Hark! It Took How Many People to Write This Carol?!

Why a traditional Christmas carol is like a 21st-century pop song

J.P. Williams
This Side of the Flood
1 min readDec 31, 2024

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The Nativity by Antoine Le Moiturier, ca. 1450. Public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Christmas carols, much like pop songs, may be the result of many contributors. Last Sunday, I noticed that the hymnal credited “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” to English early Methodist leader Charles Wesley and German classical composer Felix Mendelssohn. According to Hymn Charts, Methodist preacher George Whitefield altered Wesley’s lyrics in 1753 and in the 1850s English musician William Hayman Cummings paired them with an oratorio by Mendelssohn celebrating Johannes Gutenberg’s accomplishments in printing. Throw in the hymn’s scriptural source in the Gospel of Luke, whose authorship is anything but certain and which is in all likelihood based on earlier documents, and be sure not to forget the translators into various languages all over the world. Then and only then do you get the Christmas carol everyone knows.

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J.P. Williams
J.P. Williams

Written by J.P. Williams

Writer and translator. Some scheduled posts may go up, but I'm barely here at the moment.

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