O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
O come, Thou Wisdom from on high,
Who orderest all things mightily;
To us the path of knowledge show,
And teach us in her ways to go.
O come, Thou Rod of Jesse, free
Thine own from Satan’s tyranny;
From depths of hell Thy people save,
And give them victory o’er the grave.
Note: the later verse(s) below have been reconstructed from historical memory and may not be word-for-word identical to the original published text.
Public domain hymn text (1851 (English translation)). Words by John Mason Neale, from an anonymous Latin original.
The Story Behind the Hymn
This hymn's text draws directly on the 'O Antiphons,' a set of seven short liturgical verses traditionally sung or chanted on each of the seven days immediately preceding Christmas Eve within Western Christian tradition, a practice dating back in some documented form to at least the eighth or ninth century. Each of the seven antiphons addresses Christ using a different Old Testament messianic title — Wisdom, Lord, Root of Jesse, Key of David, Dayspring, King of Nations, and Emmanuel — drawn primarily from prophetic passages in the book of Isaiah.
The Latin hymn version weaving several of these ancient antiphons together into a single continuous metrical hymn, beginning 'Veni, veni, Emmanuel,' appears to date from around the twelfth century, though its precise original compiler remains unknown. John Mason Neale, already responsible elsewhere in this collection for numerous translations of ancient hymnody including 'Jerusalem the Golden' (hymn 117) and 'Christ Is Made the Sure Foundation' (hymn 120), translated the Latin text into the English version commonly sung today in 1851.
The now-familiar plainchant-style tune was adapted in 1854 by the English clergyman and musician Thomas Helmore from a fifteenth-century French Franciscan processional manuscript he had discovered, meaning the hymn's words and tune came together from entirely separate medieval sources centuries apart, only combined into their now-familiar single form in the mid-nineteenth century.
The hymn's minor-key melody and its repeated address to a people still waiting 'in lonely exile' give it an unusually somber, expectant tone compared to most other widely sung Christmas hymns, a tone appropriate to its original liturgical use specifically during Advent, the season of anticipation preceding Christmas, rather than during the celebration of Christmas Day itself — making it one of relatively few hymns still consistently sung specifically for Advent rather than for Christmas proper.
