The subject of one of the most popular Christmas carols in England is a tenth century Czech duke(later king) Wenceslas (actually Vaclav). Somehow he had emerged into that invisible unreality of this “sceptred Isle”, where Stonehenge, leylines and Merlin are but small scintillating glimpses of the weirdest country in the world. I know it because I have been living here, off and on, for some centuries. That is also my personal unreality. To listen to English people singing about thick snow and cruel frost, you can see that faraway look in their eyes, dreaming about foreign lands and strange foreigners going hot-footed through snow drifts to treat a poor man to a feast of Stephen. Good King Wenceslas didn’t seem to care much for his poor page whom he ordered to carry pinelogs, food and wine through waist-high snowdrifts, only to satisfy the king’s strange whim to entertain just one man on Boxing Day. But that kind of eccentric philantropy is very close to English hearts, especially when Wenceslas, a saintly man created hot spots in his footsteps which apparently, and magically, heated the worn out page- “in his master’s steps he trod, where the snow lay dinted; Heat was in the very sod which the saint had printed.” Why the cult of St Vaclav blossomed only in Bohemia and England, no one will ever know. But the carol is somehow enchanting in its weirdness and out-of the-way unreality.
