The weird origins of five Christmas carols, including one about a dead cow
The strange origins of Britain’s favourite Christmas carols is the subject of a new book, Deck the Halls by composer, conductor, singer and lecturer Andrew Gant.
Many of the Christmas carols we sing today have nothing to do with Christmas at all - some would have been illegal to sing in church in previous centuries, while one began life as a folk song about a dead cow.
These and other tales about the strange origins of Britain’s favourite Christmas carols are the subject of a new book, Deck the Halls, by composer, conductor, singer and lecturer Andrew Gant.
“Most of my working life has been in working with choirs and singing of various kinds, and I've always been fascinated by the interface between the music and the context that it comes from,” Gant told Yahoo News.
“Christmas carols were kind of an obvious place for that because we think of them as being very English. And we think of them as being a sort of fixed tradition, something that has always been like that.
"But once you start to look at it, there's not a bit of it. They come from anywhere and everywhere, all time periods, all countries, all church traditions, folk traditions, some of them have got absolutely nothing to do with church at all.”
Many "traditional" English carols are not actually English at all, but American, with carols like Away in a Manger coming from across the pond, Gant said - and the whole idea of carols is not even originally related to Christmas.
“The word carol itself, you know, is a very ancient one, certainly by no means always associated with Christmas, and certainly not with anything to do with church. You've got Easter carols and spring carols, hunting carols.’
O Little Town of Bethlehem
O Little Town of Bethlehem started life as a folk song about a dead cow and a delinquent ploughboy.
Composer Ralph Vaughan Williams heard it in a pub in Forest Green, Surrey, sung to him by an old man called Mr Garman.
When Vaughan Williams was given the job as music editor of the English Hymnal, he liked the words of a song written by an American bishop, but not the tune, using Garman’s folk song instead.
The result was O Little Town of Bethlehem.
Deck the Halls
Deck the Halls has nothing to do with Christmas, and our ancestors would have found the idea of singing it in church deeply shocking.
In fact, for much of English history it would have been illegal to sing it in an Anglican church, because it has nothing to do with the liturgy or church, Gant explained.
He said: “Deck the Halls is a Welsh song originally published to Welsh words, and then the English words that we sing are actually written by a Scottish poet, and neither the Welsh nor the English version have anything at all to do with Christmas.
“It's a new year song. It's about the coming of the new year, and it's about decorating the house, with vegetation, which is a pretty ancient symbol of the turning of the seasons, talked about by Shakespeare and Herrick.
12 Days of Christmas
The 12 Days of Christmas is not really a Christmas song at all - there are many different versions of it, and it’s more of a children’s counting song, Gant said.
“It’s more like 10 Green Bottles,” Gant says. “And why is the partridge in a pear tree? Partridges are a strictly ground-dwelling species who will never be found in a tree.”
Ant says that one possible explanation is that the Latin for partridge is ‘Perdix’ and the French ‘Perdrix’, with a printed version of the song dating from the 18th Century.
“The pear tree may just be really garbled, bad French,” he says.
I Saw Three Ships Coming Sailing In
I Saw Three Ships had many different versions, existing as a folk song, and may refer to legends of the bodies of the three kings being taken to Cologne Cathedral.
In some versions the ships are sailing into Bethlehem (which is nowhere near the sea and does not have a harbour).
In others the ships are sailing up the English Channel - sometimes with Jesus and Mary as passengers and sometimes the Archangel Michael.
Hark the Herald Angels Sing
Hark the Herald Angels Sing is sung to a tune by Mendelssohn, who specifically told his English publisher not to put religious words to it.
After Mendelssohn’s death, the publisher did so anyway, adding altered words by Charles Wesley.
Wesley wrong, ‘Hark how all the welkin [heaven] rings,’ but his editors thought no one would know what ‘welkin’ was, so his editors changed it to angels.
Deck The Hall: The Stories of our Favourite Christmas Carols by Andrew Gant is published by Hodder & Stoughton and available now in paperback priced £10.99.
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