Good King Wenceslas

The Legend of Christmas

What good are legends? I mean, what’s the point in repeating a story that presents itself as true but isn’t? Many legends are partly true, but isn’t that the worst kind of misinformation? Mixing truth and fiction brings confusion and makes it harder to discern and to believe the truthful elements thus obscured.

So, perhaps, reasons the modern mind. And we who have lately been targeted by the deceitful lecturing of a ruling elite and the institutions they control are doubly wary, still catching our breath after a coordinated attack in which misinformation was the primary weapon.

But legends are a different matter, aren’t they? There’s something deeper at stake than historical accuracy. Consider, on this Christmas Day, the legend of Good King Wenceslas. If you’ve heard of him at all (unless you’ve lived in the Czech Republic, where he is beloved as that nation’s patron saint), it’s probably from the Christmas Carol of the same name. A little research shows that this song is a nineteenth century ballad set to the tune of a thirteenth century carol about a 10th century figure, based on hagiographies that arose in the 10th and 11th centuries, which were declared as fact by a 15th century Pope.

Furthermore, Wenceslas was not actually a king, but a duke. The title by which we know him in legend and song was assigned several decades later by Otto I, whom history does not begrudge the title Emperor, despite the fact that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. He is also known as Saint Wenceslas, an honorific bestowed in light of many accounts of his piety, relentless service to the poor, and miracles reported in the vicinity of his tomb that raised enough attention to prompt his brother (and murderer) to have his body re-interred at a convenient distance.

By modern journalistic standards,¹ there’s a significant verification problem with respect to the good duke cum king cum saint. But I think we can at least lay out the basic outlines with confidence. He was a good and pious leader, whose acts of devotion and tireless service to the poor are too numerous and coherently asserted to be hagiographic fantasies made up in the generation immediately succeeding his death. He was waylaid by his brother, Boleslav the Cruel,² on his way to Mass and murdered at the church door.

Now, superimposed on this seemingly factual substrate, we have the substance of the legend and the Christmas carol it inspired.

On one of the harshest winter nights in local memory, the king looks out from the comfort of his royal lodging sand sees a thinly clad man wandering in the snow. He sends a servant to inquire, and learns that it’s a poor man gathering sticks. His food and fuel expended, he’s braving the bitter cold in search of something to keep his family from freezing to death that night. The king orders provisions and firewood to be brought and given to the unfortunate peasant. He himself will deliver them, declining the suggestion of his page that he send his guards. Putting on “nothing to shelter himself from the nipping air; for he desired to feel with the poor, that he might feel for them,” he invites his page to join him, but does not order him.

The page not only refuses to abandon his king in his chosen task, but he imitates him by putting on nothing but his “common garments.” But he soon finds that his ability has outstripped his courage. He implores the king to return, as the “wind freezes my very blood.” The king declines to turn back, noting that Christ did not turn back from his journey, though more weary and cold than theirs. The page has no answer, but the king invites him to mark his path and tread in his footsteps. The page finds warmth and fire rising from the footprints of this righteous king, and he follows him zealously on their mission of mercy.

Thus the legend. I assume we’re all in agreement that we won’t submit it to the fact-checkers. But neither should we submit it as a Hallmark movie script. There is something more than sentimentality here, and more to learn than perhaps appears at first blush. We begin by considering the times in which the man lived and in which the legend took shape. The dark ages of popular conception did not exist as such. But if the decades of the first millennium were to have a contest for the title, the latter half of the 10th century would perhaps be the strongest contender. The unifying, if stultifying, force of the Caesars was half a millennium removed into the past. With a level of political and social integration an order of magnitude below that which prevailed in the heyday of the empire, personal qualities loomed larger than we can perhaps even grasp in our day. Maybe this is the reason for all the adjectives in the royal nicknames.

Into this darkness came the light of a righteous king. While his own nobles and princely peers stood on their feudal rights, which were after all the settled order of the day, he took it as his mission and his passion to care for the poor of his realm, at great personal cost. He ascended the throne in response to the wishes of his people to end the conflict between Christian and non-Christian factions.³ But the aspirations of the people were overruled by the nobles, who were displeased by his submission to German invasions and prompted his non-Christian brother to murder him and claim the throne.

The people painted with words their vision of the righteous king they loved and missed. He was widely regarded in Bohemia as the patron saint of the nation almost immediately after his assassination. Four biographies of him that were then in circulation “had a powerful influence on the High Middle Ages conceptualization of the rex iustus, or "righteous king"—that is, a monarch whose power stems mainly from his great piety, as well as from his princely vigor.”⁴

This understanding of legend from the point of view of the past looking forward is only half of the story. We who read the story and sing the carol a millennium later have a different commerce with the idea of legend. Who among us will deny the elevation of feeling at the image of the loyal page being warmed and sustained in the footprints of the righteous king? Which of us fails to picture the shock and inexpressible relief of the poor family despairing of surviving the night, when the king bursts through the door with food and firewood for them?

The truth or falsity of the story matters not a wit from this perspective, as the question “Did Wenceslas actually do something like this?” recedes into the background. That there is such a concept of a righteous king is the irrefutable consequence of the legend. That we love and treasure this ideal, that we long for such a king, is the fruit the legend bears in our hearts. We, the modern recipients of the story, have a role in the making of the legend that is not by any means less significant than that of the people who began to tell the story, with the words of the one who inspired the legend still ringing in their ears.

But if the longing for such a king were utterly a hopeless endeavor, the concept of legend would not in this instance be anything to celebrate. Happily, that is not the case. The baby whose birth we commemorate on this day stands for a breaking into history of righteousness and humility that leaves the good Bohemian king—both as historical fact and as legend—in the shade. It was Wenceslas’s implacable ambition to repose in that shade, and those who began to tell his story had no competing object. In this the unity of the legend is complete, as the late recipients and the early tellers of the story are of one mind and spirit as to the meaning and purpose of the legend. With them, we behold the inestimable ethical greatness of a God who comes in humility to a rebellious people, taking the form of a baby lest they be frightened as were our first parents in the Garden. He grows up in the form of a servant, lest we despair in the knowledge of our inadequacy. And in the end, he assumes the form of a sacrificial lamb, lest we submit on that day to the only remaining expedient; to hide our faces as the mountains fall on us.

That the baby lived, and died by Roman crucifixion, is historical fact unchallenged by adherents and detractors of the Christian faith alike. That he rose from the dead is an assertion that the witness of history renders more unreasonable to deny than to believe. But deeper still is the witness that wells up within us, those of us who believe. We were dead, and now we are alive. We know this with the same certainty that we know we are alive in the body. And the crowning witness for us is the sublimity of the story, the undeniable truth of the legend.

The Gospel is its own witness, bearing the very qualities of heaven in the content of the narrative. A king whose inherent power and dignity reside at an unreachable and unimaginable height, stooping to a depth of suffering and shame that we strain to fully contemplate. No human mind would have ventured to even imagine such a thing, much less to request it. But in the legend of a Bohemian king, the picture is painted for us. The story is here for us to read, the truth of the legend asserted for those with ears to hear.

1. I’m referring here to a concept we all remember fondly but have not seen much of since 2016, when the very idea of journalistic ethics was explicitly renounced and universally abandoned by corporate media.

2. Also known as Boleslav the Bad. The people who also gave us Pippin the Short, Charles the Bald, Louis the Fat, Ivan the Terrible, Vlad the Impaler, and Alfonso the Slobberer were presumably as accurate as they were forthcoming with their royal adjectives.

3. He thus ended the regency of Wenceslas’s mother that began when she murdered his grandmother, who had raised him as a Christian.

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_King_Wenceslas#Source_legend