Lyrics
God rest ye merry, gentlemen,
Let nothing you dismay,
Remember, Christ, our Savior,
Was born on Christmas day,
To save us all from Satan’s power
When we were gone astray.
O tidings of comfort and joy,
Comfort and joy,
O tidings of comfort and joy.
In Bethlehem, in Jewry,
This blessed babe was born,
And laid within a manger,
Upon this blessed morn,
The which His mother Mary
Did nothing take in scorn.
From God our heavenly Father
A blessed angel came,
And unto certain shepherds
Brought tidings of the same,
How that in Bethlehem was born
The Son of God by name.
The shepherds at those tidings
Rejoiced much in mind,
And left their flocks a-feeding,
In tempest, storm, and wind,
And went to Bethlehem straightway,
This blessed babe to find.
Now to the Lord sing praises,
All you within this place,
And with true love and brotherhood
Each other now embrace;
This holy tide of Christmas
All other doth deface.
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 (Traditional, likely 16th century). Words by Anonymous.
The Story Behind the Hymn
This carol’s original author and composer are unknown. It is generally considered one of the oldest surviving English Christmas carols still in common use today.
References to carols using this same opening phrase appear in English sources dating back at least to the sixteenth century, though the specific version commonly sung today was not formally published in its current form until the early nineteenth century.
The carol’s now often-misunderstood title illustrates a significant shift in English word meaning over the centuries. In its original usage, ‘rest ye merry’ meant ‘may God keep you happy and at peace.’ There, ‘rest’ functioned as a verb meaning ‘to remain’ or ‘to keep,’ rather than as a noun referring to physical repose, and ‘merry’ meant generally content or untroubled, rather than specifically boisterous or festive.
The comma’s placement, correctly falling after ‘merry’ rather than after ‘ye,’ is frequently misprinted or misunderstood by modern readers unfamiliar with this older grammatical construction.
The carol is mentioned by name in Charles Dickens’s 1843 novella ‘A Christmas Carol.’ In one scene, a caroler singing this specific song outside Ebenezer Scrooge’s counting-house is chased away by the story’s famously miserly protagonist.
That gives the carol a documented association with one of the most widely read English-language works of Christmas literature, within only a few decades of the carol’s own first formal publication.
The carol’s unusually minor-key melody is distinctive among widely sung English Christmas carols. It gives the carol a somewhat more solemn, ballad-like musical character than many of its more overtly cheerful counterparts.
That reflects its likely origins in the older English tradition of wassailing and door-to-door carol singing, rather than in formal church worship — a folk tradition considerably closer to secular seasonal custom than to composed congregational hymnody.
