Have you ever wondered about Good King Wenceslas of Christmas carol fame? As a child, I simply learned this song by rote, as I did so many others, and I never stopped to think about him at all. Wenceslas I was born circa 907 near Prague. As prince of Bohemia, he was a pious ruler and zealous in the cause of advancing Christianity, which gained him many enemies. His undoing, however, was his submission to invading German King Henry I the Fowler in 929. At the prompting of discontented nobles, his younger brother Boleslav murdered him outside the church door as Wenceslas made his way to mass. Wenceslas was eventually canonized and became the patron saint of Bohemia and the Czech Republic. His feast day is September 28.Wenseslas is a typo of low probability. There are 3 entries in the OhioLink database for it, all in contents notes.
(Statue of St. Wenceslas, Olomouc, Czech Republic, from Wikimedia Commons)
Deb Kulczak
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