All glory, laud, and honor,
To Thee, Redeemer, King,
To whom the lips of children
Made sweet hosannas ring.
Thou art the King of Israel,
Thou David’s royal Son,
Who in the Lord’s name comest,
The King and Blessed One.
The company of angels
Are praising Thee on high,
And mortal men and all things
Created make reply.
Public domain hymn text (1854 (English translation)). Words by John Mason Neale, from Theodulph of Orleans.
The Story Behind the Hymn
This hymn's original Latin text was written by Theodulph of Orleans, a bishop and poet in the court of the Frankish emperor Charlemagne, sometime around the year 820. According to a persistent but historically difficult to verify medieval tradition, Theodulph composed the hymn while imprisoned, having fallen from imperial favor and been confined by Charlemagne's son and successor, Louis the Pious, on suspicion of conspiracy — with the legend further claiming that the emperor, passing beneath Theodulph's prison window in a Palm Sunday procession and hearing him sing this very hymn from within his cell, was so moved that he ordered Theodulph's release on the spot.
While hymnologists generally regard the specific prison-release version of the story as embellished legend rather than verified history, Theodulph's actual historical fall from favor and imprisonment are independently documented, giving the legend at least a plausible historical kernel even if its more dramatic details cannot be fully confirmed.
The hymn was originally written for use specifically on Palm Sunday, commemorating Christ's triumphal entry into Jerusalem described in all four Gospels, in which crowds — including, as this hymn's opening verse specifically notes, children among them — laid palm branches in Christ's path while crying out 'Hosanna.'
John Mason Neale, already responsible elsewhere in this collection for translating numerous ancient hymns, translated Theodulph's Latin text into English in 1854, and Melchior Teschner, a German Lutheran composer and pastor, composed the tune, originally written in 1615 for an entirely different funeral hymn before later being paired with this considerably older Palm Sunday text — meaning the hymn as commonly sung today unites a ninth-century Latin poem, possibly written from within a prison cell, with a seventeenth-century German funeral tune, brought together only through a nineteenth-century English translation nearly a thousand years after Theodulph's original composition.
