Margrethe II

Biography

In the early 1970s a Danish reader of Tolkien sent the author her drawings for “The Lord of the Rings” without being asked. She was Princess Margrethe, heir to the throne, not yet queen. Tolkien, according to tradition, kept the drawings and left warm notes about them; in 1977 they appeared in a Danish reissue of the novel under the pseudonym Ingahild Grathmer. The surname is made from the letters of the name Margrethe, and “Ingahild” is assembled from her middle names Ingrid, Alexandrine and Þórhildur.

Margrethe Alexandrine Þórhildur Ingrid was born on 16 April 1940 at Amalienborg, in Copenhagen, a week after the German occupation of the country began. The eldest daughter of the future King Frederik IX and Ingrid of Sweden, she was given the Icelandic name Þórhildur because her grandfather Christian X was also King of Iceland. She was baptised on 14 May 1940 at Holmen Church. The law of succession then allowed only the male line, and her uncle, Prince Knud, was regarded as the heir. The law was changed in 1953: in a referendum on 27 March female succession was permitted, and Margrethe became heir presumptive. On her eighteenth birthday, 16 April 1958, she was given a seat in the Council of State, where she later chaired meetings in her father’s absence. She was educated widely but took no university degree: at home and at Zahle’s School in Copenhagen, a year at North Foreland Lodge, an English boarding school, then the examen philosophicum at the University of Copenhagen (1960). After that came prehistoric archaeology at Cambridge (1960–1961), political science at Aarhus, the Sorbonne in 1963 and the London School of Economics in 1965. From 1958 to 1970 she served as a volunteer in the Women’s Flying Corps. She took up archaeology early and later joined excavations in Italy, Egypt, Denmark, Sudan and South America; by her own account, had she not been queen she would have tried to become an archaeologist. In London she met the French diplomat Henri de Laborde de Monpezat. They were married on 10 June 1967 at Holmen Church, and he became Prince Henrik of Denmark.

On 14 January 1972, after the death of Frederik IX, Margrethe, aged thirty-one, became the first woman on the Danish throne under the new law. The next day Prime Minister Jens Otto Krag proclaimed her queen from the balcony of Christiansborg Palace. She chose her motto herself: “God’s help, the love of the people, Denmark’s strength”. She expressed no political views and did not vote in elections, so as not to give an appearance of partisanship. In 1975 she made an official visit to the Soviet Union: Leningrad, Moscow and Georgia.

She had drawn since childhood, but the wider public came to know her art after her design for a Christmas seal in 1970; seals from her drawings appeared again in 1983, 2003 and 2015. Since the mid-1970s she has worked in découpage, gluing clippings from magazines and books into new compositions and sealing them with lacquer. She gave embroideries made from her own patterns on graph paper to family and friends and used them in her own rooms. From the 1970s she designed vestments and textiles for churches in Denmark, Greenland, Germany and England; in 1989 she made the bishop’s robe for the Diocese of Viborg, and in 2017 an antependium for the All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg. For theatre and film she worked mostly on Andersen’s fairy tales. She designed costumes for August Bournonville’s ballet “A Folk Tale” at the Royal Danish Theatre (1991), sets and costumes for the ballets “Thumbelina”, “The Tinderbox” and “The Swineherd” at the Pantomime Theatre, and “The Snow Queen” in 2019 with the choreographer Yuri Possokhov. Together with the screenwriter Per Brink Abrahamsen she wrote the scripts of the films “The Snow Queen” (2000) and “The Wild Swans” (2009). For “Ehrengard: The Art of Seduction” (2023) she made 51 costumes and 81 découpages on which the sets were based. For the costumes she won a Robert Award on 3 February 2024. Her work has been shown in Denmark and abroad; in 2015, with Queen Sonja of Norway, she exhibited landscape-inspired work in “From Mountains to Coast” at the Barony Rosendal.

She announced her abdication in the New Year’s address of 31 December 2023 and gave up the crown on 14 January 2024, exactly 52 years after her accession. Her elder son became King Frederik X.

In March 2026 it was reported that the new bridge across the Storstrøm would bear her name.