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
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