Good King Wenceslas

 The "feast of Stephen" is St Stephen's Day, in case the obvious eluded you, as it did me for years.

But was he real? we ask in our 21st C voices. Did he actually exist? There is record of his life from a few decades after his purported reign (as a Duke or Prince, probably not a king in Bohemia in the 10th C), and even more there is record of his death around 927. 

Well okay, but was he notably Christian?  More than those around him? We ask the wrong question.  The writers of songs, histories, poems, and epics were not focused on their subject but on their many audiences. To tell a story of a good king was to declare to both royalty and subjects what a Good King should be like.  You found a likely candidate, who had been declared a saint or had a cult springing up around him or inspired some large collection of people and you imbued him with all the good qualities. Wenceslas was reported to have diverted a battle to a single combat between himself and another local ruler. His motive might have been vainglory, or tactical because he thought himself the superior fighter or his army the inferior force, but what got passed on is that he wanted to spared his retinue, each of whom he loved dearly, from any bloodshed, taking it upon himself instead. Not because there was any evidence that this was true, but because that is what a really good king was supposed to do, and the composers of legends wanted to make that point so that other kings would take that point.

Christianity was a bit of a chancy thing in that part of Europe. It was his grandfather who supposedly converted and his parents founded churches in Prague, but still the rumors persisted that some of them remained pagan.  Getting baptised and going to Mass regularly and saying nice things about Jesus and the Church usually qualified you for being regarded as Christian, no matter what your other actions were. As it was in the days of Lot, who mostly only got one thing right, figuring out which god he was going to point to at key moments.

To those of us who have studied history this seems sloppy, however quaint and romantic it might be.  We would consider it beneath us to treat history this way. We want TRUTH, dammit.

Oh yeah? JFK anyone? Civil War Generals? Gandhi? Einstein? Have we ever wanted the truth? And each era does so well at casting out the myths of the previous ones - in order to make room on the shelf for its own.