Good King Wenceslas

beautiful

today. I happen to go to St. Stephen's UMC, so we are very familiar with that particular song.

for early tenth century Bohemia. Your link, unfortunately, cites none

... only scarce information is available from written sources ...
Archeology and written sources on eighth- to tenth-century Bohemia
Naď'a Profantová
Article first published online: 21 JUL 2009
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0254.2009.00278.x/abstract

... There is no consensus on the dating of the Wenceslas texts. Slavists argue for a 10th-century dating of the Old Slavonic texts, which therefore would have been written shortly after Wenceslas' death; historians, on the other hand, argue for a later (unspecified) date, possibly in the mid-11th century ... Although the dedication of the Legenda Christiani to Adalbert (as a bishop and not yet a saint) appears to date it to the end of the 10th century, its oldest extant copy is from c.1340. Writing in the 18th century, Gelasius Dobner doubted that a work of such high literary quality could have been produced in the 10th century and thought it was a late 12th-century falsification ... Further scrutiny in the earlier part of the 20th century of the then recently-discovered Old Church Slavonic manuscripts with Bohemian connection confirmed the existence of such works in the 10th century ...
http://christianization.hist.cam.ac.uk/regions/bohemia/bohemia-aspects-christ.html

Given what we've discovered about past popes, I don't think it should come as a shock that Duke Wenceslas wasn't quite the noble do-gooder portrayed in the co-opted carol.

They really preferred to think that writing was new, and therefore all these old things that were supposed to happen really didn't happen--esp. if they could advance a theory or idea that found the old texts inconvenient.

Homer couldn't have written the Iliad. It had to be recent. There was no Troy. Until they realized that some of the Iliad is really archaic. And Troy was discovered.

The Bible had to be written in the 600s BC. Hebrew couldn't have been written before then. Okay, they admitted, Phoenician and other W. Semitic texts existed in 1200 BC and before--but Hebrew wasn't written. Or, at least, it was very uncommon. And then they found Hebrew written in the 800s BC--and then 1000 BC. So the stance shifted: The texts were codified and amended in the 600s BC, using older documents. Exactly how thoroughly they were edited and amended has been the subject of a bit of controversy. (Again: No "consensus" in the sense of "uniform agreement," but if we let "consensus" mean "majority opinion" then there is one. We often use it to mean the latter and hope people assume we mean the former.)

It's handy to have a text that's dated, like the Ostromir Gospels. Rare, though. That helps fend off some debates. For example, it's unclear that the Lay of Igor's Host couldn't have been written down in ancient times (although the claim was made that since no extant dated writings exist from that early in the required area there could have been none). The Ostromir text, from 1056, squashes the idea that there was no early Russian writing. The Novgorod birchbark texts, dated to before 1050, show that writing was not unknown and wasn't especially rare, and if that was true of Novgorod why wouldn't it have been true of Kiev?

The Wenceslav texts have to deal with the name itself, the loss both of nasality as well as the second "e", a jer that would have been dropping out fairly early. After jer-loss, loss of nasality, and lengthening we get Václav and writers wouldn't have easily put the nasality back in (or teased the "ts" apart into "vents-i-slav". Viacheslav, for you eastern Slavs. (We can't leave out the possibility that it was originally written in Latin, of course.)

Vernaculars weren't often written then. So not much in Old Czech. Most OCS documents, even those that are surely Bohemian, are religious and often Greek translations (or take-offs on Greek originals).

There's a bit more in Latin. Most people don't care about them: They're the usual church registries. But Latin wasn't that widespread then when Vaclav was supposed to be around. Orthodoxy was spread late in the first millennium, not Catholicism. Hence the OCS and later recensions. The Latin texts are a bit handy for doing linguistic work, but you have to deal with how Slavic was represented in the various varieties of Latin that might be kicking about.

It's not easy doing historical work then. I remember being taught, sort of, about Samo's Kingdom--if it existed. A big point of Slovak pride, at least at one point. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samo Of course, it's based on one work, written in what we'd call Sorbian these days. I guess I should at least skim Curta's book. Dang. I thought I was more in the loop than I am.

Archeological remains are always a nuisance; can we really assume that culture follows political borders when 'politics' usually means a hodgepodge of closely related tribes with fuzzy and shifting borders, and that the distribution of cultural realia is really so neatly constrained?

And they should know.

When a church source is telling the tale, Wenceslas' brother becomes a standard Evil Godless Pagan who killed his brother for no reason. Of course.

Metaphorically speaking, Wenceslas is probably spinning in his grave, since modern Czechs proudly call themselves "the most atheistic nation in Europe."

Another reason for him to spin: aside from that dopey song, his name lives on in Prague's Wenceslas Square - where the citizens traditionally gather to protest their government. And not always peaceably, e.g., when Russia extended the hand of fraternal socialist brotherhood to the Czech comrades in 1968 by sending in tanks.

When Communism finally fell in 1989, it was called the "Key Revolution." Citizens of Prague gathered in Wenceslas Square and rattled their apartment keys, drowning out the official govt. spokesmen trying to rant at them.

Right down the street in Prague is Old Town Square, with its iconic black statue of Jan Hus - executed by the Pope while traveling to a debate under a guarantee of safe passage. During the Nazi years,the Hus statue was draped in swastika banners. During the Communist years, it was often hidden by black wrappings. IMO, It's a profound statement on the power of the individual human mind.

/usual tiresome rant

A whole hell of a lot of people on DU can benefit from your travel-expanded perspective.

By "King Václav I" or "Václav I of Bohemia" people sometimes designate the 10th century duke "Saint Václav" and sometimes the 14th century monarch

The continuing popularity of Václav as a first name (as in e.g. Václav Havel, the ultimate president of Czechoslovakia) suggests the 10th legend has retained some currency

So not every "legend" is all it's cracked up to be.

... Svatý Václav je jedním z nejoblíbenějších českých svatých, patron české země, mučedník, postava, jejíž tradice sehrála velmi důležitou úlohu v emancipaci českého státu a přemyslovské dynastie v rámci křesťanské Evropy ...
http://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svat%C3%BD_V%C3%A1clav

of that person's character or contributions. Unless you wish to argue that Reagan was a great president?

So if disproving your insinuation is "(making) your point," so be it.