Margrethe II of Denmark

Margrethe II of Denmark: The Queen Who Drew Middle-earth

The Danish editions of *The Lord of the Rings* carry illustrations signed Ingahild Grathmer. The surname is an anagram of Margrethe; the first name assembles her own middle names. Tolkien, shown the drawings, was struck by how close they ran to his own style. He was looking at the work of the heir to the Danish throne, who had been trained at Cambridge as a prehistoric archaeologist and who would spend the next fifty years running a monarchy and a second career at the same time.

A Girl Who Was Not Supposed to Reign

She was born at Frederik VIII's Palace, Amalienborg, on 16 April 1940 — one week after German troops entered Denmark. Under the law as it stood, she could not inherit anything: only males could take the Danish throne. It took a constitutional change and a national referendum on 27 March 1953 to make her heir presumptive at the age of thirteen. Denmark did not adopt full absolute primogeniture until 2009, long into her reign.

The Student

What followed was one of the most seriously educated apprenticeships any modern monarch has had. After N. Zahle's School in Copenhagen and a year at North Foreland Lodge in Hampshire, she took the *examen philosophicum* at the University of Copenhagen in 1960, read prehistoric archaeology at Girton College, Cambridge, in 1960–61, then political science at Aarhus, then the Sorbonne, then the London School of Economics in 1965. She had first visited an excavation at Illerup Ådal in 1952, aged twelve, with her grandmother Queen Alexandrine, and she kept going back to the field: digs in Italy, Egypt, Sudan, South America and Denmark. In 1974 she was made a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and she was elected to Sweden's Royal Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities. Between 1958 and 1970 she also served in the Women's Flying Corps, reaching lieutenant.

1972

Frederik IX died on 14 January 1972. The next day Prime Minister Jens Otto Krag proclaimed her from the balcony of Christiansborg Palace, and she announced her motto: God's help, the love of the people, Denmark's strength. She was the first female Danish sovereign under the new Act of Succession, and she was thirty-one. She had married the French diplomat Henri de Laborde de Monpezat at Holmen Church on 10 June 1967; he became Prince Henrik, and their sons Frederik and Joachim were born in 1968 and 1969. Henrik died in February 2018 after more than fifty years of marriage.

The Working Artist

The Danish Royal House puts it flatly: since 1970 the Queen has worked in painting, church textiles, watercolours, prints, book illustration, découpage, scenography and embroidery. The list is not decorative. She has designed vestments and altar textiles for churches in Denmark, Greenland, Germany and England, including a chasuble for Fredensborg Palace Church presented in 1976 and an antependium for All Saints' Church in Wittenberg in 2017. She was scenographer and costume designer for the Royal Danish Ballet's *A Folk Tale* in 1991, and did sets and costumes for *The Nutcracker*, *Cinderella* and *The Snow Queen* at the Pantomime Theatre and the Tivoli Concert Hall. With Per Brink Abrahamsen she co-wrote Hans Christian Andersen adaptations — *The Snow Queen* in 2000, which she narrated, and *The Wild Swans* in 2009, in which she took an uncredited cameo. For the 2023 film *Ehrengard: The Art of Seduction* she produced 81 découpages that served as its set designs and 51 costumes; on 3 February 2024, three weeks after leaving the throne at eighty-three, she won the Robert Award for Best Costume Design. Her work hangs in the National Gallery of Denmark and at ARoS Aarhus, and Andy Warhol put her into his *Reigning Queens* series in 1985.

The Voice at New Year

Her annual New Year's Eve address became the one moment each year when a Danish monarch was permitted a point of view. In 1984 she used it to attack xenophobia towards immigrants and coined *dumsmarte bemærkninger* — cocky remarks — which passed into everyday Danish. In the 2016 book *De dybeste rødder* she took a firmer line, arguing that Danes should explicitly spell out their cultural rules and values to newcomers. She was for decades a conspicuous chain-smoker; the court announced in 2006 that she would smoke only in private, and after major back surgery in February 2023 confirmed she had stopped.

Two Hard Decisions

In September 2022 she announced that from the following January the four children of Prince Joachim would lose their titles of Prince and Princess of Denmark and keep only the countships of Monpezat — so that, she said, they could shape their own lives without the obligations of formal attachment to the Royal House. Joachim, his wife, his former wife and his eldest son all said publicly that they were shocked, and she issued a statement of regret at having upset them. Then, on 31 December 2023, in the live New Year broadcast, she announced her abdication, effective 14 January 2024 — the fifty-second anniversary of her accession. She cited the toll of time, her ailments and that year's surgery. No Danish monarch had abdicated in nearly 900 years.

Why Margrethe Is Called a Genius

The word has to be handled carefully here, because she inherited everything and her constitutional job description required her to have no opinions worth the name. She took no part in party politics and did not vote, to avoid any appearance of partisanship. Fifty-two years of that is discipline, not intellect, and it should be said plainly.

The stronger claim is about range and standard. She was a trained prehistoric archaeologist who dug in four continents and was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. She was an illustrator good enough that Tolkien recognised something of himself in her line. She was a working scenographer whose costumes for a feature film won a competitive national award when she was eighty-three, judged against professionals. That is not a hobby portfolio; it is a second vocation sustained at professional pitch for half a century alongside a full-time constitutional office, and very few people of any station manage two lives at once.

The honest deduction: royal patronage opens doors that talent alone would not, no critic reviews a reigning queen without flinching, and her archaeology was that of a highly trained amateur rather than an original scholar. What is genuinely unusual is not any single gift but the refusal to let the office consume the person — and the judgement, over five decades, about exactly how much personality a modern monarchy can carry without breaking. Support for the Danish monarchy stood at under half when she acceded and around eighty per cent when she left. That figure is the actual measure of her skill.

Legacy

She reigned exactly fifty-two years, second in Danish history only to Christian IV, and between Elizabeth II's death in 2022 and her own abdication she was Europe's longest-reigning monarch and the world's only reigning queen. She received 42 state visits and made 55, and held 72 Danish and 8 foreign patronages. She remains Her Majesty Queen Margrethe, still eligible to serve as regent, and in October 2025 made her first official trip abroad since abdicating, to Rome. Her son reigns as Frederik X. She had spent her whole life demonstrating that a hereditary figurehead can still be a person with a body of work — which is, in a sceptical century, the only argument for the institution that has ever really landed.

Achievements

• monarch of Denmark (1972–2024)
• Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour — 1978
• Dame Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order
• Grand Cross of the Order of Wissam Alaouite
• Order of the White Eagle
• Educated at University of Cambridge and London School of Economics and Political Science