194. Be Still, My Soul

The Story Behind the Hymn

This hymn’s original German text was written in 1752, by Katharina von Schlegel. Relatively little biographical detail survives about her, 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 was a Scottish woman who, together with her sister, spent years translating German hymns into English. She translated von Schlegel’s text into the version commonly sung today, in 1855.

It was 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 was adapted from a theme within ‘Finlandia,’ an orchestral tone poem composed by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius in 1899. That was a work of Finnish national and patriotic expression, composed during a period of Russian imperial political pressure on Finland.

The tune 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. They were brought together only through later hymnal editors, recognizing that Sibelius’s already-famous melodic theme could be adapted to carry congregational singing.

That gives the hymn one of the more unusual and geographically wide-ranging combined origin stories found anywhere within this collection.