The strife is o’er, the battle done;
The victory of life is won;
The song of triumph has begun.
Alleluia!
The powers of death have done their worst,
But Christ their legions hath dispersed;
Let shouts of holy joy outburst.
Alleluia!
He closed the yawning gates of hell;
The bars from heaven’s high portals fell;
Let hymns of praise His triumph tell.
Alleluia!
Public domain hymn text (1861 (English translation)). Words by Francis Pott, from an anonymous Latin original.
The Story Behind the Hymn
This hymn's underlying Latin text, 'Finita iam sunt proelia,' is of uncertain but likely seventeenth-century origin, associated with Jesuit religious circles in Europe and probably intended originally for use during the Easter season, though its exact original author, like several other ancient hymn texts represented elsewhere in this collection, remains unknown.
Francis Pott, an English clergyman who devoted considerable energy over his career to translating and adapting older Latin hymns for English-language congregational use, translated the text into the English version commonly sung today in 1861, working from an earlier printed Latin source rather than from any single identified original manuscript.
The hymn's tune, adapted from a melody originally composed by the Italian Renaissance composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, one of the most historically significant composers of sixteenth-century sacred choral music, gives the hymn a considerably older and more formally polyphonic musical character than most of the gospel-song-era hymns found elsewhere throughout this collection, reflecting its origins within the more elaborate choral tradition of Catholic Renaissance church music rather than within the simpler congregational singing style that produced most other hymns in this hymnal.
The hymn's repeated single-word exclamation 'Alleluia!' closing each brief stanza, rather than a full sung refrain, gives it an unusually compact, almost liturgical structure compared to most hymns, closer in form to a formal Easter acclamation repeated at set points in the traditional Catholic liturgy than to the more extended verse-and-chorus structure typical of the gospel hymns that make up the majority of this collection, and it remains today a standard piece of Easter worship across a particularly wide range of denominations, including many with more formally liturgical worship traditions than most of the free-church gospel hymns found elsewhere in this hymnal.
