Princess Astrid, Mrs. Ferner, has died peacefully at 94, the Norwegian royal palace announced on Friday, September 11, 2026. Two days earlier, attendants had wheeled her into Oslo Cathedral for the state funeral of her brother, Norway’s late King Harald V.
“The Princess fell asleep today, Friday 11 September, at the age of 94,” the palace said in a statement. Her 94 years carried her from wartime exile in the United States through a marriage that cost her the style of Royal Highness and on into decades of service to the Norwegian crown.
Her nephew King Haakon VIII, 53, who had taken the throne from Harald on Friday, August 28, ordered the flag above the Royal Palace balcony flown at half-mast on the day she died and again for her funeral. That service has been set for Wednesday, September 23, at 1 p.m. at Ris Church in Oslo, and Norwegian television will carry it live. The Norwegian state is covering the cost.
The church is a deliberate choice. It stands near Vinderen, the neighborhood where she lived with her husband, Johan Martin Ferner, and raised their five children, and it was consecrated in 1932, the year she was born. Her sister was buried from the Royal Palace chapel; Astrid will be buried from the parish down the road, at the hour Harald’s funeral began on September 9.
King Haakon, Queen Mette-Marit, Crown Princess Ingrid and Queen Sonja will all attend, the palace has confirmed, along with Astrid’s children and other relatives.
King Haakon Remembers His Aunt
“Throughout her long life, Princess Astrid represented the Royal House in a warm and dutiful manner,” King Haakon said in his tribute. His aunt was “particularly committed to caring for and including the most vulnerable members of society,” he said, and she carried out her duties with “loyalty, dedication and an infectious sense of humor.” He remembered a woman “never afraid to speak her mind.”
Her five children — Cathrine, Benedikte, Alexander, Elisabeth and Carl-Christian Ferner — said in a 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.”
At Her Brother’s Bedside
Astrid’s health had been failing for months, and doctors treated her in the hospital for pneumonia in March. She came out for her brother anyway. Harald, Europe’s oldest living monarch, was admitted on August 17 with a bacterial infection in his blood. Photographers caught her leaving the National Hospital in Oslo on August 27 after hours at his bedside; the next day he died at 89, after more than 35 years on the throne.
In the days before her own death the palace released two photographs: the princess alone at her brother’s coffin in the Palace Chapel, and at a palace window above the flowers mourners had left in Palace Square. Her last public appearance came at the funeral on September 9, after 13 days of national mourning, with thousands packing the procession route from the Royal Palace to Oslo Cathedral. Four European kings attended, along with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Britain’s Prince William.
Exile in Wartime and a Lifetime of Duty
Astrid Maud Ingeborg was born on February 12, 1932, at Villa Solbakken in Oslo, the second daughter of the future King Olav V and Princess Märtha of Sweden. Her name came from a godmother, her maternal aunt Astrid, then Duchess of Brabant and, two years later, Queen of the Belgians. She was a second cousin of Queen Elizabeth II.
Germany invaded Norway in April 1940, when she was eight. She fled with her mother, her sister Ragnhild and her brother Harald, first to neutral Sweden and then to the United States, and spent the war years in Washington, D.C. Her father spent them in England beside King Haakon VII, as a military commander and counselor to Norway’s exiled government. Home again in 1945, she attended Nissen, a girls’ school in Oslo, and read economics and political history at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, from 1950 to 1952.
Cancer killed her mother in 1954, at 53. Olav never remarried, and Ragnhild had settled in Brazil after marrying Erling Lorentzen, a former resistance fighter and royal bodyguard, in 1953. So the duties of first lady fell to Astrid, then 22. For 14 years she accompanied her father to receptions, official functions and state visits, a run that ended when Harald married Sonja Haraldsen in 1968.
She chaired the board of a memorial fund in her mother’s name and was a patron of charities working with women and with young people who have dyslexia — a condition she had herself. In 2002 the government granted her an honorary pension for her decades of work. Late in life she was rarely seen without Wilma, a rescue chihuahua she adopted in 2022; her official biography noted she had been given her first dog by her parents on her second birthday.
The Marriage That Cost Her a Title
Johan Martin Ferner was a businessman and Olympic sailor, a silver medalist at the 1952 Helsinki Games, whom Astrid met in the late 1950s after taking him on as crew for a yacht race. His father owned a department store in Oslo, 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 a hunger strike and the abandonment of her royal duties unless her father consented.
Olav relented, though the bishop of Oslo refused to officiate, leaving him to ask the retired bishop of Nidaros instead. They married at Asker Church on January 12, 1961. The match cost Astrid the style of Royal Highness and her yearly allowance, and she was known as Princess Astrid, Mrs. Ferner from then on. Their five children were born between 1962 and 1972. Johan Ferner died in 2015, and well into her nineties she was still representing the monarchy and its charities.
Harald’s death left Astrid the last living child of King Olav V and Crown Princess Märtha; her elder sister, Princess Ragnhild, Mrs. Lorentzen, died in 2012. She is survived by her five children and seven grandchildren.