959: Caroling

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Caroling

Title text: For a thousand generations we vowed never to forget how his soldiers feasted on our brother Stephen.

Explanation

Here are the lyrics for the first verse of the Christmas Carol, "Good King Wenceslas"

Good King Wenceslas looked out, on the Feast of Stephen,

When the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even;

Brightly shone the moon that night, tho' the frost was cruel,

When a poor man came in sight, gath'ring winter fuel.

While not a king, Wenceslaus I, Duke of Bohemia is considered a martyr and a saint. Far from being responsible for any massacre, he protected his subjects from external dominance and is still a national hero to the Czech people. Black Hat is supplying disinformation to unsuspecting carolers, either to shut them up, by making them falsely think that they are associating themselves with a morally reprehensible man, or just because he's a classhole like that.

The title text references "the Feast of Stephen", also known as the "Feast of St. Stephen" or "St. Stephen's Day", which is a holiday celebrated on 26 or 27 December by the Western or Eastern Church respectively. (For the Eastern Orthodox Church, which still observes the Julian calendar, it falls on 9 January of the Gregorian calendar.) It is not actually a feast that involved eating a person named Stephen.^{[citation needed]} If you look closely, you can see that the carolers may be a family. The man and woman are confused by what Black Hat has said, and the girl is looking to the adults, perhaps gauging their facial reactions, or just waiting for their reply.

Transcript

[Three people, two the same size, one smaller stand together singing Christmas carols.]

Carolers (in unison): Good king Wenceslas looked out on the—

[Black Hat leans out of an above ground window.]

Black Hat: King Wenceslas massacred my people.

[The carolers stand in silence, the smaller one looks at the others.]

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Discussion

9 months until I can start pulling this out on carolers again. Gaaaah, the waaait. Davidy²²[talk] 08:33, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

I removed the section about Wenceslas being posthomously named king; the reference that is used to support this claim in the Wikipedia article does not, in fact, do so. The claim is not repeated anywhere else that I can see. 108.162.219.223 21:16, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

I have removed the trivia section arguing that Wenceslas might not have been such a great guy after all. There is no proof offered, and the comment is really only speculation, and not actual trivia. If whoever added this section can offer some concrete evidence, then maybe it would be merited. Orazor (talk) 07:50, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

maybe randall knows Overlord of oddities (talk) 00:35, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

Caroling comics title - three references in it?

1) Christmas carols 2) deliberate miss-spelilng of the verb carolling (singing carols) 3) Reference to the Carolingian dynasty of East Frankish/HRE/... rulers (of Charlemagne fame), Duchy of Bohemia was their tributary for a while under Wenceslaus's father (and partly under him as well I think?). 141.101.98.52 20:16, 17 October 2020 (UTC)

Both spellings are acceptable; "caroling" is correct in American English. L-Space Traveler (talk) 02:34, 17 November 2022 (UTC)

Could this be a reference to Wenceslaus IV?

Just occurred to me that Black Hat may be taking a jab at the "idle" rule of King Wenceslaus the 4th - with his death followed by the Hussite Wars, which his questionable rule contributed to.

While it's a far stretch to say he personally massacred Black Hat's "people" - I'd say its within the realms of Black Hat's twisted Machiavellian ways to imply he had an indirect hand in it and bounce that off carollers for fun (while keeping the nuances to himself).

Sketchy, of course... but what part of Black Hat isn't?

Any opinions?