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All Saints' Day hymns
Nov. 1st, 2012 09:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
primeidealHello! Today I'm going to share a couple hymns for All Saints' Day, November 1.
All Saints' Day is a Christian festival that, as the name implies, honors untold saints--our predecessors. I'm a Lutheran, and this tradition doesn't have a formal canonization process that recognizes various levels on the way to sainthood or make a big deal of verifying who is or is not a saint, so in that sense we emphasize the "all" part. Lutherans also celebrate the denomination on October 31, Reformation Day, when our namesake Martin Luther is said to have nailed his "95 Theses" to a church door--to make sure that everyone would see it when they came to church for All Saints' Day. So while it's not the most theologically important holiday, it's one with a rich tradition.
I would guess the best-known hymn for All Saints' Day is "For All The Saints," whose lyrics were written by William How, and whose eventual melody was written by Ralph Vaughan Williams. The hymn tune is known as "Sine nomine," ("Without name"). This might be a reference to unrecognized saints, but another source suggests that this was a common name for all sorts of hymn tunes in the Renaissance era, so I'm not sure.
The original text consists of eleven verses, each of three lines in rhyming iambic pentamenter. It was first printed in 1864.
( Read more... )
All Saints' Day is a Christian festival that, as the name implies, honors untold saints--our predecessors. I'm a Lutheran, and this tradition doesn't have a formal canonization process that recognizes various levels on the way to sainthood or make a big deal of verifying who is or is not a saint, so in that sense we emphasize the "all" part. Lutherans also celebrate the denomination on October 31, Reformation Day, when our namesake Martin Luther is said to have nailed his "95 Theses" to a church door--to make sure that everyone would see it when they came to church for All Saints' Day. So while it's not the most theologically important holiday, it's one with a rich tradition.
I would guess the best-known hymn for All Saints' Day is "For All The Saints," whose lyrics were written by William How, and whose eventual melody was written by Ralph Vaughan Williams. The hymn tune is known as "Sine nomine," ("Without name"). This might be a reference to unrecognized saints, but another source suggests that this was a common name for all sorts of hymn tunes in the Renaissance era, so I'm not sure.
The original text consists of eleven verses, each of three lines in rhyming iambic pentamenter. It was first printed in 1864.
( Read more... )
