Christmas Carols Ancient and Modern E-Book

Annie Russell Marble

• Herausgeber: Full Well Ventures
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

This article, "Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern," from the December 1901 issue of The Bookman magazine, talks about the history and origins of traditional and popular Christmas carols, ancient as well as modern. 

Leseprobe

Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern

© 2020 Full Well Ventures

Originally published in December 1901 issue of “The Bookman” magazine

THE Bookman

Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern

By Annie Russell Marble

IN THE nomenclature of literature and music, few terms are more flexible, both as regards substance and form, than the word “carol.” With its derivation still a mooted question, it has extended its range to include nearly all festival songs. From earliest times to the present, amid great diversity of models, there have been two generic types: First, the carol of exultation, closely linked with the primal use of the song as accompaniment to the dance, and second, the carol of adoration, more stately and restrictive, akin to the early Biblical hymns of praise. Moreover, the history of these two elemental carol forms is coeval, and often interlinked, rather than sequential. The Saturnalian feasts of the Romans, the Mother-Night, or Yule-Feast, of the Saxons, both occurring during the latter days of December, were celebrated with dance-songs of joy; the Hebrews commemorated their early victories by adoration of Jehovah, with “singing and dancing, with tabrets, with joy and with instruments of musick.”

Retrospect of carol singing, however, seldom reverts beyond the early Christian centuries. The birth and mission of Christ inspired existent forms and customs with new meaning and spirit. After Clemens Romanus, about 70, decreed that the Nativity should be celebrated on December 25, a date already associated with pagan festivals, the religious songs gradually and consistently became carols of adoration to Christ and the Madonna, and from these early hymns of the Nativity were developed the varied odes of adoration suggested by the term “Christmas carol.” As early as the seventh year of the second century, the younger Pliny wrote to the Emperor Trajan that Christians “gathered on festival days to sing praises alternately to God and Christ.”

In the meantime, the dance-carol, the old-time karolle, became the medium of secular exultation and feasting, associated with the decorative and material elements of Christmas celebration, with the holly and bay, the ivy and mistletoe, the wassail and the piece de resistance of the holiday feast, the entrance of the boar’s head. Dryden aptly commingled his trio of terms:

The costly feast, the carol, and the dance.

Thus, in the older Latin poets, in Boccaccio and Chaucer, the word “carol” has this meaning, always associated with movements of merriment.