On the Alleged Automatic Coronation of Exceptional Examinees

Every year, shortly before the Final Examination, the newspapers rediscover the same story. Some promising young Dwarf is identified, usually one whose tutors have unwisely described him as “the finest candidate in a generation”, and within days a correspondent asks whether a sufficiently extraordinary result might cause him to be proclaimed Emperor of the Dwarven Lands. The question is then repeated in taverns, lecture halls, betting houses, and, increasingly, publications which should employ editors. The customary answer is no. The legally correct answer is considerably more irritating.

To understand the problem, one must first remember that the Final Examination is not merely an educational exercise. Its modern form is descended directly from the examinations of the Great Empire, when performance determined eligibility for offices throughout the imperial administration. A Dwarf’s result was not a recommendation in the Human sense. It was a permanent declaration of demonstrated qualification. A sufficiently high mark might permit entry into the ministries, judiciary, diplomatic service, military command, provincial government, or whichever other offices were assigned to that class of result. The system has changed substantially in the intervening millennia, but its underlying principle survives: a Dwarf may spend the remainder of his life acquiring experience, wealth, fame, and common sense, yet his examination record will still appear in the first paragraph of any serious consideration of his fitness for public office.

For a period during the Great Empire, the imperial succession itself was incorporated into this system, a fact which is unfortunately true. The reform emerged during one of those recurring episodes in Dwarven history when hereditary monarchy had produced several rulers in succession whose principal qualification for sovereignty was having successfully been born to the previous ruler. The imperial jurists therefore placed eligibility for the throne under the examination laws. The precise arrangements changed more than once, but the surviving statutes are perfectly clear on the essential point: achievement of the highest prescribed distinction in the Final Examination conferred eligibility for the Imperial Dignity, and under certain circumstances the qualifying candidate was to succeed to it by operation of law.

This is the passage quoted by every enthusiast who wishes to inform a nervous seventeen-year-old that he may accidentally become Emperor on Thursday. What they generally omit is that the law presupposes the existence of an Empire, and the Great Empire has not existed for several thousand years. There is no unified imperial treasury, no imperial civil service, no continental legislature, no universally recognised imperial court, and (this point seems especially difficult for romantic minds) no single Dwarven state possessing authority over all the others. The modern Dwarven lands consist of sovereign governments joined by alliance, treaty, shared institutions, ancient custom, and an impressive quantity of mutually contradictory paperwork. Their rulers are not provincial governors awaiting instructions from a temporarily vacant throne. They are heads of independent states, and one cannot become sovereign over six governments merely by answering the mathematics section exceptionally well.

That should settle the matter. It does not, because Dwarven law possesses an almost pathological reluctance to die. Most Human states treat a statute several thousand years old as an archaeological curiosity. Dwarven courts are perfectly capable of treating one as controlling precedent provided nobody can demonstrate that it was properly repealed. Imperial law remains woven through modern commercial codes, inheritance rules, property rights, examination standards, municipal charters, mining law, and inter-state treaties. Entire branches of contemporary jurisprudence rest upon statutes enacted by emperors whose palaces are now excavations.

The succession provisions were never cleanly abolished. Why would they have been? The Empire did not conclude with a constitutional convention at which everyone politely agreed that it had ceased to exist. It fractured. Provinces became kingdoms, kingdoms divided, alliances shifted, dynasties rose, and the old administrative machinery gradually became several different governments. By the time anyone might sensibly have repealed the imperial succession code, there was no longer an imperial legislature universally recognised as possessing the authority to repeal it.

Thus the absurdity: the law is obsolete, unusable, politically meaningless, and very probably impossible to enforce. It is also, by several perfectly respectable interpretations of Dwarven jurisprudence, still law.

I once made the mistake of calling the provision “dead” during a lecture at the Collegium of Karad Vell. A professor of constitutional antiquities in the front row immediately corrected me.

“Dormant,” he said.

I replied that an institution which had possessed no government, territory, treasury, army, or universally acknowledged sovereign for thirty-two centuries seemed entitled to a little more than sleep. He informed me that duration was irrelevant to validity. When I asked whether the Empire would remain merely dormant after another thirty-two centuries, he said yes. I have since avoided metaphors around Dwarven lawyers.

The popular legend nevertheless goes much further than the law itself. No candidate is going to complete the Final Examination, receive an extraordinary score, and be seized by heralds before supper to be fitted for a crown. There is no automatic coronation ceremony concealed in the examination regulations. There is no secret throne beneath the Examination Hall. There is no waiting council of ancient electors, and the chief examiner does not carry the Imperial Crown in a cupboard beside the marking guides.

Yet the more precise question, whether an examinee could obtain a result which, under unrepealed imperial law, gives him a technically cognisable claim to an office called Emperor, is much harder to dismiss. Several jurists say yes, and several say no. Several say yes, but only if a number of other imperial offices simultaneously recognised his claim, most of which no longer exist. One celebrated opinion maintains that the candidate would legally become Emperor but would possess no territory over which his title had effect. Another concludes that sovereignty would attach immediately wherever surviving imperial law remained in force, an interpretation which would convert large portions of six independent states into an empire by examination result and is therefore favoured principally by scholars who do not govern anything. No modern Dwarven government accepts that conclusion, which has not prevented them from being extremely cautious about formally rejecting it.

Therein lies the true source of the legend, which owes nothing to ancient prophecy, quaint superstition, or the inventions of schoolchildren terrified by examinations. It is the grotesque afterlife of a functioning constitutional system. The old Empire left behind so much valid law that even its extinct throne retains a faint legal silhouette.

Should some future candidate obtain the necessary distinction, I am confident that nothing resembling an imperial restoration would occur. I am equally confident that within an hour, twelve constitutional scholars would begin arguing that it had. Within a day, at least one newspaper would address the candidate as Your Imperial Majesty, and by the end of the week someone would have filed suit. Within a month, the unfortunate examinee would almost certainly wish he had answered one question incorrectly.