Today is the ninth birthday of Princess Ingrid Alexandra. As usual, the Royal Court marks the occasion by releasing a new photo, this time showing the Princess walking with her father, the Crown Prince, and her grandfather, the King, thus visualising the line of succession. The photo was taken in the garden of Skaugum, the home of the crown princely family in Asker outside Oslo, last summer and echoes a rather well-known photo from the early 1980s of the then Prince Haakon walking in the same garden between his father, then Crown Prince Harald, and his grandfather, King Olav V.
Princess Ingrid Alexandra was born at the National Hospital in Oslo on 21 January 2004, incidentially the 175th birthday of previous Norwegian monarch, her great-great-great-grandfather, King Oscar II. She was the first girl to be born in direct line of succession to the throne, following the introduction of gender neutral succession in 1990.
This may a good post in which to comment on the fact that the upcoming 250th birthday of Karl Johan this Saturday will apparently go unnoticed in both Sweden and Norway, except for a Norwegian postage stamp this spring. That's the plight of a foreigner in Norway even if you were a major historical figure. At least the Swedes recognized 200 years of electing a bourgeois prince a couple years ago. BTW, Trond, I'll buy you a drink to celebrate if you are in Oslo on Saturday!
ReplyDeleteNo, the 250th anniversary of Carl Johan will not go unnoticed. There will be a seminar about his Swedish legacy at the Royal Palace in Stockholm tomorrow and I have written an article about his record as King of Norway, which will appear in Aftenposten on Sunday. The 200th anniversary in 1963 was a bigger deal with an exhibition, a royal visit to Pau etc., but I suppose the reason this is not the case this time is that most of these things happened three years ago, when the bicentenary of his election was commemorated.
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