Dear Michael: Greetings from a fellow Scandinavia PolarTREC teacher (Finland '09.) You are right - Norwegian and English are so closely related that even if you can't understand spoken Norwegian you can frequently decipher written Norwegian if you read English. They are both on the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. In my case, the Finnish language was a bit more mysterious. Check out my post
http://www.polartrec.com/expeditions/prehistoric-human-response-to-climate-change/journals/may-8-finnish-language
on the relative differences of English, Norwegian, and Finnish. Will there be speakers of Norwegian with you once you are in the field?
yours, Michael Wing