Birth and Early Life
Born in Appleton House, Flitcham, Sandringham estate, Norfolk, United Kingdom to Prince Carl of Denmark and Princess Maud of Wales, (daughter of King Edward VII of the United Kingdom), he was given the names and title of Alexander Edward Christian Frederik, Prince of Denmark. He was given the name Olav when his father became King Haakon VII of Norway in 1905.
Olav was the first heir to the throne since mediaeval times to grow up in Norway. He graduated from the Norwegian Military Academy in 1924, and went on to study jurisprudence and economics at Balliol College, Oxford.
During the 1930s, Crown Prince Olav was a naval cadet serving on the minelayer/cadet training ship Olav Tryggvason.
He was an accomplished athlete. Olav jumped from the Holmenkollen ski jump in Oslo, and also competed in sailing regattas. He won a gold medal in sailing at the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam and remained an active sailor into old age.
On 21 March 1929 in Oslo, he married his first cousin Princess Märtha of Sweden with whom he had one son, Harald, and two daughters, Ragnhild and Astrid. As exiles during World War II, Crown Princess Märtha and the Royal children lived in Washington, D.C., where she struck up a close friendship with Franklin D. Roosevelt. She died in 1954, before her husband ascended the throne.
The British Film Institute houses an early film, made in 1913, in which a miniature car commissioned by Queen Alexandra for the Crown Prince Olav tows a procession of Londoners through the streets of the capital, before being delivered to a pair of 'royal testers' of roughly Olav's age.
Read more about this topic: Olav V Of Norway
Famous quotes containing the words birth, early and/or life:
“Spirit enters flesh
And for all it’s worth
Charges into earth
In birth after birth
Ever fresh and fresh.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Franklin said once in one of his inspired flights of malignity—
Early to bed and early to rise
Make a man healthy and wealth and wise.
As if it were any object to a boy to be healthy and wealthy and wise on such terms.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“He is asleep. He knows no longer the fatigue of the work of deciding, the work to finish. He sleeps, he has no longer to strain, to force himself, to require of himself that which he cannot do. He no longer bears the cross of that interior life which proscribes rest, distraction, weaknesshe sleeps and thinks no longer, he has no more duties or chores, no, no, and I, old and tired, oh! I envy that he sleeps and will soon die.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)