Harald V of Norway
Harald V has been King of Norway since January 1991, the first king born in Norway since the Middle Ages, a boy of three when the Germans came who spent the war in Washington as the guest of Roosevelt, a sailor who represented his country at three Olympic Games and won a world championship at fifty, a prince who waited nine years for his father's permission to marry a draper's daughter, and a monarch whose speech to a garden party in 2016, that Norwegians were girls who loved girls and boys who loved boys and believed in God, Allah, everything and nothing, was watched by more people than any speech a king had made. He is, at eighty-eight, the oldest reigning monarch in Europe. He was born at Skaugum in 1937, the only son of Crown Prince Olav and Princess Martha, and was carried out of the country in April 1940 to Sweden and then across the Atlantic, so that his first memories were of the White House and of the Norwegian navy's training camp in Canada. He came home in June 1945 on the ship with his grandfather. He went to the military academy, to Balliol as his father had, and to the Storting to sit and listen. In 1959 he met Sonja Haraldsen at a party and his father, worried about the monarchy's standing, refused the match until 1968, when Olav consulted the government and the Storting's presidents and let them marry. The commoner queen turned out to be the institution's best asset. He sailed Soling-class boats at Tokyo, Mexico City and Munich, and won the one-ton world championship in 1987. He became king on 17 January 1991 and took his father's motto, all for Norway. The reign has been the reign of a constitutional monarch who reads the speech from the throne, opens the Storting and the ski jumps, and speaks once a year on New Year's Eve; he spoke at the memorial after the massacre of July 2011, and the country listened. His son Haakon has been regent during his illnesses, of which there have been several since a cancer in 2003 and a pacemaker fitted in Malaysia in 2024, but he has said he swore an oath and will not abdicate.
- Lived: 1937 CE – ?
- Nationality: Norwegian
- Roles: king, monarch
