Christmas Had Nothing to Do with It -- The Secular Roots of Carols

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"Carols originally had nothing to do with Christmas, nor even with Christianity," wrote Ian Bradley in "Sing Choirs of Angels" (History Today, December 1998). The word, "carol," derives from Greek choros, a circle dance with singing. The Romans borrowed the word as choraula, which became caroler in Old French (it first appeared in English around 1300, as a term for a round dance, without religious significance). The Ancients performed the choros at pagan religious ceremonies, fertility rites, dramas and on the winter solstice. Because these carols struck a lively contrast to the austere chants of early Christianity, the Catholic church forbade them on several occasions (as early as the mid-600s).

The Italian Order of Friars Minor, founded in 1209 by St. Francis of Assisi, held carols in higher regard. The monks' lauda was the ancestor of Christmas carols, with a "folksy" sound and danceable rhythm. By the 1300s, these lauda songs cheered Christmas festivities in France and Germany, and it was the Franciscans themselves who brought carols to Great Britain at this time (the song, "A Child Is Boren Amonges Man," was discovered in a friar's sermon notes from around 1350).

Though carols could be heard also at Easter during the Middle Ages, the songs became more and more a part of Christmas. The years from 1400 to 1550 were what Ian Bradley called "the heyday of the English carol," and toward the end of the Middle Ages, the church brought carols into the liturgy. During the Reformation, however, Protestants did not agree about the value of carols: Martin Luther liked them, but John Calvin did not (Puritans associated carols with witchcraft). Though English churches did away with carols, people kept singing them in their homes and public places until the Victorians restored their "respectability" in the 19th century.

The carols have their own histories. The 1940 Hymnal of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States (abbreviated as HPEC in the notes that follow) and John Julian's Dictionary of Hymnology (DH) provided many interesting details, as did the Montrose Music "Carols"  web page.

"O Come All Ye Faithful," said Montrose Music, "is sometimes attributed to John Wade, a British exile living in France. Otherwise it is considered to be an anonymous Latin Hymn." [HPEC: "Adeste Fideles," Latin, 18th century.] Wade first used a text by John Reading in 1751, but the now-familiar translation did not appear until 1853 -- the work of the Rev. Frederick Oakley.

The music to "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing!" is from a secular cantata by Felix Mendelssohn (1840), with words written in 1739 by Charles Wesley, whose brother, John, founded Methodism [DH devoted eight double-columned pages to "The Poetical Works of John and Charles Wesley."]

First published in 1833 as part of William Sandys' collection, "The First Noel" is a traditional carol (probably French, from the 16th or 17th century). [HPEC: Old English carol.]

In 1868, Bishop Phillips Brooks wrote a poem about his trip to the Holy Land, "O Little Town of Bethlehem," which his organist, Lewis Redner, set to music for the children's Sunday School choir.

Of "We Three Kings of Orient Are," Montrose Music said it is "frequently thought to be much older than it is," but that "the words and music for this American carol were written in 1857 by John Henry Hopkins as part of a Christmas pageant for the General Theological Seminary in New York City." [HPEC assigned three stanzas as solos for the three Wise Men, Gaspard, Melchior and Balthazar.]

Clerics bemoaned the "total absence of the spirit of religion in Charles Adam's French carol, "O Holy Night"; Adam (1803-1856) was composer of the ballet, Giselle.

There is no proof that Austrian organist Franz Gruber arranged "Silent Night" for guitar, two voices and choir to compensate for a broken church organ. What is true is that Gruber got the text from his assistant pastor, Joseph Mohr, on Dec. 24, 1818, and had it ready for midnight mass.

"Greensleeves," a song mentioned by Shakespeare in The Merry Wives of Windsor, is the melody of "What Child Is This." Englishman William Chatterton Dix wrote the poem that became the carol text in 1865.

A Nov. 4, 1998 article by Kelly Ferjutz on Suite101.com  traced "Angels We Have Heard On High" to the year 129 A.D., when the Roman congregation of Bishop Telesphorus first sang the "Angel's Hymn" at Christmas (one of the earliest Christian hymns). "Actually," Ferjutz wrote, "this carol is an amalgamation of an early Latin chorale and a medieval French secular carol." [HPEC called this a "French carol melody" arranged by Edward Shippen Barnes in 1937, to a "traditional French carol text" altered by Earl Marlatt in the same year.]

The Christian Law Association website told how 15-year-old Isaac Watts, bored by the hymns at church, accepted his father's challenge to write better ones -- at the rate of one per week during two years! "Joy to the World" (published in 1719, thirty years after Watts' first hymn) was one of more than 600 hymns Watts wrote in his lifetime. It was not originally a Christmas carol, but part of Watts' Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament. [HPEC placed it among its "General Hymns."]

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