Monthly column on hymns and songs

A quiet hush pervades the evening at our seaside B&B. With the lounge to ourselves, we can't even be sure if anyone else is in residence. We are enjoying our holiday books when at 8.55 prompt, in walks another couple, almost furtively. Do we mind very much if they switch on for the news?

The etiquette handbook would say it is as rude to walk out as to say 'Yes, we do'. We accepted the inevitable, not before exchanging pleasantries in the few moments left for conversation. It took about 90 seconds to discover that our new acquaintances were Baptists; you can usually tell. We agreed to talk more after The Weather.

By some means, I know not how, the conversation moved on to hymns. 'We go in more for songs', they said. 'Those old hymns are so hard to understand. All about hobgoblins! And what was that we had last week - All the sons of want are blessed? What is that supposed to mean?'

What could I say? Only that the hobgoblin hymn was by a Baptist, and that upstairs in our room I just happened to have a book which dealt with these very problems! I lent it to them overnight. Was that why they chose a different table at breakfast, or was it just more etiquette? We moved on next day, and never saw them again. We got our book back.

But we shared with our news-hungry friends the biblical conviction that there is no point in singing what you don't understand - with two exceptions. If it is in Scripture, then we may need to learn what it means anyway. And if we are simply out of our depth spiritually, that is different from being in a mental fog. The lines in question fell into neither category.

And barely a year later, even while announcing 'Who would true valour see', a minister confesses that he is inadequately briefed on the hobgoblins about which we are about to sing. A lifetime ago Percy Dearmer said of these pre-Tolkien Bunyanesque creatures: 'To include the hobgoblins would have been to ensure disaster; to ask the congregation to invite all to come and look at them, if they wished to see true valour, would have been difficult'.

A re-write

So what did Dearmer do? Dear me, rewrote Bunyan's pilgrim song! 'He who would valiant be' was born, losing the hobgoblins but gaining the Spirit of God. The t.v. (true valour) had to go. The Westminster Canon who produced two classic hymnals (both still in print after many more have come and gone) did what all editors do; he edited. More valiantly than most, never mind the dismal stories.
A recent author, scornful of any attempt at rewriting, gleefully passed on jokes about alleged Sunday School howlers like 'Judas's ear', 'the witch his mother Mary', and 'bridal glory round her shed'. But you can't have it both ways! The sad reaction is to drop good hymns like 'God rest ye merry' or great ones like 'Jesus shall reign', just because one line has not outlived changes in language and idiom. Sadder still, to yield to a song culture which has some weirder lines than Watts or Bunyan ever dreamed of. The music-driven songwriters do not have the excuse of having lived three centuries ago, when naffs and dishwashers were species of bird, mobiles were crowds, and it was far better to be pompous than enthusiastic.

Hymnbooks, like Bibles, are not museum exhibits but channels of truth. If Tyndale was right to make an infallible Scripture intelligible, how much more do our humble hymns need versions we can all understand!

Post-hobgoblinism?

A re-write

Christopher Idle