Tonight, “Away in a Manger.” It’s a Christmas hymn I tend to overlook – because it’s expressly for children and not very sophisticated. In my own personal history, it was the first Christmas carol I ever memorized. I remember (probably erroneously) singing it to my grandmother and an aunt or two (using the melody in the clip above) while riding in a car at night at Christmastime. But I moved on to songs that had more going on under the surface.
When I was a kid, I often heard “Away in a Manger” referred to as “Luther’s Cradle Hymn.” Everybody knew it was a translation from Luther. Turns out it wasn’t, though. Luther did write a Christmas hymn for his children, but it’s called “From Heaven Above To Earth I Come,” and can be found in any Lutheran hymnal. Nothing in his works resembles “AIAM” at all. It is, as someone has pointed out, not his kind of thing. If he’d written it, he’d have thrown in more theology. He was not a man to let a chance to catechize people go to waste. Sentimental he was not.
The origins of “AIAM” are in fact quite mysterious. According to Wikipedia, its earliest known appearance was on March 2, 1882 in the “Children’s Corner” of an anti-Masonic paper called The Christian Cynosure. Within a few months it had appeared in a couple other publications, always identified as “Luther’s Cradle Song.” This is rather perplexing. Somebody actually wrote the thing, but they gave credit to the Reformer. Why?
It’s been suggested (again, I get this from Wikipedia) that it may have originated in a forgotten children’s Christmas play, in which Luther sings the song for his children. Maybe somebody took the script literally, and reprinted it cutting the play’s author out. Nobody seems to have sued for copyright infringement, in any case.
The immortal author Lars Walker refers to “AIAM” in his novel Troll Valley, complaining that, because the song describes “the little Lord Jesus asleep in the hay,” many people draw the erroneous conclusion that hay is stuff for animals to sleep on. This is wrong, because a manger is a feed trough, and hay is for eating and belongs there. What animals sleep on is straw, another agricultural product altogether.
Psalter Hymnal Handbook has this: “Stanzas 1 and 2 of this anonymous children’s hymn were first published in the Lutheran compilation ‘Little Children’s Book for Schools and Families’ (Philadelphia, 1885).”
Funnily enough I just read a mediaeval Dutch Christmas song which includes the line (in my translation) “In hay, as the Scripture tells us” about which the editor says “Concerning hay (or straw as mentioned in other songs) in the crib, the Scripture has nothing to say”.
I wonder what I was feeding the rabbits through the bars when last I visited a farm? – it looked like straw to urban me, but maybe it was hay.
It would have been hay. Hay is dried grass (usually alfalfa in my country) that is stored up for use as fodder over the winter. It is heavy, grayish green in color, and has a sort of a “green” smell. Straw is the stems left over after grain has been winnowed out. It has little or no food value, but is useful for animals to sleep on. It also soaks up liquid waste for easier removal. Straw is yellow, and doesn’t weigh much.
Thank you for this!
Continuing to read mediaeval Dutch Christmas songs, I’ve run into a couple more interesting things.
In one (in my translation), “Orts* were his cradlestraw, / That’s for us a great joy” – meanwhile “The ox and the little ass […] when Jesus in the crib lay / then left their food” but the next stanza begins “The ox and the little ass / they celebrated a great feast there”.
In another, there is a lot of emphasis on how cold it was and how there was “neither a tunic nor a little shirt” for Jesus, but He “lay swaddled in the hay”. (Interestingly, the Greek text of St. Luke 2:7, 12 only has a swaddle-verb without saying what Jesus was swaddled in, while the Latin Vulgate translation has “pannis” which the Lewis and Short dictionary says means “an infant’s swaddling-clothes” in Job 38:9 as well as in St. Luke, and more generally “a cloth, a garment”, often used especially of “torn, worn-out clothes, rags, tatters” which, I suspect, gave rise to such mediaeval suggestions as St. Joseph’s old socks.)
*That word seems to have a fascinating history in Dutch and English in senses including fodder left by cattle, used as straw. George MacDonald ended up explaining in a Preface what he meant by calling his 1893 miscellaneous collection of short prose pieces A Dish of Orts, to avoid misunderstandings.