According to this NY Times story, Norway’s King Harald is the first native-born king since the 14th century.
WTF? Do they have some offshore breeding ground? Are they outsourcing their royalty?
Denmark or Sweden. Norway was in a dual-Kingdom with both at various times (but not at the same time!).
Norway+Denmark 1536–1814
Norway+Sweden 1814-1905
Kings afterwards were Norwegian, just born outside the country, e.g. Olav V in England, presumably because his mother was English.
King Harald is also the first King since the 14th century born during the existence of an independent Norway. There was no monarchy based in Norway from 1388 (when the union with Denmark started) until 1905 (when the union with Sweden was dissolved). In 1905, the newly-independent Norwegians decided they wanted a monarchy of their own, so they imported a Danish prince, his British wife, and their infant son (King Harald’s father).
Is it a Scandinavian custom to use order-by-mail kings?
Europe has a long and proud tradition of outsourcing royalty, mainly from Germany (kings and queens being among Germany’s chief exports). The Hanovers of Great Britain are the most famous example, but the phenomenon certainly wasn’t limited to them - for instance, when the Bulgarians achieved independence at the turn of the 20th Century, they immediately ordered a king from Vienna; the Austrians found one they weren’t using at the moment, and the Bulgarians crowned him Ferdinand I. The Greeks did something similar with their first king, Otto of Bavaria, as did the Belgians with Leopold I of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld.
Kings gave a country legitimacy. Who they were and where they were from was barely relevant.
Right, it isn’t that Norway was importing a new king every time the old king died, but rather that Norway for a time ceased to exist as an independent nation. It was at first in a union with Denmark, which over time evolved to Denmark as the center of power and Norway as more or less a province. The kings of that period were Danish, not Norwegian. In 1814, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Denmark was to be punished by losing Norway to Sweden. Some powerful Norwegians managed to force the situation to be a personal union between two theoretically equal nations, but the king who would sit on the throne of the two nations was the Swedish king.
This situation only ended in 1905, and since the Norwegian royal family was restarted with a package deal of king, queen, and wee little crown prince, that led to two generations of foreign-born kings before Harald took the throne in 1991.
Yes, and they’re a real bitch to put together with that little Allen wrench. And there’s always parts left over at the end.
If any of you saw “Dead Snow” and were confused by the danish dude with the enormous mustashe pinning medals on people, that was the current kings danish grandfather, at that point king of Norway.
The danish and the british royal houses were net exporters of sons and daughters for several generations, due to a startling run of quite large families. Norway got one of each in 1905. The danish king Cristian the ninth is sometimes nicknamed “the father-in-law of Europe”, and in that context, Queen Victoria can reasonably be described as the mother-in-law to the same families.
Actually, that’s the thing that annoys me the most about the animated “Anastasia”. The Dowager Countess Marie is given a pronounced russian accent, but in reality, she was danish, and her birthname was Dagmar. Just to prove my point, Tsarina Alexendra was Victorias grandaughter.
<APPLAUSE> Oh, very nice! </APPLAUSE>
In 1810, Sweden and Norway imported Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, a Marshal of France, to be King Charles XIV John of Sweden and Charles III John of Norway.
Not quite. Sweden was the only one doing the importing, as Norway was still in a union with Denmark at that time. He would become Karl III Johan of Norway - the man Oslo’s main street is named for - but not before 1814.
The preference for an Allen wrench over inferior tools is a carryover from the reign of the Swedish monarch, King Ingvar Kamprad the Great.
I glue them together with royal jelly.
No, no, you guys are looking at this all wrong. Here in Canada, we’ve managed to outsource our Queen. Most of the time, she stays in another country entirely, and they pick up the tab! We only pay when we borrow her for a while!
Fun fact: the King of Norway is in the British line of succession; see no. 73 here: Home Page
And naturally if you want a Mexican monarch, you fire off a letter to Austria, via France: Maximilian I of Mexico - Wikipedia
That’s not outsourcing, it’s fractional ownership!
The Danish ones are all spruced up, the Swedes all in firs. The Norwegian ones are pining for the fijords.
Quite right.
I knew we should have read that timeshare agreement appended to the 1982 constitution more closely…
Timeshare Monarchy? Damn odd country, Canada.
(ah, beaten to it)
We thought we were getting a share in some nice Caribbean island…