There is a walk you can take in central Oslo that covers barely five hundred metres and spans two centuries of history. It begins at the foot of Karl Johans gate, where the city's main thoroughfare rises gently toward the palace on the hill, and it ends in the quiet of Dronningparken, where a granite queen stands half-hidden among the trees. Along the way, several statues tell the story of how a nation that had spent four centuries as a Danish province reinvented itself as a modern monarchy — and how that monarchy, in turn, reinvented itself again and again to survive.
The walk is best done slowly. Each statue rewards a second look.
The king who said yes to the people: Haakon VII
The most important statue stands not at the palace itself but on the square below it, at the junction now called 7. juni-plassen — June 7th Square, named for the day in 1945 when the government returned from exile in London.
The statue is of Haakon VII, and when it was unveiled on the hundredth anniversary of his birth in August 1972, it caused an uproar. The sculptor, Nils Aas from Inderøy in Trøndelag, had shown the king in his general's uniform — but with his hat removed, held in front of his chest instead of tucked correctly under his arm as military protocol demanded. Critics were appalled. The pose looked, they said, like a confused man swaying in the wind.
Nils Aas was unmoved. "My king," he said, "takes off his hat for whomever he chooses." The gesture, he explained, was one of deference — to the people, to history, to the democratic compact that had made the Norwegian monarchy possible.
Today the statue is considered one of the great works of twentieth-century Norwegian sculpture, and the hat is the first thing every guide points out.
Haakon VII was not born Norwegian. He was born Prince Carl of Denmark in 1872, second son of the future King Frederik VIII. In 1896 he married his cousin, Princess Maud of Wales — youngest daughter of the British King Edward VII — in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace with Queen Victoria herself in attendance. They were 33 and 36 years old, respectively, when history caught up with them.
In need of a king
In 1905, Norway dissolved its union with Sweden. The Norwegian government, led by Prime Minister Christian Michelsen and with the diplomatic genius of Fridtjof Nansen providing crucial support, needed a king — and they needed one who could hold the support of the great powers. The fact that Prince Carl's wife was a daughter of the British Empire was not a minor consideration. Michelsen, Nansen and the first Norwegian foreign minister Jørgen Løvland understood that the alliance with maritime Britain secured Norway's shipping interests at a moment when both German and Russian ambitions were circling.
What shocked traditional European aristocrats was the manner of the election. This was a constitutional monarchy by popular referendum. The Norwegian Storting held a vote. The people confirmed it. European courts called it the "revolutionary throne." For centuries, dynastic legitimacy had flowed from bloodlines and divine right. Here was a king who had been, in effect, elected.
Prince Carl accepted — but only after insisting on the referendum. He took the old Norwegian name Haakon, his son Alexander became Olav, and in November 1905 they sailed into a country neither had ever visited before.
When Germany occupied Norway in April 1940, Haakon refused to capitulate. He fled north, was bombed by the Luftwaffe at Nybergsund, and on 7 June 1940 sailed from Tromsø to London aboard HMS Devonshire with Crown Prince Olav. (The ship's bell hangs to this day in Oslo City Hall, beside the right-hand staircase — worth finding.) For five years he broadcast to occupied Norway from London, becoming the symbol of resistance that his statue now commemorates.
He returned on 7 June 1945 — exactly five years to the day after his departure. The city went delirious with flags and crowds. After that, nobody in Norway seriously questioned the monarchy's legitimacy again.
The fashion queen: Maud
Behind the palace, in the quieter section of Slottsparken known as Dronningparken, a granite statue stands on a simple plinth. It is the work of sculptor Ada Madsen and was unveiled by Maud's son, King Olav V, in 1959, two decades after her death. The statue is, as one guide puts it, "simple and proud and elegantly withdrawn" — which captures something true about the woman herself.
Maud arrived in Kristiania — as Oslo was then called — in November 1905, and she arrived as a sensation. She was her mother's daughter in matters of fashion, and Queen Alexandra of Denmark (wife of Edward VII) had been the style authority of Europe. No one in Kristiania had ever seen a waist like Maud's. Rumours and gossip swirled from the moment she stepped off the ship.
Dronningparken has a long history as a cultivated garden space, dating back to the mid-eighteenth century. Gardeners at the palace are currently working to restore it to something resembling its appearance in Maud's own time; it opens each year on 18 May and closes on 1 October.
She had grown up in the stables and grounds of Sandringham, the great Norfolk estate her father had given her as a wedding gift, and she never entirely left it behind. Norway was a shock — a smaller court, a harsher winter, an altogether more austere aristocratic culture than anything she had known at Buckingham Palace or Fredensborg. But she made her adjustments. She insisted on upgrading the royal stables to match those at Buckingham Palace — same tiles, same fittings, same quality — and she got the budget approved.
She also found common cause with Nansen's Norway on one front: Holmenkollen. She and Haakon attended every year, whatever the weather. Whether she loved the skiing is uncertain; that she appeared, reliably, is not.
Maud died in England in the autumn of 1938, aged 68. She was the first member of the royal family to be buried in the Chapel Royal at Akershus Fortress. Her wardrobe — rescued during the occupation by her two British ladies-in-waiting, who managed to get the clothes to safety — was given as a gift to what is now the National Museum. It is worth seeing, if you have not.
In 2005, for the centenary of the Norwegian monarchy, a great part of the ground floor of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London was devoted to her wardrobe for a full year.
The statue in the park does not attempt to capture any of this. It simply stands, in the trees, in a posture of quiet dignity. That is probably correct.
The conqueror from the south: Karl Johan
At the top of Karl Johans gate, on the forecourt of the palace itself, the founding king of the dynasty sits permanently on horseback, one hand extended toward the city below. The statue was unveiled in 1875 and is the work of sculptor Brynjulf Bergslien — who, incidentally, gave a young Gustav Vigeland his first break.
The statue shows Karl Johan in his classical Napoleonic hat — but he too, like Haakon VII above, has removed it. It sits in his hand. He surveys his capital with, as one observer notes, "a certain regal satisfaction."
Vigeland turned up at Bergslien's studio one bitter winter, freezing, carrying his portfolio. Bergslien looked at the work for ten minutes and said: "Who made this? Did you do it yourself?" When Vigeland said yes, Bergslien said: "Damn, that's the best thing I've seen."
It was the beginning of a career.
Read more about Vigeland:
- The Vigeland Park: How Gustav Vigeland shaped humanity in 80 acres
- Gustav Vigeland: The Man, the Museum, and the Park That Became His Life’s Work
Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte was born in 1763 in the small town of Pau in southern France. He rose from common soldier to Marshal of France under Napoleon, became one of the empire's most capable commanders, and accumulated a fortune through strategic brilliance in the Napoleonic wars.
When the Swedish parliament needed a new crown prince — Sweden had no viable heir, and the elderly and senile King Karl XIII was going to need a successor — a delegation went looking in France. In Bernadotte they found someone with military competence, an heir of his own (his son Oscar), and the financial resources to stabilize a Swedish crown that had been stripped bare.
He was adopted as crown prince at the age of 47. He converted from Catholicism, was baptised into the Lutheran church, and took the name Karl Johan. He never learned more than rudimentary Swedish or Norwegian, but he governed both kingdoms for decades with considerable pragmatism, visiting Norway twenty-four times.
His choice of the palace site was said to reflect his military instincts: a plateau commanding the approach to the city, defensible, dominant. When the palace was finished in 1848, the public was unimpressed — they called it a box, said it had no artistic value. But additional funds were eventually approved, the façade was improved, and what emerged is now considered one of Europe's finest small empire-style palaces.
Karl Johan became Karl XIV Johan of Sweden and Norway in 1818. His dynasty still reigns — though, through the accident of inheritance and the extinction of various lines, the Norwegian branch is now technically of the Danish house Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg. Haakon VII is the third generation of what Norwegians call the modern dynasty; King Harald is the fifth.
The modern princess: Märtha
The fourth statue is the most animated of the five. Märtha — Crown Princess Märtha, wife of Crown Prince Olav — is shown by sculptor Kristin Kokkin with her arm raised in the characteristic wave she was famous for: as one guide describes it, "as if she was screwing in a lightbulb." It is exactly right. You can see the warmth in it.
Märtha was born a Swedish princess, married Olav in 1929, and their wedding was the first royal wedding held in the capital in 340 years.
The city had been waiting a long time. What it got was a three-day event of considerable splendour: an open carriage procession that deliberately crossed to the east side of Akerselva, through working-class Oslo, in a calculated gesture of democratic solidarity. Märtha wore a wedding dress with a skirt of silver lamé, brutally short for the era, with a four-metre train and Brussels lace veil. She was extraordinarily beautiful, and she knew how to use a wave.
That spring evening of 29 March 1929, the crowds outside the palace were enormous. As the heat of the day gave way to evening, jazz music flooded out of the palace windows. "Those were new tunes," one chronicler noted. They were.
When Germany invaded in 1940, Märtha and the children went to Stockholm. The situation in Sweden was uncomfortable — there were rumours that the Swedish king, Märtha's grandfather, might not be entirely averse to German interest in a Norwegian puppet king. The family eventually made their way to the United States, where they became, effectively, personal guests of President Roosevelt. Märtha had cultivated the relationship with extraordinary skill during an earlier American visit, and Roosevelt's personal connection to the Norwegian royal family was important to the Allied cause.
She died in 1954, aged 53, before Olav became king. He reigned as a widower, and it was said that the loneliness never entirely left him.
A second statue of Märtha — identical in spirit — stands outside the Norwegian embassy in Washington, D.C. Those who watched the television series Atlantic Crossing will have encountered her story; those who have not might consider it.
The children's gift: Prinsesse Ingrid Alexandras Skulpturpark
The fifth stop on this walk is unlike the others. It is not a single statue of a royal figure but an entire sculpture park — and its creators are children.
Prinsesse Ingrid Alexandras Skulpturpark was established in 2016 to mark King Harald and Queen Sonja's 25 years on the throne, funded by Sparebankstiftelsen DNB. The sculptures were chosen through a nationwide drawing competition among fifth and sixth graders from every part of the country. The winning entries were then realised by professional craftspeople, working directly from the children's drawings. The children followed the process from sketch to finished sculpture and were present at each unveiling, alongside members of the royal family.
The results are deliberately tactile and playful. "They are here for you," King Harald said at the opening, "to touch and play with, not just to look at." Among the sculptures: a rabbit in trouble, a geometrically abstracted fox, a man without a face (the expression supplied instead by a puppet he carries), a giant earthworm, a rainbow portal named Roggbif — an acronym of the Norwegian names for the colours of the rainbow — and a pencil making its escape. The park now holds twelve works in total, added gradually between 2016 and 2019.
The rainbow, Roggbif, has become one of the most photographed spots in Oslo during Pride. On any ordinary summer day, there are children climbing on the rabbit.
A postscript on hats
Three of the statues show a royal figure with hat in hand. The coincidence is too consistent to ignore. Karl Johan holds his Napoleonic hat. Haakon VII holds his general's cap. The gesture, across the decades, says the same thing: we are here at the pleasure of the people, not the other way around.
It is a small thing to notice. But Oslo is a city where small things, looked at closely, turn out to carry the whole story.
The walk described in this article begins at 7. juni-plassen, near the junction of Henrik Ibsens gate and Drammensveien, and ends in Dronningparken behind the palace. Allow an hour. The vaktskifte — the changing of the guard — takes place most days; check the Royal Court website for the current schedule. The guard departs from Akershus Fortress at 1:10 pm.
