Wenceslas (or Vlacas) may have looked out on St Stephen’s day (Boxing Day) but he wasn’t a king and the carol about him was written by J.M. Neale rather than being one of a collection of songs coming from a society that liked singing and dancing. That society brought forth carols just as it brought forth ballads. We are talking about folk productions. As Ian Bradley says in his ‘Penguin Book of Carols’, the background of carols was pagan and their lively dance rhythms got them banned by serious church leaders.
So, what are we to make of ‘Good King Wenceslas’ and his concern for ‘yonder peasant’? We are to recognise that there are songs that are not hymns or carols but are none the less enjoyable items in the Christian repertoire. We understand Wenceslas’s call for flesh and wine but we find his heated footsteps in the snow a detail too far. The carol ‘I saw three ships come sailing in’ takes off from the narrative of the Magi, and majors in a similar light-hearted way on the journey.
‘The Wassailers’ Carol’ and ‘O Tannenbaum’ take us into an area where Christianity is hardly present. We begin to see the genre of the carol, as is the case with the ballad, as a secular folk production such as The Hunting of the Cheviot’. Before we know where we are, we shall be auditioning Southey’s poem ‘Bishop Hatto’ as a composition urging consistency in Christian behaviour. And that may lead us to take in the rather longer ‘Pied Piper of Hamelin’ by Browning. Both these poems urge us to shun meanness and cold-heartedness. Both adopt poetic story-telling as their mode of dealing with the subject. Can we call them carols? No. We can’t sing or dance to them. We can’t use them in worship. But that’s no reason for giving them the cold shoulder.
So, if we should find ourselves singing about the good-hearted King on Boxing Day (an unlikely eventuality, I agree), we should remember that we are not taking part in an act of worship but we are enjoying make-believe in a half-way house that is a welcome place of hospitality within the Christian tradition.
LOVE CAROL
Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’ contains a love carol with the refrain ‘Sweet lovers love the spring.’ As we said earlier, carols were not always of a religious nature.
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