The International Order of Good Templars, an organization devoted to ending the consumption of alcohol, had established lodges in Scandinavia beginning in 1877.
After the Nazi occupation of Norway beginning on April 9, 1940, the Norwegian parliament met in emergency session at Elverum and unanimously voted to delegate all legislative authority to King Haakon VII and the elected cabinet.
In Vestlandet, in fact, the Norwegian Esperanto League successfully arranged a clandestine meeting in 1942 for 70 NEL delegates.
Certain German soldiers who knew Esperanto sometimes tried to make contact with the underground group but were politely turned away because of the war situation and the danger that Esperantists faced if exposed.
In 1952 the 37th World Esperanto Congress, held in Oslo's newly completed city hall, attracted 1,600 delegates.
In November 2006, Norwegian Esperantists arranged a conference call by telephone among delegates in Oslo, Bergen, Stavanger, Trondheim and Korgen (Hemnes Municipality); the teleconference attendees heard a talk on Esperanto history in Norway delivered by Elna Matland.
[4] Today the NEL has active branches in Bergen, Bryne, Hamar, Kristiansand, Oslo, Sarpsborg, Stavanger, Tromsø and Trondheim.
At the same time as the organization continues to publish Norvega Esperantisto, the NEL, along with other Esperantist groups, is making more and more information available on the Internet.
They have delegated the task to an editorial committee from the Grupo Esperantista de Trondheim (GET) consisting of Herman Ranes, Jardar Eggesbø Abrahamsen and Kjell Heggvold Ullestad.
The younger of the 1963 edition authors, Erling Haugen, began even before the dictionary was published to collect words and expressions from Esperanto journals and other literature.
He donated all his notes to GET, with a plea to handle the materials carefully, as he had not been able to evaluate the quality of the collection he had amassed, a task he left for new generations.
On his death in 1989, the tireless lexicographer Erling Haugen left the GET his materials containing over 20,000 words not found in the earlier 1963 dictionary.
Already in the time of Erling Anker Haugen, Ulf Lunde had contemplated organizing the word corpus into a database.
He systematized the materials, and devised workable technical solutions for ordering the great data corpus to generate a dictionary.
This attracted many participants for several years, but the corpus was huge, and the feeling of inadequacy had slowed the work when Kjell Heggvold Ullestad came into the picture.