Recommended, 2024

Editor'S Choice

Queen Sonja: Stiller Birthday

Queen Sonja of Norway: Whether and how she celebrated her 75th birthday is not known.
Photo: Getty Images

No celebration on the day of marriage

Too bad: Queen Sonja of Norway turned 75 this week, but apparently she did not feel like partying. How she spent her day of honor is unknown. "Private matter, " it said in the palace.

The fact that the queen is now covered, may have the reason that at the end of May, an official celebration with concert and Winke-Winke appointment took place from the castle balcony, which was her husband King Harald (75) and her equally.

But the radio silence will presumably have had to do with the fact that they wanted to escape in the royal house any discussion about the secret trip to India the Crown Princess. Probably every journalist would have asked why Mette-Marit (38) just shines on the 75th birthday of her mother in law by absence.

Queen Sonja, bourgeois born merchant's daughter Sonja Haraldsen, would like to once again be able to shake hands with the commoners in her country, Norwegian royalists now said. The birthday would have given her a good reason to do so.

In the 1960s, the royalists were among those who, like the late King Olav, were long opposed to opening the royal house to "Normalos". But what should Olav have done? The staffing in his then young dynasty was thin and Harald sat coldly on blackmail: "The or none, otherwise I thank as crown prince, " he is said to have threatened.

That was in 1968. Sonja, who had previously been secretly married to the heir to the throne for nine years, is thus regarded as the ancestress of all the bourgeois crown princesses who are so popular today. Only long after her, Queen Silvia (68) on the side of King Carl Gustaf (66) achieved an equal rank.

Both ultimately paved the way for a crown, due to their impeccable work, Letizia (39), Mette-Marit, Mary (30) and Kate (30). Perhaps one or the other (or even Prince Daniel (38), who also belongs to this round) would have started out of gratitude with Sonja on the 75. At least that would have been a nice gesture.

Top