Princess Astrid, Mrs. Ferner, sister of Norway’s late King Harald V, died at 94 on Friday, September 11, 2026 — just two days after she was wheeled into Oslo Cathedral for her brother’s state funeral. The royal palace, announcing her death, said she had died peacefully.
“The Princess fell asleep today, Friday 11 September, at the age of 94,” the palace said in a statement. A childhood interrupted by wartime exile in the United States gave way to a marriage that cost her the style of Royal Highness and then to decades of service to the Norwegian crown.
Her nephew King Haakon VIII, 53, who succeeded Harald as monarch on Friday, August 28, gave the order for the flag above the Royal Palace balcony: it flew at half-mast on September 11 and will do so again on the day of her funeral. The Royal Palace confirmed on September 16 that the service will be held Wednesday, September 23, at 1:00 p.m. at Ris Church in Oslo, with Norwegian television broadcasting it live. The church was chosen because it sits near Vinderen, the neighborhood where the princess lived for decades with her husband and raised their five children.
King Haakon, Queen Mette-Marit, Crown Princess Ingrid and Queen Sonja will attend, the palace confirmed, as will Astrid’s children and other relatives — a group that could include Prince Sverre Magnus, who does not hold formal membership in the Royal House. The state will bury the princess at its own expense, Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said, adding that flags will fly at half-mast across Norway. The state will cover the cost of the funeral.
King Haakon Pays Tribute to His Aunt
“Throughout her long life, Princess Astrid represented the Royal House in a warm and dutiful manner,” King Haakon said in his tribute. She had stepped into the role of first lady at just 22, he said, after the death of his grandmother, Crown Princess Märtha.
The king said she was “particularly committed to caring for and including the most vulnerable members of society,” and that she carried out her duties with “loyalty, dedication and an infectious sense of humor.” He described an aunt “never afraid to speak her mind,” a key support to Harald and to the wider family, and someone from whom relatives had learned a great deal.
Her five children — Cathrine, Benedikte, Alexander, Elisabeth and Carl-Christian Ferner — said in a joint statement: “In our grief, we stand together with gratitude. Thank you for all the wonderful memories. You will forever hold a great place in our hearts.”
A Sister at Her Brother’s Side
The princess had been in declining health for months, and in March she received hospital treatment for pneumonia. Illness did not keep her from her brother. Doctors treated Harald, Europe’s oldest living monarch, for a bacterial infection in his blood after he was taken to a hospital on August 17. Photographers caught Astrid leaving the National Hospital in Oslo on August 27 after several hours at his bedside; he died the following day at 89, after more than 35 years on the throne.
The palace, in the days before her own death, released photographs of her: she sat by herself next to her brother’s coffin in the Palace Chapel, and she gazed through a palace window at the flowers mourners had left in Palace Square. She made her final public appearance on Wednesday, September 9, when 13 days of national mourning ended with the funeral, and thousands lined the procession route from the Royal Palace to Oslo Cathedral. Among the mourners were Britain’s Prince William, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and the kings of Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden and Spain. Allison Hooker, the under secretary of state for political affairs, represented the United States.
Wartime Exile and a Life of Duty
Astrid Maud Ingeborg was born February 12, 1932, at Villa Solbakken, one of the royal residences in Oslo. The future King Olav V and Crown Princess Märtha of Sweden had a second daughter in her, and her aunt Queen Astrid of Belgium, one of her godparents, supplied her name. She descended from King Edward VII as a great-granddaughter and counted Queen Elizabeth II as a second cousin, which put her 18th in line to the British throne at birth.
Germany invaded Norway in April 1940, when she was eight, and she fled with her mother, her sister Ragnhild and her brother Harald — first to neutral Sweden, then on to the United States. The party reached New York that August, and she went to school in Washington, D.C. Her father spent the war years in England at the side of King Haakon VII, acting as a military commander and a counselor to Norway’s exiled government. Home again in 1945, Astrid attended Nissen, a girls’ school in Oslo. The chapel of the Royal Palace hosted her confirmation on May 9, 1948, and Oxford taught her for two years in the early 1950s.
Cancer killed her mother in 1954 at 53. Olav was a widower who never remarried, and Ragnhild had settled in Brazil after her 1953 marriage to her bodyguard, Erling Lorentzen, so the duties of first lady fell to Astrid, then 22. For 14 years she joined her father at receptions, official functions and state visits; the arrangement ended when Harald married Sonja Haraldsen in 1968. The memorial fund established in her mother’s name, which supports social and humanitarian projects, had her as chair of its board, and charities working with women and with young people with dyslexia — a condition she had herself — counted her as a patron. Norway’s government granted her an honorary pension in 2002 in recognition of her decades of work on behalf of the crown. A chihuahua named Wilma kept her company at her side frequently in her later years.
The Marriage That Cost Her a Title
Johan Martin Ferner, a businessman and Olympic sailor who had taken silver in the sport in Helsinki in 1952, won her heart in the late 1950s. They met when she took him on as crew for a yacht race. His father owned an Oslo department store, and conservative figures in the Norwegian establishment objected to a commoner. Because he was also a divorcé, the church objected too. Astrid was said to have threatened to go on a hunger strike and to give up her royal duties unless her father consented.
Olav relented, and after the bishop of Oslo refused, he had to ask the retired bishop of Nidaros to officiate. The couple married at Asker Church on January 12, 1961. The match cost Astrid the style of Royal Highness and her yearly allowance, and from then on she went by Princess Astrid, Mrs. Ferner. She kept representing the monarchy and its charities well into her nineties. Her five children were born between 1962 and 1972, and Johan Ferner died in 2015.
Harald’s death left Astrid the only living child of King Olav V and Crown Princess Märtha; her elder sister, Princess Ragnhild, Mrs Lorentzen, died in 2012. Her five children and seven grandchildren survive her. She died as the eldest surviving descendant of Queen Victoria, a distinction that now passes to her third cousin, Anne Abel Smith, 94, a granddaughter of Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone.
