On 21 September 2024, Björn Ulvaeus married Christina Sas in a private ceremony at the Langelinie Pavilion in Copenhagen, Denmark. The 79-year-old Swedish musician, one of four founding members of ABBA, confirmed the union via his official Instagram account, stating: “Today on the 21st of September 2024, Björn Ulvaeus married Christina Sas from Herning, Denmark.” The couple had met in Nuremberg, Germany, in 2021 during promotional activities for ABBA’s comeback album Voyage, and began dating in the spring of 2022. Approximately 120 guests attended the wedding, which Ulvaeus described as taking place “in the presence of close friends and family.”
The ceremony was officiated by Sandi Toksvig, the Danish-British broadcaster, comedian, and writer. Photographs published by Ulvaeus show Toksvig wearing a red and gold clerical-style robe, standing beside the groom in a suit and Sas in a muted green wrap dress. Representatives for Ulvaeus confirmed to the Press Association that Toksvig had conducted the full ceremony. Ulvaeus credited Toksvig, along with Danish singers Anne Linnet and Kaya Brüel, with making the evening “extra special.”
Toksvig told The Times she became friends with Ulvaeus after writing the script for Mamma Mia! The Party!, a theatrical dining experience that opened at The O2 Arena in London in 2018. The production, which Ulvaeus conceived and co-produced, features ABBA songs performed live within an immersive narrative set on a fictional Greek island, joining a broader wave of immersive London entertainment experiences as explored in Unveiling the Best Theatre Shows to See in London. Toksvig’s role in scripting the London show established the personal relationship that led to Ulvaeus asking her to officiate his wedding six years later. “Bjorn is my friend, and he phoned me up and said, ‘Sandy, you would come to my wedding.’ I said ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘You will do the wedding.’ I said, ‘In what sense?'” Toksvig told ITV’s Good Morning Britain in October 2024.
The Langelinie Pavilion, the venue for the ceremony, holds personal significance for Toksvig. Situated on the Copenhagen waterfront with views across the Øresund strait to Sweden, the venue was where her father, Claus Toksvig, a foreign correspondent for Danish television, had delivered public talks during her childhood. “I had been to the venue many times when I was younger to hear him talk,” Toksvig wrote in The Times. “It felt weird being the one speaking; I would have liked him to have been there.” The Danes describe the aesthetic of such ceremonies as enkeldt – beautiful through simplicity.
Not everything proceeded without incident. During the trilingual ceremony conducted in Danish, Swedish, and English, Toksvig mixed up her languages. She had taught the English-speaking guests a Swedish phrase meaning “don’t worry,” but instead delivered the Danish equivalent: “Der er ingen ko på isen,” which translates literally to “There is no cow on the ice.” The gaffe became a talking point when Toksvig recounted it at the Brighton Dome during the opening night of her 14-date Friends of Dorothy UK tour in late September 2024. “So now I will gift my wedding mistake to all of you,” she told the audience. “The next time something is worrying you just say to each other ‘There is no cow on the ice.’ It is fine.”
Ulvaeus has been married three times. His first marriage was to Agnetha Fältskog, his fellow ABBA member, in 1971. The pair divorced in 1980, during the period when ABBA ceased active recording. In 1981, Ulvaeus married Lena Källersjö; the couple had two daughters, Emma and Anna, and jointly managed assets reported at approximately £100 million before separating around 2022. Fältskog, Anni-Frid Lyngstad, Ulvaeus, and Benny Andersson formed ABBA in Stockholm in 1972, achieving global fame after winning the Eurovision Song Contest in 1974 with “Waterloo.” The group sold an estimated 400 million records worldwide before disbanding in 1982. Their Eurovision victory remains one of the contest’s most cited moments, a cultural touchstone explored in depth in Eurovision 2024: Everything You Need to Know About the World’s Biggest Song Contest.
The wedding occurred as ABBA’s commercial enterprise continued to generate substantial revenue. ABBA Voyage, the virtual concert residency featuring digital avatars of the four members at a purpose-built 3,000-seat arena in Stratford, east London, opened in May 2022. The holding company Aniara Ltd reported turnover of £104.3 million for 2024, with 1,055,038 tickets sold across 374 performances. The show maintained an average occupancy rate exceeding 90%. Cumulative economic impact on the UK economy reached £2.06 billion between May 2022 and May 2025, with attendees spending an average of £224.10 per day in London beyond their ticket costs, according to a report commissioned by the production. Bookings remain open through June 2026.
Toksvig’s own career spans multiple decades across British broadcasting. Born in Copenhagen on 3 May 1958, she was raised in the United States and educated at Girton College, Cambridge, where she wrote and performed in the first all-woman Cambridge Footlights show. She took over from Stephen Fry as host of the BBC quiz show QI in October 2016, becoming the first female presenter of a mainstream British television comedy panel show. From 2017 to 2020, she co-presented The Great British Bake Off on Channel 4 alongside Noel Fielding. She chaired BBC Radio 4’s The News Quiz for a decade, and in 2015 co-founded the Women’s Equality Party. She is a patron of Humanists UK, which positioned her as a natural choice for officiating a humanist wedding ceremony.
Ulvaeus and Sas made no public announcements regarding future plans following the wedding. Gyles Brandreth, who interviewed Ulvaeus for his Rosebud podcast, posted on Instagram that he had “loved meeting Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus” and Sas, confirming Toksvig’s role in the ceremony and Ulvaeus’s statement that she had made the day “extra special.”
