‘On the second day of Christmas my true love sent to me…’

Two turtle doves, and
A partridge in a pear tree…
And also:

Good King Wenceslas, on the Feast of Stephen

Try teaching the words of Good King Wenceslas to a ten-year-old Ukrainian who’s still finding her way in English. I’d thought it would be easy, but clearly I hadn’t been concentrating in all the years I sang that song.

I had the vague idea of a king in a fairytale castle setting off with his loyal page boy through a snowy forest to bring pine logs and a decent dinner to a poor peasant. My secret mission was to moderate Vira’s unbearable enthusiasm for Jingle Bells, which she likes to pick out on the piano with one pokey finger, or Santa Claus is Coming to Town accompanied by disco dance moves. It was time to raise the tone.

As we waded into the “thees”, “thous”, “hences”, “hithers”, “thithers” and “yonders”, I could see it would be a challenge. “Sire, he lives a good league hence” – how far is a league? I’d no idea, and how to explain why it’s a good league instead of a bad league?

I was tempted to swerve to another carol, but my young friend had set about this one with such charming enthusiasm I resigned myself to delivering a crash course in Gothic revival Medievalese. Life is dull if you never fly before you can walk, and wouldn’t she just bowl the world over if she suddenly came out with: “My dwelling is a good league hence”, or “Let’s dig a hole in the sod”?

The only thing that’s medieval about Good King Wenceslas is the thumping, hurdy-gurdy tune to which the words were set. The scholar and Anglican clergyman JM Neale wrote it in 1853 from his translation of a lyric by the 19th-century Czech poet Vaclav Alois Svoboda about a 10th century Duke of Bohemia, Wenceslas I, who rose every night from his bed and went out to succour the needy (in bare feet of course, so forget those fluffy boots we see in old illustrations).

In 935 AD his wicked brother Boleslav invited him to the feast of Saints Cosmas and Damian and skewered him with a lance. As if martyr and Saint weren’t fine titles enough, he was posthumously elevated from Duke to King.

Neale was an enthusiast of the Oxford Movement, whose original aim was to recall the Church of England to a sense of its place in the life of the Church Universal. He popped in a saint wherever he could, which is why King Wenceslas had to look out of the window “on the feast of Stephen”.

St Stephen, the first of the Christian martyrs, was stoned to death in Jerusalem in approximately AD 34. You’ll see him in pictures with what looks like a potato on each shoulder and another one growing out of his head – they’re stones of course, the instruments of his martyrdom – a fate nearly shared by Neale himself when a furious mob of Low-Church evangelicals mauled and threatened to stone him at a funeral in 1857.

St Stephen’s Day is the second day of Christmas. It’s otherwise known as Boxing Day: a day for giving alms to the poor, but also for mummery and dancing. In Wales, late-risers and servant girls were swatted out of their beds with holly branches; in Ireland the straw-hatted “wren boys’” danced from door to door with a dead wren. So let’s liven up our picture of a solitary king in an empty hall staring through a window.

10th-century Bohemia had only recently and partially been converted to Christianity. The duke’s court would have been full of reveling courtiers old enough to remember the Saturnalia and all the pagan rumpus that went with it. The tune to which Neale grafted his carol was a 13th-century Easter carol, Tempus adest floridum, a hymn to springtime and burgeoning life.

It’s a vigorous dance in the branle measure or “brawl” as it was called in England – a drumming, stamping, swaying dance which swept across Europe in the early Middle Ages. It’s quick, vigorous and entirely pagan in spirit and feeling. An impious version of this Easter carol is found in the Carmina Burana, where the second verse veers off into maidens and clerics frolicking in the fields for Lady Venus.

Elizabeth Poston, in her notes to The Penguin Book of Christmas Carols, deplored this “unnatural marriage” between what she called “ponderous moral doggerel” or “Victorian whimsy” and a sprightly pagan dance, and hoped the horrible hybrid would “drop into disuse”. Other critics have been equally scathing. But they were being too grownup. I only discovered the enchantment of it when I tried to explain the story to Vira.

“Sire, the night is darker now / And the wind blows stronger / Fails my heart, I know not how / I can go no longer.” This verse, often sung in a boy’s quavering treble, is the crux of the drama. The poor child succumbs to the “winter’s rage”; the king, so intent on the errand of mercy, has nearly caused his page to die of exposure. How many glorified philanthropic heroes have sacrificed their nameless attendants in like manner?

The least he can do under the circumstances is produce a miracle. Suddenly I got excited explaining it to Vira. How come I’d never noticed before? He tells the page to tread exactly in his footsteps and there, buried in the clunkiest line in the whole carol – no wonder I skated over it – is the miracle: “Heat was in the very sod / which the saint had printed.” A turbo blast of supernatural hypocaustic warmth shoots out of the saintly footprints to warm and invigorate the frozen boy: Hoc quod frigus laeserat / reparant calores, says the Easter carol: “That which the cold had harmed, the warmth repairs.”

This surely is the line Neale must have spotted and been moved by when he chose the Easter carol tune for his Christmas song. Yes, yes, it’s all very symbolical too and there’s the trite moral at the end about how the giver of charity finds blessing, but the magic of the carol is the imagining of frozen pain relieved by warmth. Nothing in religion is so appealing as the promise of relief from our feeble human discomforts; cooling streams when we’re thirsty; warmth when we’re frozen.

Under the icy wasteland is hidden the warm beneficence of the coming Spring, which the saint has unleashed in his piping hot holy footprints. So was Neale really so guilty of a mismatch between words and tune? Perhaps he was, but he had a point. He nearly bungled it with infelicitous wording, but it won’t drop out of the repertoire any time soon.

(Image by Sean Jefferson, courtesy David Messum Fine Art.)

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