I Volunteer as Leader

And now we come to the end of this extended cut of sacrificial kingship as a concept, what happened this got so out of control. It's just... I just love this theme so much, and, and, I got carried away, and...

Hokay, so. When last we left off, we'd established that the idea of a king as a noble leader willing to sacrifice himself for his people is fundamentally rooted in our worldwide mythology. That's why we all love characters like Aragorn, who are willing to sacrifice not only their lives but also their personal happiness for their people.

That's all fine and well in a fantasy setting where you have pure evil and pure good, but is it really relevant in a modern-day context? Does the divine right of kingship have a place in the modern world?

Let's talk about Tom Bombadil for a hot second.

He's of the jolly, beardy sort.

In case you've forgotten him, or never read The Lord of the Rings (since they wisely left him out of the movies), Tom Bombadil is the most powerful character in LOTR. Gandalf and Elrond and everybody says so. He could hold the One Ring forever and never be corrupted by it. And if Middle Earth fell to Sauron, he would be the very last to fall.

But none of that matters, because it's not in his nature to fight. He will not take a stand against Sauron, and therefore all the power in the world doesn't matter. Lesser men are forced to do the things he technically could do - but won't.

In ye oldeny days and even now, leadership and goodness are often conflated with genealogy. There's a few reasons for this - one is that when kings were running things you needed justification for their rule and you wanted to be reassured that the right guy was in power. And also, it's just easy. Heyyy, this guy is awesome because God made him born into this family, therefore he was MEANT to do this job. Abracadabra.

I like to think we've made a bit of progress. Leadership abilities are not restricted to a particular gene pool - or a particular gender, for that matter.

Instead, I propose the notion of sacrificial leadership. Where the strength of character to lead others and be willing to sacrifice yourself (or at least a part of yourself) for them comes from within whatever you are.

A really great example of this is Katniss in The Hunger Games. Don't worry, no spoilers, although it applies to later events in the series too... But all we really need to look at is the very beginning.

They’re not our kids, of course. But they might as well be. Gale’s two little brothers and a sister. Prim. And you may as well throw in our mothers, too, because how would they live without us? Who would fill those mouths that are always asking for more? With both of us hunting daily, there are still nights when game has to be swapped for lard or shoelaces or wool, still nights when we go to bed with our stomachs growling.

When her father dies, twelve-year-old Katniss chooses not to give up. She chooses to provide for the sister she loves and the mother she doesn't. She puts their welfare ahead of her own, feeds them when she can't feed herself. And of course, we all know that she makes the ultimate sacrifice for Prim.

“Prim!” The strangled cry comes out of my throat, and my muscles begin to move again. “Prim!” I don’t need to shove through the crowd. The other kids make way immediately allowing me a straight path to the stage. I reach her just as she is about to mount the steps. With one sweep of my arm, I push her behind me.

“I volunteer!” I gasp. “I volunteer as tribute!”

This doesn't only apply to life-or-death situations. In my upcoming book, the hero is a rich CEO who runs the family business out of duty. He knows that he has the means to employ a large number of people and to make positive changes in the world, so he feels that it would be irresponsible to step down and just dabble in hobbies and have fun for the rest of his life.

So yes, as much as I have always loved the theme of sacrificial kingship in literature/film, I think we've moved past the idea of divine right. Nobody deserves anything because they happened to be born in a certain situation. But life isn't about what we deserve. Life isn't fair. We have to make the best of what we have and the best of what's inside us. We can use the term sacrificial leadership to encompass heroes and heroines both past and present. Some people are born leaders, and (at least in literature) in order to complete their character arc they need to embrace that ability in themselves and be willing to sacrifice themselves (or part of themselves) for the greater good.

Like Aragorn.

Tolkien once killed a man in an outlining contest.

Just, not like his crown.

Fishing for Kings (Sacrificial Kingship Part 2)

So! Now that we've gone into the background of modern thinking about mythologic archetypes, we can talk about two particular concepts: the sacred king and the maimed king.

The sacred king was the cornerstone of Frazer's theories about ancient civilizations. In his work, he postulated that in the past, the life and eventual death of kings represented and growth and death of the vegetation, a "dying and reviving god". This human king provided for his people for a time and then eventually was sacrificed back to the earth. (I have some problems with this theory... namely that back in ye oldeny times most people were nomadic and didn't do a ton of agriculture... but this is about lit theory and therefore my historical issues with it really aren't relevant.) In any case, this connects to the fact that both in ancient and far more modern history, some kings are viewed as sacred beings. This could mean that the king was credited with good fortune. Or it could mean that your people view you as responsible for their well-being and sacrifice you in order to get a better harvest next year.

The maimed king (also known as the Fisher King, as he was referred to in T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land) seems to come from Arthurian legend. In the tales, this king was wounded so that he suffered from impotence, and his lack of fertility affected the earth around him and turned it into a barren wasteland. This legend is super freaking weird in all of its incarnations (there's a version where this king asks his followers to cut off his head and then his head keeps talking and keeps them all company on their trip back to Britain idk idk guys the Celts were weird). In any case, when purehearted people eventually come fetch the Grail he was hanging onto and this somehow heals him, his restoration represents the growth of vegetation in spring. Rebirth, if you like.

SO. These are cool and all, but not terribly interesting concepts unless you're super into agriculture and ye olde civilizations that may or may not have been nomadic. So why talk about them at all?

Because I think that these are necessary concepts if you want to understand what sacrificial kingship is and why it works. The idea of a king being responsible for the fate of his people, and being willing to lay down his life for their good, is deeply embedded in not just one culture, but essentially every culture. While history tells us that kings are flawed and often corrupt, our legends and mythology tell us a very different tale. Belief in the goodness and rightness of our kings is practically part of our DNA.

It's why characters like Aragorn work in fiction. We see from his introduction in The Fellowship of the Ring that although Aragorn is a good leader and has royal blood, he has no desire to be king and happily plays around in the mud while the stewards of Gondor do their thing. (Yes, I know that the films gave him all this inner conflict about being Isildur's heir, because of course if your great-great-great-great-great-whatever was susceptible to corruption, so are you, because that is totally how ancestry works. This isn't in the books and it was stupid anyway so I don't care.)

The books aren't overt about it because they aren't nearly as focused on Aragorn as the movies are, but we see clearly that Aragorn is happy in his current circumstances and views kingship as a burden. There is nothing kingship could give him that he wants. He's used to living as free as it's possible for a man to be, as a nomad following whims of the moment. Kingship is a cage - as Eowyn later notes.

In fact, in the books Aragorn proposes to Arwen and she accepts, but Elrond forbids them to marry until Aragorn is king of Gondor. And Aragorn does nothing. He loves Arwen, but he loves his freedom more. You could argue that he doesn't want to upset the political situation with things being kinda shaky in Middle Earth, but know who's on the throne as steward? Denethor.

This guy is definitely a savvy political player; I foresee no problems at all.

While in the movies Aragorn has to achieve self-actualization and gives himself lots of hugs, in the books Aragorn's arc is him eventually deciding to put the needs of others before his own needs and becoming king despite his own wishes. We get a bunch of lines like, "I have come because Gandalf begs me to do so." and, The hobbits still remained in Minas Tirith, with Legolas and Gimli; for Aragorn was loth for the fellowship to be dissolved. "At last all such things must end, but I would have you wait a little while longer." Also this: "I have," said Strider. "I dwelt there once, and still I return when I may. There my heart is; but it is not my fate to sit in peace, even in the fair house of Elrond." 

And while in the movies Boromir is all tetchy about GONDOR HAS NO KING; GONDOR NEEDS NO KING; EFF YOU ASSATHORN, in the books Boromir flat-out begs Aragorn to come fight for Gondor as its king. "I was not sent to beg any boon, but to seek only the meaning of a riddle," answered Boromir proudly. "Yet we are hard pressed, and the Sword of Elendil would be a help beyond our hope - if such a thing could indeed return out of the shadows of the past." 

And later... "Mayhap the Sword-that-was-Broken may still stem the tide - if the hand that wields it has inherited not an heirloom only, but the sinews of the Kings of Men." 

"Who can tell?" said Aragorn. "But we will put it to the test one day." 

"May the day not be too long delayed," said Boromir. "For though I do not ask for aid, we need it. It would comfort us to know that others fought also with all the means that they have."

The ending in the book is not a happy one for Aragorn. He is forced to take up his right of kingship and do his best by the people of Gondor, no matter what he would rather his fate be (and, just to rub it in, Gondor does have peace under his reign as he sits on the throne - just like he claimed his fate wasn't). It's not a tragedy of course, but his happiness is qualified by the fact that he'd rather be somewhere else doing something else. BUT he's a good king doing right by his people, which takes precedence over personal happiness.

But what about divine right of kingship and that whole ickyness, you may ask? Does blood (either through ancestry or sometimes trial by combat) really justify kingship? Does it matter?

Well... Check back for part 3.

The King is Corn, Let's Eat

WHO WANTS TO TALK ABOUT SACRIFICIAL KINGSHIP?!

Yeah, well, too bad.

In 1890 a Scottish guy named James Frazer published The Golden Bough and everyone immediately dove for their fainting couches. The Golden Bough was a comparative study of mythology and religion that analyzed both alike from a dispassionate perspective. His analysis concluded that human thought progresses over time from belief in magic to belief in religion to belief in science. While that seems like a common enough thought now, back in the day if you didn't go to church every Sunday they started gathering logs in anticipation of the witch-burnin' party. (Not really, but back then effectively everyone was religious. Atheism was almost unheard of.) So to analyze religion from an anthropological standpoint was revolutionary, and in fact completely revitalized the field of anthropology.

By the third edition this sucker
expanded from one volume into
TWELVE. 

While most people today haven't heard of The Golden Bough, almost everyone has heard of the people whose work was self-admittedly influenced by it (this sentence structure and verb/noun agreement is so horrendously awful that I actually decided to keep it instead of edit. Such horror must be preserved), including but not limited to: Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, Aleister Crowley, Ezra Pound, William Gaddis, Mary Renault, T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, and H.P. Lovecraft.

One of the main things that The Golden Bough tried to do was to isolate the shared ideas of different religions and myths into clearly defined elements - such as fertility rites, human sacrifice, sun worship, etc. Frazer's hypothesis was that old religions were fertility rites that revolved around the worship and eventual sacrifice of a sacred king. The king symbolized plants and I swear to God I am not just making this up. Basically the idea was that the life and death of a chosen king (who also symbolized the sun) mirrored the growth and death of the crops that kept people alive.

Also this Anthropologist/Egyptologist named Margaret Murray (born 1863) wrote a bunch of stuff about how she believed that there was this huge underground cult of pagan covens that practiced frequent human sacrifice until they were driven underground by the witch hunts that started around 1450. Included in this writing was the idea that a bunch of English Kings like William Rufus were secret pagans. And this woman was a professor at University College London and published by Oxford University Press. Academia in the early 1900s, you are crazy. And this really had nothing to do with anything but I thought it was hilarious.

This looks legit.

Sooooo this post is getting way long already, so I think this is gonna be a 2 or 3 parter. Those of you that aren't passed out in front of your computer by now, very good. You have been edified or something.