The funeral service for King Harald V of Norway was held in Oslo Cathedral at one o’clock on Wednesday, 9 September. The coffin left the Royal Palace at noon in a formal procession, and the Royal House records that heads of state and visiting royalty attended. Before the service, the coffin had lain in the Palace Chapel from 1 September; more than 46,000 people filed past it.
Harald V died on 28 August at the age of 89. He had been admitted to hospital on 17 August and placed on two weeks’ sick leave, and the palace, which reported his condition through the month, said he was being treated for haemolytic anaemia. He had been king for thirty-five years, since January 1991, and was the oldest reigning monarch in Europe. His son, Crown Prince Haakon, succeeded him, taking the name Haakon VIII, and swore his oath before the Storting on 1 September.
Norway is a constitutional monarchy in which the crown’s powers are almost entirely formal, which is part of why a figure like Harald becomes a measure of elapsed time rather than of authority. Thirty-five years is long enough that most Norwegians under fifty have known no other king. The queue at the Palace Chapel — forty-six thousand people, in a country of some 5.6 million — is the kind of number that says more about that than any tribute does.
In the late afternoon on the day of the funeral, the new King and Queen, the Crown Princess, Queen Sonja and Prince Sverre Magnus appeared on the palace balcony to acknowledge the crowd below. It is the gesture Norwegian royalty makes on national day. Used here, it closed the mourning and opened the reign in the same movement.