Norway is not a traditional soccer power, but its arrival at the World Cup’s Round of 16 feels entirely expected. That is largely because of the team’s towering center forward Erling Haaland, a blunt-faced, flowing-maned phenom who you can easily imagine reaving enemy villages alongside his Norse ancestors back in the Dark Ages. Haaland transforms games with his centripetal force, the ball invariably finding its way to his giant feet or slab forehead before being caromed emphatically into the back of the net. He has scored five goals this tournament, just behind the Golden Boot leaders Kylian Mbappé and Lionel Messi. At 25 years old, he is already far and away the best player Norway has ever produced.

Haaland has also charmed North American audiences with his surprisingly sunny demeanor, posting videos of himself relishing a pastrami sandwich in New York and predicting, correctly, that Norway would lose to France in the group stage. (“They’re probably going to win the whole tournament,” he added, which at this point feels like another good prediction.) The Norwegian team has borrowed its talisman’s aura of joyful belligerence, posing as Vikings in a photo shoot, wearing horned Viking hats, and performing a “Viking row” after victories in which the players pretend to pull the oars of a ship to the quickening beat of a galley drum.

To get a sense of what this team means to Norway, a country now better known for free day care than bloody steel and animal skins, I spoke over video with its preeminent novelist, Karl Ove Knausgaard, who between tokes of his vape at his home in London exuded the enthusiasm of a longtime soccer aficionado. In addition to the autofictional opus My Struggle, which contains numerous scenes of young Knausgaard watching and valiantly trying to play football, he is the author of Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game, a series of letters with the Swedish author Fredrik Ekelund about the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. There, he writes what many of us are feeling now: “It was a perfect summer, as all World Cup summers are.”

Norway plays Brazil on Sunday. What do you think of your chances? I think Brazil actually will be an easier opponent than Ivory Coast because there was an expectation for Norway to win. But when it’s Brazil, there’s no expectation whatsoever. And then Brazil has a very slow midfield and didn’t play........

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