In the Fields, A-Wokeing

 

I see that the church of All Saints with Holy Trinity, Loughborough, have caused "fury" by using changed the words to "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen". This is the MSN account of the Mail article - I hope the Mail may get slightly less in the way of pay-per-click if you read it there.

I must say, when you dig in, the fury appears to be confined to the ubiquitously shocked Sam Margrave, and serial tweet-deleter Matthew Firth. So the thought of them fuming away in their front rooms, though amusing, is not unusual.

First up, well done to the Rector, the Awesome Wendy Dalrymple, who made sure the comma was in the right place. The number of times it's implied that the Gentlemen were just sitting around merry, by someone putting the comma after "Ye". I don't normally notice the rest of the lyrics anyway if I'm still in a state of fury over that.

In one way, it's just a shame that the lovely folk of Loughborough chose to use that hymn for these sentiments. Because the actual hymn, regardless of comma, is a pretty-near paraphrase of the narrative of Luke 2 - which is how, by avoiding the wokeist censoring of the Mail's predecessors, the Puritans, it was allowed to be sung in church at all. 

But the Mail is not being as conservative as it might be.

Querying Wikipedia, I notice that this is the oldest version known of the carol: 

Sit yow merry Gentlemen

Let nothing you dismay

for Jesus Christ is borne to save or soules from Satan's power

Whenas we runne astray

O tidings of comfort & joy

to save or soules from Satan

When as we runne away

O tidings of comfort & joy 

Where is the outrage that this hymn was changed in the 18th century? Was Mercurius Rusticus up in arms? And also, worst of all... 

That "ye" is wrong. It's a deliberate, and incorrect, use of an archaic nominative pronoun. In Wyclif's translation of Luke 2, we have "do not ye dread"  - but that is using "ye" as the subject. Here in the hymn, "ye" is the object - God is the subject, ie the one originating the verb (isn't God, in a very real sense, always?) and so that "ye" should be "you". Or maybe even "yow", if you're from Walsall or the 16th Century or both.

Honestly. These people strain at gnats and swallow camels.

And wouldn't "God Rest You Merry, Gentlefolk" have been more inclusive?