Stockholm, Sweden Skeppsholmsbron/Skeppsholm Bridge
King Harald V of Norway died on the morning of 28 August 2026 at Oslo’s Rikshospitalet, eleven days after he was admitted with a rare blood condition. He was 89, and he had reigned for 35 years — long enough to become, by the end, Europe’s oldest sitting monarch. His son automatically succeeded him as King Haakon VIII, and the country entered a period of mourning that will close with a state funeral at Oslo Cathedral on 9 September.
A death like this is a reasonable moment to ask a question that rarely gets asked outside of it: why does Norway, a modern parliamentary democracy with universal suffrage and one of the world’s highest standards of living, still have a king at all? And why do four of its five Nordic neighbors — Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and, in a different way, the histories of Finland and Iceland — share so much genealogical DNA that most of their royal houses are, quite literally, the same family wearing different national labels?
Norway: the crown that had to ask permission
Harald’s own house did not exist as a Norwegian institution until 1905, and the way it got there says almost everything about why it has survived. For nearly 600 years Norway had been ruled from Copenhagen or Stockholm, first as a Danish possession and then, after 1814, in a forced union with Sweden under the House of Bernadotte. When that union dissolved in 1905, Norway’s parliament, the Storting, faced a live and genuinely contested choice between becoming a republic and installing a monarch of its own.
It picked a Danish prince named Carl, but Carl himself insisted on conditions. He would only take the throne, he said, if the Norwegian people confirmed in a referendum that they actually wanted a monarchy in the first place. That vote, held in November 1905, returned 79 percent in favor. Carl accepted, took the old Norse name Haakon, and arrived in Oslo that November as King Haakon VII — Norway’s first fully independent monarch in 518 years, and, not incidentally, the son-in-law of Britain’s Edward VII, since his wife Maud was an English princess.
Haakon VII’s defining moment came 35 years later, when Nazi Germany invaded and demanded he legitimize a puppet government under Vidkun Quisling. He refused, went into exile in London rather than capitulate, and became — largely because of that refusal — the figure Norwegians still point to when asked why the monarchy earned its keep. His son Olav V inherited that popularity; Harald V, Olav’s only son, inherited it in turn, marrying a commoner, Sonja Haraldsen, against considerable establishment resistance in 1968 and quietly normalizing the idea that future kings and queens of Norway could marry for love rather than lineage.
That norm now runs straight through the family. Haakon VIII’s wife, Crown Princess turned Queen Mette-Marit, was a single mother with no royal background when they married in 2001, a match that dropped support for the monarchy to its lowest recorded level — 58 percent — before recovering within the decade. The family has weathered rockier ground more recently: Mette-Marit’s son from a prior relationship was convicted of rape and sentenced to prison earlier this year, and her own past association with the late Jeffrey Epstein resurfaced publicly around the same time. None of it appears to have moved the underlying numbers much: surveys taken as recently as 2024 put support for keeping the monarchy at 84 percent, a figure that has proven remarkably durable across nearly a century of scandal, war, and generational turnover. Haakon VIII’s own daughter, Princess Ingrid Alexandra, is next in line.
Denmark: the in-laws of Europe
Amalienborg Palace, Copenhagen
Norway’s royal house and Denmark’s are, formally, the same house — the House of Glücksburg, a minor German ducal family that Denmark’s aristocracy handed the throne to in 1863 after its previous dynasty ran out of male heirs. The founding king, Christian IX, married off his children so successfully across the continent’s courts that historians still call him the “father-in-law of Europe” — his descendants ended up on the thrones of Denmark, Norway, Greece, and Britain, and briefly Russia, through his daughter Dagmar’s marriage to Tsar Alexander III.
Denmark’s current monarch, Frederik X, took the throne in January 2024 under circumstances almost nobody expected: his mother, Queen Margrethe II, announced her abdication on New Year’s Eve 2023 after 52 years on the throne — the first Danish monarch to voluntarily step down in nearly 900 years — and handed him the crown two weeks later. Frederik is married to Mary Donaldson, an Australian he met at a bar during the 2000 Sydney Olympics, which makes the current Danish king, like his Norwegian counterpart, married to a commoner rather than a fellow royal. Officially the house remains Glücksburg; through Frederik’s father, the late French-born Prince Henrik (born Henri de Laborde de Monpezat), the family is also head of the de Laborde de Monpezat line, an unusual double identity that gets debated more by genealogists than by ordinary Danes.
Sweden: the marshal who became a king
Royal Palace, Stockholm
Sweden’s royal house is the odd one out, and deliberately so. Where Norway’s and Denmark’s monarchs descend from centuries of interlinked German and Danish nobility, Sweden’s House of Bernadotte begins with a French commoner from Pau who joined the army as an enlisted man and rose, entirely on merit, to Marshal of the Empire under Napoleon. When Sweden’s childless king Charles XIII needed an heir in 1810, a faction in the Riksdag — reportedly hoping to curry favor with Napoleon — nominated Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, who had by then quietly broken with the emperor. He accepted, took the name Charles John, and in 1818 became King Charles XIV John of Sweden, and of Norway too, since the two crowns were then held jointly. That joint arrangement is what Norway dissolved in 1905, at which point Sweden’s Bernadottes stayed home and Norway went looking for its own king, eventually finding one in Carl of Denmark.
Sweden’s current monarch, Carl XVI Gustaf, is Charles XIV John’s direct descendant and has reigned since 1973, making him — after Harald’s death — one of the longest-serving monarchs left in Europe. His heir, Crown Princess Victoria, married her personal trainer, Daniel Westling, in 2010, continuing the same pattern of Nordic royals marrying commoners that now defines Norway’s and Denmark’s houses as well. Sweden’s monarchy is also the most constitutionally hollowed-out of the three: since 1975, the king has held no formal political power whatsoever, not even the nominal authority — appointing a prime minister, opening parliament — that Denmark’s and Norway’s monarchs technically retain.
Finland: the king who never arrived
Finland is the case that makes the other three legible by contrast, because Finland actually tried this and stopped. Newly independent from Russia in 1917 and gripped by civil war, Finland’s parliament briefly leaned monarchist, partly out of fear of Bolshevik Russia and partly out of hope that a German-linked king would buy German protection. In October 1918 it elected Prince Frederick Charles of Hesse, brother-in-law to Kaiser Wilhelm II, as King of Finland. Preparations went further than most people realize: a crown was designed, court uniforms were sewn, and Helsinki’s Stockmann department store had begun delivering furniture for the palace.
Then Germany lost the war. With his royal patron defeated and Allied sympathies clearly running toward republics, Frederick Charles renounced the throne on 14 December 1918 without ever setting foot in the country he’d been elected to rule. Finland became a republic instead, with Kaarlo Juho Ståhlberg as its first president, and has remained one ever since — the shortest-lived and least consequential of the Nordic monarchist experiments, but a real one, complete with a monarch-elect whose descendants can still, in theory, trace a claim that was never exercised.
Iceland: a king by paperwork only
Iceland’s monarchy was never really Iceland’s. Under Danish control since 1380, Iceland won full sovereignty in 1918 through the Act of Union, but the arrangement kept the Danish king, Christian X, as monarch of both countries in a personal union — Iceland handled its own domestic affairs while sharing a head of state with Copenhagen, and had a legal off-ramp built in: the union was due for review after 25 years.
That review arrived at almost the worst possible moment for Denmark. Nazi Germany occupied the country in April 1940, severing practical contact between Reykjavík and Copenhagen and forcing Iceland’s parliament, the Althing, to quietly assume full executive authority on its own. When the 25-year clock ran out in 1944, with Denmark still under occupation, Icelanders held a referendum on ending the union outright, and the vote was overwhelming. The republic was proclaimed at Þingvellir, the ancient assembly site, on 17 June 1944 — timing some Danes found galling, given that their own country was still occupied and unable to properly weigh in. Christian X sent his congratulations anyway, and Iceland has had no monarch, and no serious monarchist movement, since.
So why do the survivors survive?
Set against Finland’s abandoned experiment and Iceland’s clean break, the durability of the Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish crowns looks less like inertia and more like a specific, repeatedly re-confirmed choice. Norway put the question to a direct vote in 1905 and got 79 percent in favor; when a sitting government minister floated republicanism again in recent years, parliament rejected the idea by a lopsided margin, and a follow-up survey found 84 percent of Norwegians still wanted to keep the king. Denmark’s most recent comparable polling put support in a similar range. None of the three Scandinavian monarchies has held a serious national referendum on abolition since the ones that founded or re-founded them, mostly because there’s been no evidence of a public appetite for one.
The institutional design helps explain why. All three monarchies are constitutional in the strict sense — the crown reigns, elected governments rule — and have been for so long that the distinction barely needs restating. Sweden stripped its king of even nominal political power outright in 1975; Denmark and Norway still route ceremonial functions like the formal opening of parliament through their monarchs, but no one seriously argues the king or queen could overrule an elected government and survive the attempt. What’s left is a head of state who costs comparatively little, generates a disproportionate amount of tourism and diplomatic goodwill, stays scrupulously out of party politics, and gives the country a non-elected, generationally continuous symbol of itself — one that, as Norway’s own polling shows, younger respondents support at rates equal to or higher than their elders, which is not something republican movements in, say, Britain can currently claim.
None of that guarantees the arrangement forever. Support for constitutional monarchy has softened elsewhere in Europe — Britain’s has fallen to a 33-year polling low, and the Netherlands has seen rising complaints about royal costs even as core support holds — and Scandinavia’s royal houses are not immune to the same generational drift, or to the kind of scandal now trailing Norway’s own family into its transition. But for the moment, the pattern across Scandinavia looks less like nostalgia and more like a durable, actively renewed contract: keep the family, keep it married to ordinary people rather than foreign princes, keep it out of politics, and put the question to the public again whenever anyone seriously proposes otherwise. Iceland and Finland took the other option and never looked back either. Both answers, it turns out, can be permanent.
Sources
- Death and state funeral of Harald V — Wikipedia
- Norway’s King Harald V dies, succeeded by son — Al Jazeera
- Harald V — Wikipedia
- King Harald V of Norway, Europe’s oldest monarch, dies — CNN
- After King Harald V’s death, what comes next for Norway’s scandal-prone royals? — CNN
- Norway’s King Harald V dies at 89 and his son becomes King Haakon VIII — NPR
- Queen Sonja of Norway — Wikipedia
- Election of a king — Royal Court of Norway
- 1905 Norwegian monarchy referendum — Wikipedia
- Haakon VII — Wikipedia
- Family tree of Danish monarchs — Wikipedia
- Frederik X — Wikipedia
- House of Bernadotte — Wikipedia
- The Swedish royal family — Hello!
- Prince Frederick Charles of Hesse — Wikipedia
- The Almost-King of Finland — Schoolgirl Milky Crisis
- Kingdom of Iceland — Wikipedia
- Lost Kingdoms – Kingdom of Iceland — History of Royal Women
- Survey on attitude towards Norway being a monarchy, by age — Statista
- Record high support for the Norwegian monarchy — Royal Central
- Support for the Norwegian monarchy continues to grow — Royal Central
- 55% of Britons still prefer a monarchy, but this has fallen to 33 year low — Ipsos
- Support for Dutch royals, monarchy stable, criticism of costs — NL Times
- Share of Danes who want monarchy or republic head of state — Statista
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