This carol carries no LSB or TLH number, since it never entered the confessional Lutheran hymnal tradition, which favored Reformation-era chorales confessing justification outright over English street balladry. Its text survives from oral carol singing and printed broadsheets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, reaching its familiar fixed form only in nineteenth-century collections such as William Sandys’s Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern of 1833. The opening words themselves preserve an older sense of English: “rest” once meant “keep” or “cause to remain,” so the line calls on God to keep the hearers joyful and at peace, with the comma properly falling after “merry” rather than after “rest.” Its familiar minor-mode tune shares a family history with the melody KINGSFOLD, both descending from eighteenth-century English broadsheet ballads such as “Gilderoy’s last Farewel.” As the Opening Hymn on Christmas Day, it brings the congregation’s own long English carol tradition into a service otherwise built from the German chorale.
Sung at Our Saviour
2025