King Harald of Norway was laid to rest after a twelve-day farewell that became an intricate ritual, each step and every day carrying its own meaning. The period blended private family ceremonies with crowded processions through the streets of Oslo, and royal relatives from across the world came to say goodbye. Yet even those who followed the events closely could have missed important details. How was the funeral carried out, and what went wrong?
Why did some moments spark such heated debate? A crown accompanied the king’s coffin, although he had never worn it. And what did his two-million-dollar coffin look like? There were many memorable, moving moments in the farewell to Norway’s king.
On August 28, an era ended for Norway. King Harald died at the age of eighty-nine. His body was brought to the Red Room of the palace, where, in those first days, his family said a quiet goodbye in the presence of only close relatives. On August 31, the coffin was moved to the palace chapel so the whole country could pay its respects.
His children and grandchildren walked with the coffin through five royal halls, past rooms where the king had lived and worked for decades. At the front of the procession was carried the crown that Harald himself had never worn. It had been made more than two hundred years earlier for King Carl Johan. But long before Harald’s reign began, the mandatory coronation ceremony had been abolished.
At his blessing ceremony, the crown had been placed beside the altar and never set upon his head. Now it accompanied him on his final journey. Family members stood against the walls. As the coffin passed, they joined the procession, which slowly grew longer.
In the great banquet hall, the king’s military aides lifted the coffin and carried it toward the chapel. The presence of Marius beside the coffin had already caused much debate, and what happened during the funeral gave people new material for discussion. Some viewers noticed that Queen Sonja seemed to avoid Marius and Durek. We will return to that moment later.
In the palace chapel, family and members of the royal household gathered for a private memorial service. It was a place filled with family memories. Harald himself had been baptized there. His son Haakon had also been baptized there.
It was there that Harald had held the young Ingrid in his arms at her baptism. Twenty-two years later, his granddaughter returned to the same room to say goodbye to her grandfather. The next day, the church doors were opened to all who wished to come. According to the royal court, more than 46,000 people came to pay their last respects over the course of a week.
People stood in lines a kilometer long, sometimes waiting as long as seven hours. The court extended visiting hours late into the night so everyone could enter. The royal court shared a deeply moving photograph of ninety-four-year-old Princess Astrid, Harald’s sister, seated before the coffin. Fourteen years earlier, she had lost her older sister.
Now she was saying goodbye to her younger brother. Of the three siblings, only she remained. Among the flowers on the coffin was a wreath from Queen Sonja, its ribbon bearing a brief message: thank you for a beautiful life. Harald had died just one day before their fifty-eighth wedding anniversary.
At the foot of the coffin lay his medals and honors, including Danish, Swedish, and British decorations. Across the coffin lay a sword and its scabbard, the handle near his right hand and the scabbard on the left, the way the weapon would have been worn. This sword had an unexpected history. Its previous owner, Carl Johan, had served under Napoleon before becoming king.
It was said that the emperor himself had given him the weapon. Later, the sword became part of the royal insignia, and for nearly two centuries it had been placed on the coffins of deceased kings. September 9, the day of the funeral, arrived. Oslo’s main streets were closed, and six and a half thousand police and soldiers ensured security.
The day was so emotional that one guard fainted. At noon, the procession set out from the palace along the main avenue, Karl Johan Street, toward Oslo Cathedral. People lined the entire route. Armored police led the way, followed by military musicians and the guard of honor.
The coffin was carried on a gun carriage, with aides walking on either side. Behind the coffin walked Harald’s son, the new King Haakon. Beside him were his children, Crown Princess Ingrid Alexandra and Prince Sverre Magnus, and Haakon’s sister, Märtha Louise. Because of physical difficulties, the two queens, Sonja and Mette-Marit, followed in cars.
People also discussed the family’s clothing that day, especially the veils. They recalled the long black veils worn by Sonja and Märtha Louise at the funeral of the previous king, Olav. In such an emotional moment, those veils had hidden the women’s faces and tears from the cameras. Even then, the practice was seen as old-fashioned and had sparked fierce public debate.
Guests from abroad joined the Norwegian royal family in bidding farewell to Harald. Prince William represented his father, King Charles III of Britain, and Princess Anne attended as a guest and as Haakon’s godmother. King Abdullah of Jordan arrived with Queen Rania; the two royal families had enjoyed warm relations for years. Unexpectedly, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was among the guests.
His arrival had not been announced in advance. After the ceremony, the crowd gathered outside the cathedral applauded him. King Frederik and Queen Mary of Denmark postponed a state visit to Belgium in order to attend. Crown Prince Christian and Princess Benedikte came with them.
Frederik’s mother, former Queen Margrethe II, canceled the visit because she had recently been hospitalized. King Carl and Queen Silvia of Sweden attended with their children and their partners. King Harald had been the godfather of Crown Princess Victoria. From the Netherlands came King Willem-Alexander, Queen Máxima, their daughter and heir Amalia, and Princess Beatrix, who had once occupied the throne.
King Felipe and Queen Letizia of Spain were accompanied by his mother, Queen Sofía. From Japan came Crown Prince Akishino and his wife, Princess Kiko. Prince Albert of Monaco brought Princess Charlene. Harald’s farewell gathered royal families from far beyond Scandinavia.
At the cathedral, the procession halted. The coffin was carried inside, where family and invited guests gathered for the state funeral ceremony. Outside, people watched on large screens placed around the city. It was in this same cathedral that Sonja and Harald had married in 1968.
They had walked out through these doors as husband and wife. Fifty-eight years later, Sonja had returned to say her last goodbye to her husband. At one o’clock, three bells rang out over the cathedral. A minute of silence began across the whole country.
Inside, the organ played, the choir sang, and memorial speeches were given. Representatives of different faiths and worldviews lit candles. Marius was among the close family members inside the cathedral, but he was not seen in the street procession. After the intense debate over the coffin bearers, it seems a decision was made to keep him away from the most public part of the farewell and limit his presence to the church ceremony.
Many also noticed that Princess Märtha Louise’s husband was present at the funeral. He had previously been hospitalized. Durek had undergone a kidney transplant and had attracted public attention with a social media post. About three hours after the official announcement of the death, he had published a farewell message to Harald in which he addressed him as “Papa.
” Many found this manner of offering condolences inappropriate, and the debate continued on online forums even after the funeral. Some felt that Sonja had deliberately avoided embracing Marius. After embracing her granddaughters, she turned toward the bishop. Others noticed that when Durek, her daughter’s husband, stood before her, she moved her hand away.
But a few seconds of behavior is not enough to draw conclusions about a family’s relationships. People also discussed where Princess Astrid had been seated in the cathedral. Some viewers felt that Harald’s only surviving sister deserved a better seat, closer to the close relatives. The seating arrangement for guests thus became another subject of debate over who had received enough attention that day.
When the prayers ended inside the cathedral, the coffin was brought out. Four fighter jets appeared above the cathedral. One aircraft separated from the others and climbed upward. The absence of that single plane signaled the one who was no longer among us.
The funeral procession then moved toward Akershus Fortress in the center of Oslo, where the royal burial chamber is located. This part of the procession led directly toward the burial site. In the church of Akershus Fortress, a smaller group of family, royal guests, and government representatives gathered. After the prayers, Harald’s coffin was carried down into the royal burial chamber beneath the church and placed in the sarcophagus made for him and Sonja.
Nearby stood two other sarcophagi: one holding his parents, Olav and Märtha, and the other holding his grandparents, King Haakon and Queen Maud. During the king’s lifetime, an order for this burial chamber had attracted attention. The joint sarcophagus made for Harald and Sonja had cost nearly two million dollars, and its shape had been kept in strict secrecy until the funeral. Harald himself had treated the matter with humor, once looking at Sonja and saying, “I hope there will be a good soft mattress inside so that our stay will be comfortable.
We will be there for a long time. ” The burial itself was entirely private, and the royal court promised to show what the sarcophagus looked like about a week after the funeral. The fortress is normally open to visitors, but it and the church were closed during the funeral. When visits resumed, those who had not been able to say goodbye during those days could pay their respects to the king’s memory.
After the funeral, royal salutes were fired twice from the fortress grounds, twenty-one shots in each round with a one-minute pause between them. Church bells rang across the country for another hour. When the funeral ceremony ended, a motorcade brought the royal family and remaining guests back to the palace. There, the new King Haakon and his family came out onto the palace balcony before the people who had gathered to share in the farewell.
The palace then hosted a reception for members of the Norwegian government, foreign delegations, and the relatives and guests who had taken part in the funeral. With that, the official farewell program came to an end. But Harald’s memory would endure far beyond the walls of the royal vault. In family photographs, in the stories of those who met him, in the words left among the flowers.
Beside Sonja are still her children and grandchildren, with whom she can share her grief and her warm memories. And that was how the king of Norway was laid to rest.