Polar evening at the Ishavsmuseet 22 September at 19.00 "... part of the Kingdom of Norway". How Svalbard became Norwegian.

Thor Bjørn Arlov will visit the Arctic Museum on Friday 22 September at 19.00, and opens a new round of the popular polar evenings. It is Svalbard that is the theme of autumn's first polar night.

From Barentsz's discovery of the archipelago in 1596 until 1920, Svalbard was considered zero ground — a landless country. The Svalbard Treaty gave Norway sovereignty in 1920 and five years later the treaty came into force; Svalbard became “part of the Kingdom of Norway”, as the law states. It was not a given that Norway would gain sovereignty over the archipelago. Before World War I, there were futile international diplomatic negotiations about the “Spitsbergen case”, as it was called. In connection with the Paris Peace Conference, the Norwegian government demanded sovereignty over Svalbard, and so it was. Why was that possible in 1920 that had been hopeless just five years earlier?

This lecture describes Svalbard's political history and the process that led to the Svalbard Treaty of February 9, 1920 and Norwegian takeover on August 14, 1925. He also discusses the extent to which the treaty set limits for Norwegian rule on the archipelago and how this rule has developed to the present day.

Thor Bjørn Arlov is a senior advisor at NTNU and associate professor of history at the University Centre in Svalbard, UNIS. He has published a number of books and articles on Arctic history, including "The History of Svalbard" (2003) and "The Right Man — the Story of the Governor of Svalbard" (2013).

After Arlov's lecture, dinner will be served at the museum in the usual style. This time, the menu will feature clipfish with good accompaniments. Registration for dinner is required.