King Haakon VIII had a nickname for his daughter. Standing before Norway’s lawmakers at the Royal Palace in Oslo for the annual Stortingsmiddag, Haakon called Crown Princess Ingrid Alexandra “the junior and debutante.” It was her first time at the dinner and a genuine coming-out moment, marked by her wearing the Norwegian amethyst tiara. Beside her sat her grandmother, Queen Sonja, whom Haakon cheerfully cast as the evening’s “superveteran.”
© NTBThe Stortingsmiddag is the gala banquet the monarch hosts for members of Parliament, and it served as the perfect backdrop for Princess Ingrid's new nickname. A week later, she's set to clear another first: an audience on her own as crown princess.
She'll also be welcoming representatives of Operation Day’s Work, the student-run charity, along with members of the South African education organization Equal Education, at the Royal Palace. This year’s campaign raises money for educational projects in South Africa, and the pairing is a natural one for an heir who is still a student herself.
That student status is why the palace is moving things so quickly.
Ingrid Alexandra is currently spending the fall semester as an exchange student at the University of Oslo, and is due back at the University of Sydney in February to continue her degree. The Royal Court has said she’ll keep prioritizing her studies and take on select official engagements until she leaves, explaining why her calendar has accelerated so sharply since the start of her father’s reign.
© Rune HellestadA princess called to the rescue
The ramp-up didn’t start with the new reign, though. Ingrid Alexandra’s training as heir has been underway for some time, driven in large part by the possibility that her mother’s absence would require her to step in as a de facto first lady. Queen Mette-Marit is still recovering from the lung transplant she underwent in June after years of battling pulmonary fibrosis.
Haakon has clarified time and time again that Mette-Marit is, and will remain, at his side. Still, there’s little doubt that Ingrid Alexandra is expected to be an indispensable asset in this new era, and circumstances have forced her through an apprenticeship that other heirs take at a more leisurely pace.
Haakon’s ascension has also given the crown a popularity boost, but it comes on the heels of an annus horribilis. As Mette-Marit fought her illness, she was forced to answer for her past friendship with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, while her son, Marius Borg Høiby, stood trial on dozens of charges, among them four counts of rape. He was ultimately convicted on two of those counts and sentenced to four years in prison, a verdict he has appealed.
© LISE ASERUDWith King Harald and Queen Sonja well into their eighties, Ingrid Alexandra emerged as the one figure capable of projecting youth, renewal and a future, hopefully encouraging the country to look past its royal family's scandals.
Her premature role as a working heir was on its way to getting a legal framework. To shore up that fragility, Parliament began work on a precautionary regency reform that would allow the princess to serve temporarily as regent if both Harald and Haakon were incapacitated at the same time. King Harald’s death on August 28 made any such extraordinary mechanism unnecessary.
All of this unfolded during her first year of university in Sydney, a plan that was reworked so she could fly home to be closer to her mother as she recovered from a challenging surgery. That exceptional arrangement ends in February. From then on, the palace will have to work out, step by step, how to balance Ingrid's studies with an institutional role that no longer allows for pauses.
A veteran of firsts
© NTBIngrid Alexandra is preparing to become Norway’s first queen regnant in six centuries. She's the first woman to inherit the throne under the absolute primogeniture rules that Norway adopted in 1990. She completed 15 months of military service with the Engineer Battalion at Skjold camp in Målselv, and she followed her family’s tradition of public schooling, finishing at Elvebakken, one of Oslo’s largest public high schools.
The new reign handed her another first right out of the gate. On September 1, as her father swore his oath to the Constitution before the Storting, Ingrid Alexandra signed her own written oath at the Royal Palace. In the modern monarchy, that hadn’t happened before, because the heir had never been of age when a new king took the throne.
She became heir at 22, and she’s expected to be one of the great pillars of her father’s reign, alongside Queen Sonja.
