A Medley of Christmas Carols Part IV: I Saw Three Ships

Often things of great beauty have some degree of strangeness in the proportion, and that is certainly true of this beautiful, but odd, carol. 

I Saw Three Ships dates back to the 15^th Century, but we are familiar with the 19^th Century arrangement by Sir John Stainer.  The song is a traditional English carol, possibly from Derbyshire.  The meaning of three ships in land-locked Bethlehem has puzzled your correspondent for years.  Some scholars believe this carol references the arrival in Cologne in 1162 of the bodies of the Three Magi after the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa razed the city of Milan, where the remains of the Magi had rested. 

There are several variant lyrics, including Our Saviour Christ and his lady instead of The Virgin Mary and Christ were there in verse three, and a line that speaks about Mary and Joseph with O, he did whistle and she did sing.

Your correspondent must confess to a particular liking for this carol; I could not explain what I find so compelling, but it is the one that I most often hum to myself.

I saw three ships come sailing in

On Christmas day, on Christmas day;

I saw three ships come sailing in

On Christmas day in the morning.

 

And what was in those ships all three,

On Christmas day, on Christmas day?

And what was in those ships all three,

On Christmas day in the morning?

 

Our Savior Christ and His lady,

On Christmas day, on Christmas day;

Our Savior Christ and His lady,

On Christmas day in the morning.

 

Pray whither sailed those ships all three,

On Christmas day, on Christmas day?

Pray whither sailed those ships all three,

On Christmas day in the morning?

 

O they sailed into Bethlehem,

On Christmas day, on Christmas day,

O they sailed into Bethlehem,

On Christmas day in the morning.

 

And all the bells on earth shall ring,

On Christmas day, on Christmas day;

And all the bells on earth shall ring,

On Christmas day in the morning.

 

And all the angels in Heav’n shall sing,

On Christmas day, on Christmas day;

And all the angels in Heav’n shall sing,

On Christmas day in the morning.

 

And all the souls on Earth shall sing,

On Christmas day, on Christmas day;

And all the souls on Earth shall sing,

On Christmas day in the morning.

 

Then let us all rejoice amain,

On Christmas day, on Christmas day;

Then let us rejoice amain,

On Christmas day in the morning.

A Medley of Christmas Carols Part III: Deck the Halls With Boughs of Holly

Deck the Halls With Boughs of Holly is a popular, secular carol of Welsh origin.  Mozart uses a bit of it as the theme of a composition for violin and piano; later, Haydn used it in the song New Year’s Night – proving that great artists only borrow the best.

The words Follow me in merry measure suggest that the singers would dance about as they sang, much as they would in a ring dance, the original meaning of the word carol.

The tune was first found in a musical manuscript by Welsh harpist John Parry Ddall (1710-1782), but is believe to be much older than that.  The version we are most familiar with today was found in The Song Book, edited by John Hullah, published in 1866.  The translated lyrics are attributed to Thomas Oliphant.  The lyrics of 1877 and 1881, known best by contemporary readers, are:

Deck the hall with boughs of holly,

Fa la la la la la la la la.

‘Tis the season to be jolly,

Fa la la la la la la la la.

Don we now our gay apparel

Troll the ancient Christmas carol,

Fa la la la la la la la la.

See the blazing yule before us,

Fa la la la la la la la la.

Strike the harp and join the chorus.

Fa la la la la la la la la.

Follow me in merry measure,

While I tell of Christmas treasure,

Fa la la la la la la la la.

Fast away the old year passes,

Fa la la la la la la la la.

Hail the new, ye lads and lasses!

Fa la la la la la la la la.

Sing we joyous all together,

Heedless of the wind and weather,

Fa la la la la la la la la.

 

 

A Medley of Christmas Carols Part II: Hark! The Herald Angels Sing

We continue our look at the music of Christmas with Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.  This is one of particularly popular tunes with children, and is familiar to baby boomers as the song sung by Charlie Brown and company at the end of A Charlie Brown Christmas, first broadcast in 1965.

The words to Hark were written in 1730 by Charles Wesley.  (Wesley’s brother, John Wesley, was the founder of the Methodist Church.)  Charles was probably the most prolific hymn-writer of all time, with more than 6,500 hymns and carols.  Hark! The Herald Angels Sing is perhaps the most popular.

Wesley’s actual opening line was Hark! How all the welkin rings.  Welkin is a now obscure word meaning sky.  The lyrics were changed 30 years later by another hymn-writer, the Reverend Martin Madan.  They were not set to the current familiar music until 1855, when Dr. W.H. Cummings adapted a tune by Felix Mendelssohn to fit them.  Oddly enough, Mendelssohn said, I am sure that this piece will never do for sacred words.  In fact, he thought the melody best suited for some military theme!  How often are artists bad judges of their own work! 

Hark! The herald angels sing,

“Glory to the newborn King;

Peace on earth, and mercy mild,

God and sinners reconciled!”

Joyful, all ye nations rise,

Join the triumph of the skies;

With th’angelic host proclaim,

“Christ is born in Bethlehem!”

Refrain

 

Hark! the herald angels sing,

“Glory to the newborn King!”

Christ, by highest Heav’n adored;

Christ the everlasting Lord;

Late in time, behold Him come,

Offspring of a virgin’s womb.

Veiled in flesh the Godhead see;

Hail th’incarnate Deity,

Pleased with us in flesh to dwell,

Jesus our Emmanuel.

Refrain

 

Hail the heav’nly Prince of Peace!

Hail the Sun of Righteousness!

Light and life to all He brings,

Ris’n with healing in His wings.

Mild He lays His glory by,

Born that man no more may die.

Born to raise the sons of earth,

Born to give them second birth.

Refrain

 

Come, Desire of nations, come,

Fix in us Thy humble home;

Rise, the woman’s conqu’ring Seed,

Bruise in us the serpent’s head.

Now display Thy saving power,

Ruined nature now restore;

Now in mystic union join

Thine to ours, and ours to Thine.

Refrain

Adam’s likeness, Lord, efface,

Stamp Thine image in its place:

Second Adam from above,

Reinstate us in Thy love.

Let us Thee, though lost, regain,

Thee, the Life, the inner man:

O, to all Thyself impart,

Formed in each believing heart.

Refrain

Wesley’s original version read thus:

Hark, how all the welkin rings,

“Glory to the King of kings;

Peace on earth, and mercy mild,

God and sinners reconciled!”

 

Joyful, all ye nations, rise,

Join the triumph of the skies;

Universal nature say,

“Christ the Lord is born to-day!”

 

Christ, by highest Heaven ador’d,

Christ, the everlasting Lord:

Late in time behold him come,

Offspring of a Virgin’s womb!

 

Veiled in flesh, the Godhead see,

Hail the incarnate deity!

Pleased as man with men to appear,

Jesus! Our Immanuel here!

 

Hail, the heavenly Prince of Peace!

Hail, the Sun of Righteousness!

Light and life to all he brings,

Risen with healing in his wings.

 

Mild He lays his glory by,

Born that man no more may die;

Born to raise the sons of earth;

Born to give them second birth.

 

Come, Desire of nations, come,

Fix in us thy humble home;

Rise, the woman’s conquering seed,

Bruise in us the serpent’s head.

 

Now display thy saving power,

Ruined nature now restore;

Now in mystic union join

Thine to ours, and ours to thine.

 

Adam’s likeness, Lord, efface;

Stamp Thy image in its place.

Second Adam from above,

Reinstate us in thy love.

 

Let us Thee, though lost, regain,

Thee, the life, the inner Man:

O! to all thyself impart,

Form’d in each believing heart.

A Medley of Christmas Carols Part I: Silent Night

Manuscript Copy in Gruber's Own Hand

Christmas is our most musical holiday – in fact, Christmas music is on the stereo as I write these words. 

But why is Christmas so musical?  Why are there so many carols, so many popular songs, and so much seasonal music available on the radio, Internet and television?  One reason, perhaps, is that the very language of Christmas is so musical.  The Gospel of St. Luke says that the shepherds in the fields were amazed when an angel came to them and told them of the birth of Jesus.  Luke writes:

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will to men.

Most translations read saying rather than singing, but these words are so musical that we can almost hear the heavenly host singing.  In fact, these words have been set to music multiple times.

Christmas songs were sung in the churches of Rome as early as 129 A.D., and St. Jerome mentions carols in the fifth century.  By the 1300s, Christmas songs were sung between the acts of miracle plays performed in church courtyards – a wonderful way of transmitting Biblical messages to a populace with low literacy.

It’s very hard to tell the origins of the earliest carols – the music traveled more widely and faster than any other musical form.  Today’s carol Silent Night, for example, was translated into at least six European languages within 30 years of its composition in 1818.

Perhaps the most popular carol in the world, Silent Night was written in 1818 in small-town Austria by the village priest, Father Joseph Mohr, and his organist, Franz Gruber.

On Christmas Eve that year, Father Mohr noticed that mice had damaged the church organ, making it unplayable.  He wrote the words to Silent Night that afternoon and hurried to the home of his friend, Gruber.  Gruber wrote the music in just a few hours and at midnight mass that evening the two of them sang it, joined by two women and accompanied by a Spanish guitar.  We have been singing it ever since.

Silent night, holy night,

All is calm, all is bright

Round yon virgin mother and Child.

Holy Infant, so tender and mild,

Sleep in heavenly peace,

Sleep in heavenly peace.

 

Silent night, holy night,

Shepherds quake at the sight;

Glories stream from heaven afar,

Heavenly hosts sing Alleluia!

Christ the Savior is born,

Christ the Savior is born!

 

Silent night, holy night,

Son of God, love’s pure light;

Radiant beams from Thy holy face

With the dawn of redeeming grace,

Jesus, Lord, at Thy birth,

Jesus, Lord, at Thy birth.

 

Silent night, holy night

Wondrous star, lend thy light;

With the angels let us sing,

Alleluia to our King;

Christ the Savior is born,

Christ the Savior is born!

Christmas: Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse, edited by Robert Haven Schauffler

It’s extremely unlikely that the name Robert Haven Schauffler (1879–1964) resonates in any way with you, but if you are a reader from about 30-to-90 years of age, you have probably read one of his books.
 
Schauffler was an American writer, musician, war hero and biographer (of Beethoven, Brahms and Schumann), as well as editor of a series of books about holidays.

He was born in Austria to missionary parents; his family would later found Schaffler College in Cleveland for Bohemian immigrants who were interested in social or religious work.  He would later serve in the Great War and win a Purple Heart.

In 1907 he wrote a book about Thanksgiving, and his publisher recommended a follow-up book on Christmas.  (He would later write or edit books on Arbor Day, Independence Day, and the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln.)  Now, here’s the amazing thing, the book -- Christmas: Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse – was first published in 1907.  I have seen editions from the 1920s, 30s, 40s, and finally an edition published in the 1970s, which I first read in grade school.  Schauffler’s collection is one of scores of “anonymous” books that are in nearly every school library, well-thumbed by children and adolescents, and then cast aside without a second thought.  It’s now available for free download from Project Gutenberg or ManyBooks.net. 

That’s something of a shame, because Schauffler’s Christmas collection has many good things in it.  Aside from the obligatory Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen, Schaffler has tidbits from writers as diverse as Leigh Hunt, Christina Rossetti, Robert Herrick and William Morris.  If you desire a Christmas bedside reader, you could do no better.

Here is a snippet from another forgotten author, Hamilton Wright Mabie (1846–1916): The world has been full of mysteries today; everybody has gone about weighted with secrets. The children's faces have fairly shone with expectancy, and I enter easily into the universal dream which at this moment holds all the children of Christendom under its spell. Was there ever a wider or more loving conspiracy than that which keeps the venerable figure of Santa Claus from slipping away, with all the other oldtime myths, into the forsaken wonderland of the past? Of all the personages whose marvelous doings once filled the minds of men, he alone survives. He has outlived all the great gods, and all the impressive and poetic conceptions which once flitted between heaven and earth; these have gone, but Santa Claus remains by virtue of a common understanding that childhood shall not be despoiled of one of its most cherished beliefs, either by the mythologist, with his sun myth theory, or the scientist, with his heartless diatribe against superstition. There is a good deal more to be said on this subject, if this were the place to say it; even superstition has its uses, and sometimes, its sound heart of truth. He who does not see in the legend of Santa Claus a beautiful faith on one side, and the naive embodiment of a divine fact on the other, is not fit to have a place at the Christmas board. For him there should be neither carol, nor holly, nor mistletoe; they only shall keep the feast to whom all these things are but the outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace.

More on the holidays next week!

Beasley’s Christmas Party, by Booth Tarkington

 

It is both amazing and sad to your correspondent that American novelist Booth Tarkington (1869-1946) is so little read (and regarded!) today.  Tarkington had a distinctly American voice – a distinctly Midwestern voice – that resonated with turn-of-the-century America in a deep and profound way.  He is one of only three novelists (the others being William Faulkner and John Updike) to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once – but today he is remembered chiefly for The Magnificent Ambersons, which was turned into a now-highly regarded film in 1942 by Orson Welles.

Tarkington was born in Indianapolis, Indiana and would eventually graduate from the prestigious Exeter Academy, Purdue University and, ultimately, Princeton.  He came from extremely well-to-do people, but the family lost money during the Panic of 1873 – though eventually they would recoup much of their fortune.  It was this up-and-down experience that would later influence his 1918 novel Ambersons.

It is amazing that a man called “the most significant contemporary American author” by Publisher’s Weekly in 1921 should be so little remembered today.  Perhaps his reputation was usurped by fellow Princeton graduate F. Scott Fitzgerald, a critical assessment that baffles your correspondent as Tarkington is the better writer with the more distinctive voice.  Perhaps it is the sense of wistful nostalgia, a sense of sweetness that makes Tarkington so unpalatable today; his lack of irony and cynicism is distinctly unfashionable in academic circles.

Christmas, and its ability to transform a diverse spectrum of men, was of particular interest to Tarkington, and he wrote of the holiday more than once.  He wrote the novella Beasley’s Christmas Party in 1909, and it was later dramatized by C. W. Munger.  It is available for free at Project Gutenberg or ManyBooks.net, and is heartily recommended for holiday reading.

The story concerns a journalist who moves to the all-American town of Wainwright, where he befriends Mr. Beasley, a local politician who is sure to run for governor and win.  However, Beasley has taken to talking with imaginary people, and when his political enemies learn this, they dragoon the reporter to witness this eccentricity and report upon it.  The resolution provides wonderful satisfaction, and perhaps not a little envy at political malice so easily erased.

Here is a taste of Tarkington’s prose: It might be difficult to say why I thought it was the “finest” house in Wainwright, for a simpler structure would be hard to imagine; it was merely a big, old-fashioned brick house, painted brown and very plain, set well away from the street among some splendid forest trees, with a fair spread of flat lawn.  But it gave back a great deal for your glance, just as some people do.  It was a large house, as I say, yet it looked not like a mansion but like a home; and made you wish that you lived in it.  Or, driving by, of an evening, you would have liked to hitch your horse and go in; it spoke so surely of hearty, old fashioned people living there, who would welcome you merrily.

It looked like a house where there were a grandfather and grandmother; where holidays were warmly kept; where there were boisterous family reunions to which uncles and aunts, who had been born there, would return from no matter what distances; a house where big turkeys would be on the table often; where on called “the hired man” (and named either Abner or Ole) would crack walnuts upon a flat-iron clutched between his keens on the back porch; it looked like a house where they played charades; where there would be long streamers of evergreen and dozens of wreaths of holly at Christmas-time; where there were tearful, happy weddings and great throwings of rice after little brides, from the broad front steps: in a word, it was the sort of a house to make the hearts of spinsters and bachelors very lonely and wistful – and that is about as near as I can come to my reason for thinking it is the finest house in Wainwright.

It is a perfect house, in fact, in which to spend some reading time this Christmas.

The Art of Rise of the Guardians

Many movie-goers leave an animated film amused or moved or (all-too-frequently) indifferent, but few spare a thought for the incredible amount of work involved in creating it.

Such is not likely to happen with the current animated film Rise of the Guardians, which seems to be the one film to emerge from 2012 that may be a holiday classic for years to come.  One of the most beautifully designed animated films in recent memory, Rise brings to life several of childhood’s most cherished figures, including Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, the Sandman and Jack Frost.  (Not to mention Pitch, the Boogey Man!)  Such reinvention does not happen without careful artistic consideration or much thinking and re-thinking.

Fortunately for those who cannot get enough holiday spirit (or insight into that remarkable alchemy that is animated films), a new, deluxe coffee table book is there to tell you all you need to know and more.  The Art of Rise of the Guardians details how these iconic figures were reimagined for the film, along with how the many set pieces – from the North Pole to the Tooth Fairy’s palace – were designed.  The book is written by animation historian Ramin Zahed (also editor-in-chief of Animation Magazine), who provides not only an instructive look at the creative process, but also at how large-scale animated films are conceived, produced, nudged-along, and, finally, let out into the world with the best intentions.

This film is, of course, based on the on-going series of books The Guardians of Childhood by William Joyce.  Regular Jade Sphinx readers are well-aware of our devotion for this illustrator, writer, animator, and filmmaker, who is on his way to becoming something of a 21^st Century Walt Disney.  Joyce provides the preface to the book (Alec Baldwin, the voice of Santa, penned the foreword), where he writes about the Guardians: they have vast, extraordinary domains, they are more than just benign gift-givers, they are great and magnificent heroes who would lay down their lives for innocence and the well-being of children everywhere … It will, I think, make kids believe, and for everyone else, it will remind them of how beautiful and powerful belief can be.

The book then shows everything -- from rough pencil sketches to watercolors to intricate storyboards and special effects shots – a creative team at a world class studio can do to harness that belief.  The Art of Rise of the Guardians is a lavishly illustrated book, but the art is put into perspective by a text showing the creative process.  For instance, we learn that Pitch’s lair is not only influenced by such film noir classics as Orson Welles’ The Lady From Shanghai, but also by Venice, Italy.  As Zahed writes, One couldn’t really pick a more appropriate inspiration for Pitch’s home than the melancholy, sinking city of Venice.  The decrepit walls of Pitch’s palace are sliding into the water, and the interiors are covered with mud.  Set in one of the most haunting and beautiful cities in the world, this gloomy Renaissance-style lair is a reminder of the dark turn the villain’s life took hundreds of years ago.

Though the heroes in Rise of the Guardians all have equal time, of course the star turn is that of Santa Claus, perhaps the most famous and beloved Guardian of them all.  The Art of Rise of the Guardians is strongly recommended for believers in Santa Claus (and you know who you are), animation buffs or simply people interested in how intricately-designed, large-scale movies are made.