We might be surprised by the origin of certain Christmas carols, says Andrew Gant
One of the notable features of our much-loved Christmas Carol tradition is that quite a lot of it doesn’t have much to do with Christmas. “The Holly and the Ivy” belongs to a rich tradition of fertility songs about the turning of the seasons: the religious imagery appears to be a slightly uncomfortable grafting. “Good King Wenceslas” doesn’t mention the Nativity at all as he goes tramping about his territory cooking dinner for strangers. A partridge never went up a pear tree or any other kind of tree; no ship ever sailed into Bethlehem, which is landlocked; and “Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing-Day” covers a huge range of mystical and religious imagery in its 11 verses, from the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus to last things and ancient theological disputes.
That is one of the many threads of this wonderful tradition which makes it so fascinating.
And, even when we do sing songs with at least one foot in a sensible biblical or theological background, we often do them in the wrong order or blur the boundaries of the different seasons and images in the wider Christmas story. This certainly brings many beautiful songs from all sorts of places into use. But it can cause us to miss opportunities, too.
For example, Advent is a season of expectation, of waiting, even of penitence. Today we sing Christmas carols and go our services of Nine Lessons and Descants during Advent, turning it into a season of celebration instead.
My new book on Christmas carols attempts to find a path through this fertile and varied hinterland by lining up its cast members in more or less chronological order.
For example, we sing songs about the Annunciation, including “Angelus ad Virginem”, sung by the rather effete young scholar Nicholas in Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale”, and the haunting Basque carol “The Angel Gabriel”, collected and translated by the pioneering West Country folklorist and priest Sabine Baring-Gould.
We move happily into Advent with “O Come, O Come Emmanuel”, whose words and melody reached us from ancient sources through the good offices of two other enormously influential and dedicated Victorian clergymen, John Mason Neale (words) and Thomas Helmore (music).
Helmore and Neale gave us many other items in our familiar repertoire, including the cheerfully moralising little tale of Wenceslas dragging his reluctant page boy out into the snow in search of pine logs and pious works, even though the tune they reached for had precisely no connection with Christmas or even church – it’s a spring carol, about priests and virgins mostly, which they found in a 16th century schoolbook printed in Finland. And why not?
The 18th century brings us the Age of Reason, the emphasis on the word, the great upswell of popular hymn singing, the works of Isaac Watts (“Joy To The World”), big characters like John Byrom, the inventor of a hugely popular variety of shorthand (“Christians, Awake!”) and the Wesleys (“Hark, the Herald Angels Sing”, or “Hark, How All the Welkin Rings” as Charles Wesley originally wrote). “While Shepherds Watched” found itself sung to literally hundreds of different tunes, varying from village to village or from church to pub. Two familiar items, “O Come, All Ye Faithful” and “Joy To The World”, were repeatedly and confidently attributed to Handel, though in fact he had nothing to do with either of them.
And so, by a fascinating if roundabout route, we get near to Christmas.
People often ask me if I have a favourite Christmas carol. There is no answer to that question. They’re family: we love each of them for what they are. But there is something special about “It Came Upon the Mid-night Clear”. The words are by an American Unitarian minister, Edmund Hamilton Sears, who wrote that, as a child, “some poem was always singing through my brain”. Visions of angels were a recurrent fascination: as a young boy he believed that the Berkshire hills around the family farm were the place where “bright-robed messengers alighted and rested, as they came and went on their errands of love”. The tune we use is an English folksong, arranged, like so many, by a well-known composer with a profound love and respect for the folk traditions of England, in this case Sir Arthur Sullivan. Interestingly, Sullivan’s is not the tune you will hear if you find this song on a carol service hymn sheet in America: a number of our favourite carols had, and still have, different tunes on opposite sides of the Atlantic.
It’s a curious parentage. But it allows us to stand up and hear once again the voice of Sears’s beautifully-constructed poem, urging us to “hush the noise, ye men of strife, and hear the angels sing”.
Happy Christmas.
Andrew Gant teaches Music at St Peter’s College, Oxford, and is the author of Deck the Hall: The Stories of our Favourite Christmas Carols (Hodder & Stoughton 2023)
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.