About me
Bookshop

Get new posts by email.

About me

A modern Christmas tradition

For Boxing Day, I enjoyed this brief article in The TLS about the surprisingly modern history of carols. It turns out that singing them in church is a relatively modern innovation: they moved there from the village green as part of

the Oxford Movement in the nineteenth century and its introduction of what might be called a performative inclusivity – try saying that after two glasses of the Archdeacon’s sherry – in Anglican worship. Get them in and singing, and they’ll feel more a part of things.

My latent assumption had always been that there was a long British tradition of carols, but in fact, most of them are from other places:

“Good King Wenceslas”, comes from a songbook of 1582, Piae Cantiones Ecclesiasticae et Scholastichae, by Jaakko Suomalainen, head of the Turku cathedral school in Finland? Or that both “We Three Kings” and “Away in a Manger” are American? The latter was published in a bulletin of the universalist movement, which falsely attributed the words to Martin Luther.

I had no idea.


The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

This post was filed under: Post-a-day 2023, , .




The content of this site is copyright protected by a Creative Commons License, with some rights reserved. All trademarks, images and logos remain the property of their respective owners. The accuracy of information on this site is in no way guaranteed. Opinions expressed are solely those of the author. No responsibility can be accepted for any loss or damage caused by reliance on the information provided by this site. Information about cookies and the handling of emails submitted for the 'new posts by email' service can be found in the privacy policy. This site uses affiliate links: if you buy something via a link on this site, I might get a small percentage in commission. Here's hoping.