Tag Archive: 0carols

According to The New Oxford Book of Carols, this year marks the 125th anniversary of the famous carol known in English as ‘Gabriel’s Message’. It is actually a translation, by Sabine Baring-Gould, of a Basque carol, Birjina gaztettobat zegoen, which was collected by the French musician Charles Bordes and published in his Dix cantiques populaires […]

What better way to end our Christmas carol countdown than with a rousing round of ‘Here we come a wassailing‘? The words were first published in Husk’s book of carols in 1864 (which we blogged about this past Tuesday), whose sources included a Manchester chapbook and a broadside printed in Bradford, c.1850 (Keyte, p. 545). […]

Today we are spotlighting the antiquary Thomas Wright (1810–1877), an ardent scholar of Old English, Middle English, and Anglo-Norman texts, and his book of carols: Songs and Carols, now first printed, from a Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century (London: Printed for the Percy Society, by Richards, 1847). The first edition contains ‘This Endris Night’ (ender = […]

Today we will take a break from our series of ‘first appearances’ of carols to bring you a delightful early Victorian gift book, with chromolithographed illuminations throughout: Joseph Cundall’s A Booke of Christmas Carols, illuminated from Ancient Manuscripts in the British Museum (London, Henry G. Bohn, 1845): ‘After Pickering, the publisher with the most devoted […]

As with many of our favourite Christmas carols, ‘It came upon the midnight clear’ first appears (with its tune) in a Victorian publication: Arthur Sullivan‘s Church Hymns with Tunes (London, Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1874): ‘This fine Christmas hymn is a meditation on man’s wilful deafness to the message of the angels, and, not […]

‘We Three Kings of Orient are’ has always been a crowd-pleaser (and a magnet for children who enjoy changing the words). An American carol, it first appeared on p. 12 of John Henry Hopkins‘s Carols, Hymns, and Songs (New York, Church Book Depository, [1863]): ‘Hopkins was rector of Christ’s Church, Williamsport, Pennsylvania, when he published […]