intentandinvention replied to your post: You know, as much as I love Tolkien, these days...
Agreed! It’s possible, though. There are all sorts of ways you can amend the original concept of divine right - make the family pass down the concept that they have to earn it / work for it / instead of primogeniture it’s whichever sibling does the most work for the kingdom / incorporate the idea that whilst the god(s)/higher power gave it, they can take it away. Divine right doesn’t have to mean entitled asshole esp if a rep of the divinity is active for accountability
Except that you’ve actually described the concept I take the most issue with.
I really don’t think Divine Right to its fullest extent is endorsed in many current High Fantasy novels---most readers these days recognize it’s bullshit, especially if the crown is passed on to an entitled asshole character. But there’s this...thread running through High Fantasy novels that says as long as you’re a good king/lord/duke/prince/whatever, as long as you’re capable, you're still first on the list to rule. You’re still entitled, there’s just a small caveat. Fee simple determinable. Sure, you have to work for it, you may even have to prove yourself worthy of it in the first place. And maybe it all turns out well, and the result is the good of the High Fantasy kingdom, 1000 years of peace and prosperity!
What I think that narrative misses---or deliberately ignores---is that while gods or kings or magic swords are figuring out who is Worthy Of Being King After, the actual people who will be under the king’s rule have little to no say in that decision.
It’s sneakier than straight-up Divine Right talk, more subtle, but the result is still an affirmation of the nobility. A kind of rigid meritocracy, where you were only ever considering the Duke’s three children. I mean, if you remove primogeniture and the divine right of kings, but keep the nobility, you have not actually fixed the problem! The nobility is the problem.
It doesn’t even have to be nobility, really, that’s just the most common form it takes in High Fantasy. For example I love Pratchett’s Discworld series, and especially Vetinari---the Patrician and tyrant of Ankh-Morpork. He’s a wonderful fantasy of a hyper-competent chess master who can move society towards modernism with a minimum of fuss. But outside of the fantasy, I’m left uneasy. A benevolent dictatorship, after all, is still a dictatorship. Why are we---readers, fantasy fans, writers---all so obsessed with this fantasy elite nobles who can take care of all this without our input, and the messy push and pull of self-governance?
What I want is more High Fantasy democracies and republics and parliaments, and---Greek polises or Mayflower Compact-style legislatures or even the elected kings of medieval Ireland, or the Slavic veches. Pick a model, pick something else. People have wanted a voice in their societies for as long as there have been societies, a specific ruling class is no more “natural” than plastic cups. The choice to keep writing about them is an artificial one, just like everything in fiction.
Look, I want to fantasize about elves and dwarves and dragons as much as the next girl, and I’m certainly not immune to stories about palace intrigue and courtly drama. But the fact that we can’t seem to fantasize about (parody, invert, play off of, comment on) democracy is depressing sometimes.
