Would it surprise you to learn that J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth and the Advent hymn “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” are cousins? The beloved hymn shares an ancestor with Tolkien’s invented world of elves, hobbits, balrogs, and wizards; or, to put it another way, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” and the tales of Middle-earth ultimately arise from the same source—with some twists and turns along the way.
The story of the link between Middle-earth and the most famous Advent hymn takes us back to the medieval period, and to a sequence of short responsive chants known as the “O Antiphons”—called “O” Antiphons because each chant began with an invocation to Christ such as O Adonai (“O Lord”), O Radix Jesse (“O Root of Jesse”), O Clavis David (“O Key of David”), and so forth.
The “O Antiphons” were reserved for Advent, which needs some explanation, since in that time, “Advent” was not just a synonym for “Christmas.” The purpose of Advent was not to celebrate the Nativity: for people in the Middle Ages, that would come later in the month, with festivities and liturgical observances beginning on December 25th and lasting through January 5th, the famous “12 Days of Christmas.”
Instead, the purpose of Advent was to emphasize our need for Christ’s birth—our need for a Savior. Advent was about preparing one’s heart for the Nativity celebrations that lay on the horizon, but which had not yet come. Unsurprisingly, then, a spirit of longing pervaded the medieval observance of Advent. This sense of urgent longing can be seen in the “O Antiphon” for December 21st:
O Oriens,
O Dayspring,
splendor lucis aeternae, et sol justitiae:
Splendor of eternal light, and sun of justice:
veni, et illumina sedentes in tenebris, et umbra mortis.
Come, and give light to those who sit in darkness, and in the shadow of death.
These lines expressed the ache of sinful man, man sinful and therefore mortal, the captive of Death, echoing the yearning of the Messianic prophecy in Isaiah 9: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined.” In the antiphon, mankind sits in darkness, but Christ is described as Oriens, a word that could signify the “rising light” of the dawn, or the sunrise, or even the Morning Star: all are symbols of light bringing hope and comfort to the darkness, and all are symbols of the coming day which will dispel the darkness—just as Christ dispels the umbra mortis, the shadow of death itself.
The imagery of darkness and light was especially appropriate to the “O Antiphons,” because these Advent chants belonged to the daily evening service known as Vespers. You must picture yourself there in the darkened stone church, reciting these chants in the week leading up to Christmas Day as the sun sank beneath the trees and hills outside (or, in the more northern parts of Europe, as the darkness already lay thick beyond the church walls).
As you’ve probably already guessed, these “O Antiphons” are ultimately the source of our modern hymn “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.” But there’s a bit of a story here. What happened was this: at some point—no one knows exactly when—the plainchant “O Antiphons” were adapted into a metrical hymn, also in Latin and titled “Veni, Veni, Emmanuel.” This hymn first appears in a German hymn-book in 1710. The author remains unknown, but whoever he or she was, their inspiration came from the older “O Antiphons.” For example, compare this stanza from “Veni, Veni, Emmanuel” with the “O Antiphon” quoted above:
Veni, veni o Oriens:
Come, come O Dayspring [or Morning Star]
Solare nos adveniens,
Console us [by your] coming,
Noctis depelle nebulas,
Dispel the clouds of night,
Dirasque noctis tenebras
And the ominous shadows of night.
“Veni, Veni, Emmanuel” then became the familiar English hymn “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” in 1851: that was the year when the Englishman John M. Neale translated the Latin hymn into English and another Englishman, Thomas Helmore, set it to the tune that we still use today.
O Come, thou Dayspring from on high,
And cheer us by thy drawing nigh;
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
And death's dark shadows put to flight.
The yearning desire for our Savior expressed all the way back in the early medieval “O Antiphons” persists in “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”: the English hymn retains that powerful sense of longing.
So, to recap: the “O Antiphons,” these early medieval Advent chants, were later adapted into they hymn “Veni, Veni, Emmanuel,” sometime before 1710; and this “Veni, Veni, Emmanuel” was translated into “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” and given its famous tune in 1851.
Now, I mentioned at the beginning that “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” is a kind of cousin to Tolkien’s whole invention of Middle-earth: that the English hymn and Middle-earth have a common ancestor, as it were. That’s because there’s another interesting aspect of the history of the “O Antiphons”: these early medieval Advent chants were also adapted into a series of Old English poems sometime in the ninth or tenth century. And this is what leads us to Tolkien, because he read and studied these poems as a student at Oxford University.
And what does the Old English adaptation of the “Oriens” Antiphon that we’ve been discussing look like? It looks like this:
Eala Earendel, engla beorhtast—
Ofer middangeard monnum sended...
Or, as we would say in Modern English:
“O Earendel [an Old English name for the Morning Star], brightest of messengers—
sent above Middle-earth unto men...”
It was Tolkien’s encounter with these lines that marked the beginning of his invented world. And this is the surprising story we’ll trace in Part II.
