two very different exports have come out of these woods recently. One is Lene Cecilia Sparrok, born here in 1997 — a Southern Sámi reindeer herder who was cast as Elle-Marja in the 2016 film Sami Blood, a story about a Sámi girl pushed to disown her own language and family under ...

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Image: Henning J. Lund | CC BY-SA 3.0

Namsskogan Municipality: Thirteen Seats and a Long Memory

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Henning J. Lund, CC BY-SA 3.0. The municipal council has thirteen members on four-year terms, and the mayoral roll goes back to Kristian Trones in 1923 and forward through a hundred years of local lists, Liberals and Labour to Elisabeth Vollmo Bjørhusdal, elected in 2023. One entry sits differently from the ot...

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Image: Henning J. Lund | CC BY-SA 3.0