The 300-Year History of"Hark! The Herald Angels Sing"
✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦
Every Christmas, somewhere between the first week of December and the final chord of a Christmas Eve service, most of us sing "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" without thinking too hard about where it came from.
We know it's old. We know it's a classic. We know it involves angels, a newborn King, and a melody that manages to feel simultaneously triumphant and tender.
What most of us don't know is that the carol we sing today has been through more transformations than almost any other Christmas carol in history — shaped by at least four different hands over more than a century — and that the most important word in the whole song has been sitting there, largely unexamined, for nearly 300 years.
It Started With a Welkin
The year is 1739. Charles Wesley — younger brother of John Wesley, co-founder of the Methodist movement, and one of the most prolific hymn writers in Christian history — writes a new Christmas hymn.
His opening line: "Hark, how all the welkin rings, glory to the King of kings."
Welkin is a Middle English word for sky or heavens. It's a good word — evocative, atmospheric. But it's also a word that, by the mid-eighteenth century, most ordinary people no longer used in conversation. It was literary. Poetic. A little inaccessible.
Whitefield's Revision
In 1753 — fourteen years after Wesley wrote the original — George Whitefield published a revised version. His opening line: "Hark! The herald angels sing, glory to the newborn King."
Gone was the welkin. In came the herald angels.
Wesley was not pleased. He had specific views about how his hymns should be used and altered. But Whitefield's version resonated with congregations in a way the original hadn't quite managed. Herald angels was more specific. More visual. More interesting.
And it raised a question — even if nobody in 1753 was consciously asking it — that would take nearly 300 years to answer: Who are the herald angels?
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Mendelssohn and Cummings
In 1840, Felix Mendelssohn composed a cantata called Festgesang to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Gutenberg's printing press. Mendelssohn himself noted that while it was suitable for festive occasions, he didn't think the music worked well for sacred texts.
Mendelssohn was about to be overruled.
In 1855, English organist William H. Cummings adapted Mendelssohn's tune to fit Whitefield's revised lyrics. The combination was immediate and electric. That arrangement — Wesley's theology, Whitefield's revision, Mendelssohn's melody, Cummings' adaptation — is exactly what we sing every December.
Four people. Over 116 years. One carol.
The Word We've Been Walking Past
Of all the revisions across more than a century, the one thing that survived every iteration was the word that changed everything for me.
Herald.
A herald is a specific kind of angel. Not a generic, decorative, background-of-the-nativity-scene angel.
A herald is a designated official messenger — someone entrusted with carrying important news, bound to deliver it accurately, credentialed by the authority that sent them.
In other words: a reporter.
And that one specific word, sitting in the opening line of one of the most sung Christmas carols in human history, is what started me on a years-long journey that eventually became MARK! The Herald Angel.
For nearly 300 years, we've been singing about the herald angel without asking the most obvious journalistic question: Who was he? What was his story?
That angel has a story. He had a morning. He had a wardrobe decision and a train to catch and a stable he nearly walked past. And then he had a moment that broke open something in him that had never been opened before.
That's the story I wrote. It took nearly 300 years for anyone to tell it. I'm glad it finally got told.
✦ Discover Mark's story for yourself at MarkTheHerald.com.
MARK! The Herald Angel — a fair dinkum Christmas story in prose.
Free Advent devotional guide included.
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