God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen

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God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen (or God rest you merry, gentlemen) is a traditional Christmas carol. The tune to which it is generally sung is usually in the key of E minor and is in common time or cut time. It seems to have no name but is generally indicated as English traditional and is amenable to arrangement into a wide variety of musical styles.

Contents

[edit] History

"Like so many early Christmas songs, this carol was written as a direct reaction to the music of the fifteenth century church," writes Ace Collins, in Stories Behind the Best-Loved Songs of Christmas. It was the most popular of the early carols, sung for centuries before being published in Britain in 1833, when it appeared in Christmas Carols Ancient and Modern, a collection of seasonal carols gathered by William B. Sandys, though its incipit was in William Hone's "List of Christmas carols now annually printed" in Ancient Mysteries Described, 1823. The author is unknown.

This is the carol of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, 1843: "...at the first sound of — "God bless you merry, gentlemen! May nothing you dismay!"— Scrooge seized the ruler with such energy of action, that the singer fled in terror, leaving the keyhole to the fog and even more congenial frost."

This carol also features in the second movement of the Carol Symphony by Victor Hely-Hutchinson.

[edit] Lyrics

The carol exists in a wide variety of versions, and even with differing numbers of verses. So no attempt is made here to detail the variants; rather the reader is referred to the Hymns and Carols of Christmas analysis of a nine-verse version.

In the UK, the de facto baseline reference version is that adopted by Carols for Choirs, OUP, (1961):

1. God rest1 you2 merry, gentlemen,

Let nothing you dismay,
For Jesus Christ our Saviour
Was born upon this day,
To save us all from Satan's power
When we were gone astray:
O tidings of comfort and joy,
comfort and joy,
O tidings of comfort and joy.
2. From God our heavenly Father
A blessèd angel came,
And unto certain shepherds
Brought tidings of the same,
How that in Bethlehem was born
The Son of God by name:
O tidings ...
3. The shepherds at those tidings
Rejoicèd much in mind,
And left their flocks a-feeding
In tempest, storm and wind,
And went to Bethlehem straightway,
This blessèd Babe to find:
O tidings ...
4. But when to Bethlehem they came,
Whereat this Infant lay,
They found Him in a manger,
Where oxen feed on hay;
His mother Mary kneeling,
Unto the Lord did pray:
O tidings ...
5. Now to the Lord sing praises,
All you within this place,
And with true love and brotherhood
Each other now embrace;
This holy tide of Christmas
All others doth deface:3
O tidings ...

Carols for Choirs


Notes:

1Subjunctive mood: should be read to mean "may God rest you merrily, gentlemen."


2Even in this traditionally-based publication, the opening line is "you", not the archaic "ye".


3The carol's use of deface is Middle English, now archaic, to be understood not as spoil or vandalise but as efface (outshine, eclipse). Many subsequent versions, such as the New English Hymnal of 1986, make this substitution.

[edit] Notable cover versions

[edit] 20th Century

The song was "sampled" in the 1963 Christmas hit "A Soalin" by Peter, Paul and Mary.

[edit] 21st Century

[edit] Further reading

  • The New Oxford Book of Carols, ed. Hugh Keyte and Andrew Parrott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 527
  • Stories Behind the Best-Loved Songs of Christmas, Ace Collins (Zondervan, 2001).

[edit] External links

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