More on Christmas Carols

Dear Dr Knowledge:

I would be grateful if you could tell me something about my favorite carol, "Silent Night"?

Hillary Belloc


Silent Night
As every school kid knows, late in the last century this carol was at the center of a firestorm of controversy that toppled the very foundations of Caroldom. This all began in 1875 when the then Dean of Carols at Oxford, perhaps influenced by the new German textual Carol criticism, publicly declared in the infinitely respectable Carol Quarterly that he was "unsure who or what is 'round yon virgin.'"

Controversy in Britain
This pronouncement set off shockwaves of indignation. Surely this was blasphemy to question the coherence of such a great carol. Yet, astoundingly, prominent Carolists in Kent, Cornwall, Bath, Liverpool, Aberdeen, and Cork, among others, declared themselves similarly agnostic. Carol lovers across the island were thrown into confusion.

Carol fundamentalists launched a counter-attack. "Obviously it is the mother and child who are around the virgin," they declared. Yet none could explain how the mother, being also the virgin, could somehow be around herself. Some then took to arguing that the carol implies that there is something like a halo or mist or some spiritual light around the heavenly pair. But they were stumped on the question of why the text does not mention a halo or mist or anything like it.

Canterbury Falls
The harshest blow to Carol fundamentalism, however, came when the Great Dean of Carols at the Canterbury Carol Seminary, long considered a bedrock of fundamentalism, stated that he, for one, never knew what to make of that "Sleep in heavenly peace" line.

"Is it a statement of the fact that the mother and child are sleeping? Or is it a command that they should sleep? Or is it just the child who should sleep? Or should we the audience sleep? Or is it the night or the nearby village or the whole scene that should sleep or is sleeping?"

Howls of protest followed, but once again attempts to bring this question into orthodoxy found Carolists lining up all over the spectrum. The country was fast heading toward complete chaos. Civil war was inevitable.

Holland Compromised
Meanwhile, across the sea, a Dutch Carologian, speaking at the Carol Convention in Rotterdam, publicly called into question the understandability of the line "Holy Infant so tender and mild." "Hadn't the song," he asked, "just mentioned the child? Now who is this Holy Infant character then? Is he someone else entirely?"

The country was immediately up in arms; however, many Carolists came out publicly to declare that they thought the carol did not for certain rule out the possibility that in addition to the Christ Child there was also a Holy Infant present at the scene. Some even went so far as to call for a reexamination of Carol sources to try and discover additional mentions of this Holy Infant, to see why he was in Bethlehem at the time, and perhaps gain some idea of his philosophy, if he had one.

We all know what followed, the war, the devastation, the horror. Yeah, it was too bad.