[norwegianne]

Originally Posted by Brian_Ahern

I've asked this before on other forums, but either noone knows or noone's interested:)

I'll try to answer it as best I can. I'm currently writing Sonja's profile for August, for our 1905-2005 project. (It's a bit late due to computer trouble...)

I've always tried to get a sense of Queen Sonja's background, but with very little success. I know that Norway has a small population and that Sonja grew up when the country was recovering from the war, but I also know that there is a band of old families and families that were titled until Norway did away with titles in the first decade of the 20th century. So there must have been something like a polite society. Would the Haraldsen's have been part of this?

No, they wouldn't. In the book Sonja, Norges Kronprinsesse, if you can get to that, there is a brief retelling of Sonja's family history. I also know that around the wedding someone did a family chart. Sonja's apparently related to the first Norwegian king, Harald Fairhair, but so are many other people as well.

The titles disappeared in the earlier than that. (I don't recall the exact year now, and am on a public computer..., I'll try to find out for later.)

I know that they owned some sort of clothing store, that Harald and Sonja met at a party held by the very rich Johan Sternerson, that Sonja's brother built the apartment building near the palace that her mother lived in, and that the NRF used to holiday at a ski home inherited from Sonja's family. Sonja grew up in Vinderen, which I've heard described as a rather quiet section of Oslo, though I don't know if it's a particularly fashionable or affluent area. There are some things that would indicate her background is quite cushy, and others that indicate it isn't particularly top-drawer. It's been reported that she worked in a pub in England while perfecting her English in her student days; and then the Ecole Professionelle des Jeunes Filles she attended in Lausanne doesn't exactly sound like a finishing school.

The school she attended in Switzerland was a school to get a degree in clothing design/sewing. No finishing school.

Most Norwegian families, especially in the middle areas of income and above, own a cabin in the mountains. These cabins often sounds more fantastic than they truly are. Ski home would probably be exaggerating it. Sonja's background is what most other people, other than Norwegians who claim that there are no classes, would call middle class/upper middle class, seeing as they owned a store... No more, no less.

My sense is that she comes from a comfortably middle class background, and that it would have been possible for Harald to have taken a Norwegian bride from a more distinguished one. I wonder, for instance, if he would have had an easier time getting permission to marry a Wedel Jarlsberg? (None of this is to say that I think he SHOULD have taken a more upper class girl).

If anyone knows anything more about the Haraldsens, I would very much appreciate having it passed along. It's always been extremely difficult to learn more about them. Ditto the Ferner and Lorenzen families. It's easy to discover that the Hoiby and Behn families, on the other hand, are definitely pretty ordinary, run-of-the-mill working folk.

The only thing more acceptable at the time, would have been for him to marry someone else with royal blood, I think. It was what everybody expected.

I'd say the reason for your trouble in finding more about the Haraldsens/Ferners/Lorentzens is that it's all pretty far in the past, and the families knew how to keep their mouths shut. (Unlike others... *cough*Sven*cough*...) There might be more, but go 50-60 years into the past, and it is more difficult to find.