Norway has a new queen, and she has yet to appear on her own at a single official event. In June, the palace announced that Mette-Marit had undergone a lung transplant. A few weeks later, the crown landed on her head - sooner than anyone expected, and long before her body had healed. The consequences were plain for everyone to see: she was absent from the mass for the late king, and absent from the oath of her husband, the new King Haakon.

The illness isn't new. She was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis back in 2018, and for years the palace talked about it carefully, in measured sentences. Now, without any official statement, the doctors have spoken - and said more than the palace was prepared to.

Dr Jesper Magnusson, the Swedish specialist who heads the lung transplant unit at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg, was blunt with Norwegian broadcaster TV 2: "The goal is for patients to live much better than they did with their lung disease, but their life will never be the same as before the illness."

Translation: strict discipline with medication for the rest of her life, regular physical activity and constant medical supervision. And one more thing the ceremonial photos don't show - post-transplant drugs permanently weaken the immune system. For a woman whose job, by definition, is to stand among crowds and shake people's hands, every packed reception becomes a health risk.

Meanwhile, the gap is already being filled. Princess Ingrid is in the public eye more and more, at an almost relentless pace. Monarchies don't tolerate an empty spot in the frame: when one face is missing, the cameras quickly find another.

Danish pulmonologist Michael Perch, chief physician at Copenhagen's Rigshospitalet, told the Norwegian science portal forskning that it is entirely conceivable the queen could keep her former public profile. The palace, for its part, keeps repeating the same sentence: Mette-Marit has no official duties in her diary for the next six months.

Which leaves the question nobody in Oslo says out loud: how long can a queen be a queen only on paper? For now, not even the palace knows the answer.