On Tuesday, Dolly Parton died, and I felt genuinely bereft. For years I had loved her voice, her songs, her wit and her faith. I admired her appearance, and the intelligence with which she carried it off. Dolly ensured that we saw the joke without ever allowing us to imagine that she was one.
Friday brought news of the death of King Harald V of Norway. Regular readers of this website will not have been waiting impatiently for my reflections on royalty. It is not my bag. I do not follow royal weddings, collect commemorative china or possess strong views about who should appear on a palace balcony. Yet his death saddened me too.
At first glance, Dolly Parton and King Harald made an improbable pair. One was born in a cabin in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. The other was born into a royal house. One wore a crown. The other wore rhinestones. Yet each possessed a quality that has become exceptionally rare in public life. They knew how to include people without flattering them, and how to stand for something without turning those who differed from them into enemies.
Perhaps that is why their deaths, coming within days of one another, have felt like more than the passing of two famous people. We have lost two custodians of a generous we.
Dolly Parton was unmistakably herself. There was nothing neutral or focus grouped about her. She was Appalachian, Christian, working class, female, ambitious, shrewd and entirely unembarrassed by any of it. She neither disguised where she came from nor allowed it to limit where she might go. She wrote songs of emotional depth, built a formidable business empire and fashioned a public image from glossed lips, false eyelashes and towering wigs.
Her humour was part of her intelligence. She made the joke before anyone else could, but the joke was never an apology. The wigs, the clothes and the figure were not evidence that she had failed to understand the rules of good taste. They were evidence that she had understood them perfectly and decided that they did not interest her.
What was more remarkable was the breadth of the affection she inspired. Dolly was loved by conservative Christians and gay men, by feminists and country traditionalists, by people in Appalachian towns and by people who would not dare go to Tennessee. These groups are not usually found sharing cultural heroes. Some of them have spent much of the past decade being encouraged to regard one another with bitterness.
Dolly did not bring them together by becoming vague. She was sufficiently secure in her own identity to make room for the identities of others. Her faith did not require an enemy. Her love of home did not depend upon hostility towards those who came from somewhere else. She could hold convictions without needing to convert every human encounter into a contest.
Her generosity took practical form. The Imagination Library, established in honour of her father who could not read, began by sending books to children in her home county. It grew into an international programme that placed millions of books in the hands of children. She also gave to medical research, supported communities after natural disasters and assisted families in the region from which she had emerged. Dolly knew what poverty could take from a child, including the ability to imagine a life beyond their circumstances. For her, love was not sentiment. It was something one did.
King Harald’s generosity took a different form. Much of his public service was carried through words, and he chose them well.
My Norwegian friends, and the visits I have made to Norway, have left me with a deep affection for the country. Among the countries I have visited, Norway seems to possess an unusually strong sense of we. This is not to make the place sound impossibly virtuous. Norway has its arguments, exclusions, vanities and political divisions, as every country does. Yet Norwegians still seem to believe that they are responsible for one another.
It is not the belligerent we of nationalism, which requires an opposing they before it can feel secure. Nor does it demand that everyone become alike. It is more spacious: the sense that a country is something its people hold in common, and that belonging brings obligations as well as rights.
King Harald did not create this quality in Norway. But he recognised it, gave words to it and came to embody it. He appeared to understand that a monarch does not own the country over which they reign. At their best, they serve as custodians of its we.
In 2016, at a garden party in the grounds of the Royal Palace, Harald attempted to describe the people who made up Norway. He spoke of Norwegians whose families had come from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Poland, Sweden and Somalia. He spoke of the young and the old, of people who were married or divorced, and of girls who loved girls and boys who loved boys. Norwegians, he said, believed in God, Allah, everything and nothing.
“In other words,” he concluded, “Norway is you. Norway is us.”
There was something radical in those words. Harald was not pretending that differences of religion, sexuality, history or conviction were unimportant. Nor was he offering the soulless language of a corporate inclusion statement. He was saying that difference need not prevent people from speaking of one another as us. To love one’s country, in this understanding, was not simply to love its mountains, flags or ancestral memories. It meant accepting responsibility for the people with whom one shared it.
Harald had shown the same understanding after the terrorist attacks of 22 July 2011, when 77 people were murdered in Oslo and on Utøya. The violence had been committed in the name of an exclusive vision of Norway. Its purpose was not only to kill, but to determine who could belong.
Harald refused that premise. He grieved with the bereaved and spoke of the Norway that must endure beyond the terror. Freedom, he insisted, was stronger than fear. Words neither restore the dead nor remove prejudice, but societies live partly through the stories they tell about themselves. Harald’s task was to prevent hatred from dictating what Norway would become.
Harald could do something that elected politicians increasingly struggle to do. Politicians speak through parties, programmes and constituencies. Their success often depends upon persuading one part of the population to defeat another. Harald could speak of Norway without asking half of Norway to vanquish the other half. He used his position to remind Norwegians of what they shared.
Much of contemporary public life encourages people to treat identity as a source of conflict. We are told that recognising the dignity of someone else will somehow diminish our own. Some confuse unity with conformity, while others regard any suggestion of a common life as a threat to individual difference. We say more and more about who we are, but less about what we owe one another.
Dolly Parton and King Harald offered another possibility. Both were rooted in particular places, traditions and forms of faith. They belonged somewhere. They knew who they were. But their sense of belonging did not end at the boundary of the self.
There was also little moral grandstanding in either of them. Dolly could speak about love, faith and acceptance without sounding as though she had recently completed a training course in the approved vocabulary. Harald could affirm gay people, Muslims and immigrants without presenting himself as unusually enlightened for having noticed their existence. Neither seemed interested in being admired for being good.
Nor was their kindness the product of lives untouched by difficulty. Dolly emerged from poverty and wrote with piercing clarity about abandonment, sacrifice and grief. Harald experienced exile as a child during the German occupation of Norway and later led his country through terrorism and national mourning. Their warmth was not an escape from suffering. It was a way of answering it.
The public grief following their deaths tells us something about what we fear we are losing. It is not simply their talent or status. There will be other singers, and Norway already has another king. What feels rarer is their largeness of spirit. They possessed enormous influence without using it to diminish anyone else.
Dolly put books into the hands of children. Harald wrapped words around a nation. Each understood, in a different way, that whatever gifts we possess are entrusted to us for the sake of others. A voice, a crown, a fortune, a public platform: these things become meaningful when they enlarge the common life.
“Norway is you,” Harald said. “Norway is us.”
Dolly might have put it differently, and almost certainly with more sparkle. But I think she knew exactly what he meant.
Consilium 
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