Above the snowline - a Coronation reflection

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

I’m posting this on the day of the Coronation of King Charles II. I’m neither a republican nor an ardent royalist but I will be watching it, although I’m relieved that this idea of the ‘Homage of the People’ has been dropped. We’re not in the 12th century, and there’s only ONE King that we Christians should ever be paying homage to.

Royalty – good monarchs, bad monarchs – is a rich theme in literature. Here are some of my favourites from fantasy fiction:

• Aslan – there’s a reason why Lewis made him a lion. The Lion of Judah.

• Théoden, the noble and tragic king of the Rohirrim in Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

• Aragorn and Arwen – their reign ushered in a new golden age for the peoples of Middle-earth, but their marriage was the last Elf-Human union. There would never be another.

• Tar-Míriel, the final, doomed queen of Númenor, Tolkien’s version of Atlantis. She only gets a few lines in The Silmarillion but her appearance is unforgettable.

From classical literature:

- Macbeth is my favourite Shakespeare tragedy as its themes are so powerful and universal, the timeless saga of a would-be king and his would-be queen who get so drunk on their own power that they destroy other people and bring about their own destruction.

From historical fiction:

- Elizabeth Chadwick paints a wonderfully vivid portrait of Eleanor of Aquitaine in her trilogy The Summer Queen, The Winter Crown and The Autumn Throne. She writes about the movers and shakers of medieval history in her novels.

In Rosemary Sutcliff’s haunting Arthurian novel Sword at Sunset, Artos - the Romano-British king whose men hail him as Caesar on the Hill of the White Horse - reflects that it’s ‘lonely above the snowline’. He is now King of the British people, fighting against the Saxon invasion. He has achieved the ultimate goal. But that kind of authority and responsibility is a heavy burden. It’s lonely above the snowline, on the heights of the mountain, surveying the world at your feet, and there’s a long, long way to fall.

Our new King won’t ever have to face scheming Archbishops, royal courtiers plotting his downfall, pretenders to his throne or rebellious sons resenting his leadership and planning to either murder him or leave him to die, as Henry II’s sons did. Neither will he face trial by the people and suffer the same grim, bloody fate as his first namesake did. His is a purely symbolic role, albeit one of immense privilege.

Power, and the abuse of power, is a timeless, universal theme. How do we tackle issues like this in our own writing? What writers do we admire, who have tackled this subject well?

I’m an Anglican lay minister: my day job is administrator for the education and learning department of the United Reformed Church. I wrote a devotional for the anthology Light for the Writer’s Soul published by Media Associates International, and my short story ‘Magnificat’ appears in the ACW Christmas anthology Merry Christmas Everyone.