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European monarchy is sometimes misunderstood abroad as government by hereditary rulers. In countries such as Norway, its more interesting function is almost the reverse: the family remains while governments come and go.

A king is a son before he is a sovereign, later a husband and father and, with luck, a grandfather. The public watches these passages across an entire lifetime. In return, the royal family appears at the passages of national life: schools opened, universities founded, ships launched, marriages celebrated, disasters mourned and the dead remembered.

The arrangement gives otherwise abstract ideas — nation, inheritance, duty, continuity — a human form. Haakon VII could lay a university foundation stone and, seventy-five years later, his grandson Harald could return to the same institution.

Its significance is therefore less political than temporal.  A familial monarchy asks each generation to receive something, care for it and hand it on.