Be still, my soul: the Lord is on thy side;
Bear patiently the cross of grief or pain;
Leave to thy God to order and provide;
In every change He faithful will remain.
Be still, my soul: thy best, thy heavenly Friend
Through thorny ways leads to a joyful end.
Public domain hymn text (1855 (English translation)). Words by Jane Borthwick, from Katharina von Schlegel.
The Story Behind the Hymn
This hymn's original German text was written in 1752 by Katharina von Schlegel, about whom relatively little biographical detail survives beyond her authorship of this and a small number of other German hymn texts; she is generally believed to have been associated with a German Lutheran religious community, though even basic facts such as her exact dates of birth and death remain uncertain among hymnologists who have studied the question.
Jane Borthwick, a Scottish woman who, together with her sister, spent years translating German hymns into English, translated von Schlegel's text into the version commonly sung today in 1855, part of a larger multi-volume project the two sisters undertook to introduce the substantial body of German hymnody, largely unknown to English congregations of their era, into English-language Protestant worship.
The hymn's now-famous tune, adapted from a theme within 'Finlandia,' an orchestral tone poem composed by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius in 1899 as a work of Finnish national and patriotic expression during a period of Russian imperial political pressure on Finland, was not paired with this hymn text until considerably later, in the twentieth century, well after both von Schlegel's original German words and Sibelius's own orchestral composition had already existed independently for decades.
That later pairing joined an eighteenth-century German devotional text with a nineteenth-century Finnish nationalist orchestral melody, two works with no original connection to one another, brought together only through later hymnal editors recognizing that Sibelius's already-famous melodic theme could be adapted to carry congregational singing, giving the hymn one of the more unusual and geographically wide-ranging combined origin stories found anywhere within this collection.
