Originally written February 11, 2023, for SLC 494 : Animals in the Anthropocene

Living within the walls of the Edinburgh Zoo in Scotland is royalty, Sir Nils Olav. No, not because he's a king penguin, a species with a regal namesake, but for the unusual history of the zoo penguins.

Imagine: you are a penguin living in the Antarctic continent. You would have been hatched, raised, and fed by your penguin parents, who would have regurgitated their food contents into your beak. Eventually, you would grow and leave the ice sheet, where delicious fish abound—basically, the life of an average penguin.

Now, you're a Norwegian gentleman on an Antarctic whaling expedition. You come across a colony of strange-looking animals, and shockingly, they welcome you! Obviously, their friendliness is the perfect excuse to capture several of these creatures and transport them thousands of miles across several oceans to the other end of the world to showcase your latest triumph.

110 years later, people continue to celebrate the Edinburgh Zoo's 1913 gift of three king penguins from the Norwegian shipping expedition. Today, one can find a bronze statue of a king penguin outside the Penguin Rock enclosure, as the penguin is the zoo's mascot.

And of course, there's royalty:

The royalizing of Edinburgh's king penguins ​​begins in 1961, after Lieutenant Nils Egelien of Norway's King's Guard visited the zoo and became infatuated with the avian residents. 11 years later, Nils adopts one of the penguins, who he names Nils Olav, a name combining his own name and the king's, thus aggrandizing Nils and the penguin while also creating official Norwegian sponsorship of the zoo. Not to mention, the penguin becomes the King's Guard official mascot, with Nils Olav holding the title of Lance Corporal. 

Reasonably, we wouldn't expect Corporal Olav to be granted military assignments or to be given a paycheck for his service. Rather, Olav continued to live with the zoo's penguin colony, otherwise oblivious to his newfound status, but people's obsession grew. Five years later, Olav becomes a sergeant, and later, he was due for a promotion to Regimental Sergeant Major, but Olav caught a mild case of death. Instead, a replacement Nils Olav assumed the role in 1993, and over the next twelve years, he ascended to Colonel-in-Chief, until being knighted and replaced by yet another Nils Olav.

The name of "Nils Olav" has outlived both Nils Egelien and King Olav. Even Edinburgh Zoo's official page for their famous penguin ignores the animal's 20-year lifespan and lists the dates of promotion as though the first and second Nils Olavs never died, featuring the unrealistic range of 1982 to  2016, a supposed 40-year-old penguin (4)(6). An otherwise nameless animal is granted an equally impersonal name, one entangled in marketing, image, and denial of death. Nils Olav is not a penguin: it is a name, a construct, and the name will outlive the current Nils Olav and, if the penguin remains popular, future generations of Nils Olavs. 

When Sir Nils Olav III is taken from his pen and forced alongside a line of legs of amused, touchy people in his 2016 promotion, one can only assume that the penguin inside of the name feels anything but royal.