Tradition traces this hymn to a vision of the fourteenth-century Dominican mystic Heinrich Seuse, who wrote in his own autobiography that angels drew him into a heavenly dance on the eve of a feast of angels and sang “a joyous ditty about the infant Jesus” beginning In dulci jubilo, a gladness so sweet it made him forget all his sufferings. The earliest surviving manuscript, from Mainz around 1380 to 1400, preserves the hymn as a macaronic text mixing Latin and Middle High German within the same stanzas. It entered Lutheran hymnody through Wittenberg’s own 1533 hymnal and reached its familiar four-stanza form in Valentin Babst’s 1545 collection. Arthur Tozer Russell translated it into English in 1851, and it passed from The Lutheran Hymnal into Lutheran Service Book as hymn 386, its tune arranged for LSB by Richard Hillert. Its four stanzas move from the joy of Christ’s taking on our humanity, through a prayer for Him to come down since we cannot rise to Him, to thanks for the Father who gave His Son, and finally to hope for heaven itself. As the Closing Hymn on Christmas Day, it sends the congregation out still carrying the dance and the dear Name a medieval friar once heard from the angels themselves.
Sung at Our Saviour
2025