A hymn festival focusing on the works of John Mason Neale will be conducted on Sunday, January 26, at St. Margaret’s Episcopalian Nuns’ Convent, Duxbury (Plymouth County), Massachusetts, at 4 p.m. The convent is home to the Sisters of St. Margaret, an order that Neale founded. Neale translated many medieval texts into hymns, especially those related to the Daily Office and the Eucharist. Dr. Carl Daw, one of the compilers of HYMNAL 1982, will be the presenter.
By the way - for all Neale enthusiasts: the Collected Hymns, Sequences, and Carols of John Mason Neale is available as a reprint of the original Hodder and Stoughton publication.
Neale's texts have gotten the heavy "alt." treatment over the years in many hymnals. My guess is that an Episcopalian community will not be using his unaltered texts, viz., from the Hymnal 1940 and elsewhere.
In point of fact, the English Hymnal, 1906, supplied some fresh translations to replace the Neale translations which had been altered in successive editions of Hymns Ancient and Modern. Julian, in his Dictionary, was particularly scathing when reviewing the continued alterations in the 1904 edition. Frere should have known better! Many Neale translations continue on in The New English Hymnal with sensitive alterations (and the Revised English Hymnal makes very few alterations that weren't already present in the NEH).
Richard Chonak and I had the opportunity to attend this spiritually uplifting event celebrating the hymns of John Mason Neale last Sunday. In case you may be interested, I am attaching the listing of Neale's hymns from HYMNAL 1982 that we had the opportunity to sing.
Once Neale was meeting with John Keble, also a wonderful hymn writer, and challenged Keble about the originality of one of his texts. If this is original, he said, how do you account for this Latin source?
Keble said he had never seen the text before and protested that his text was original. Then Neale said, relax, while I was waiting for you I just quickly translated your text into Latin.
I have some notes from the lecture by Carl Daw, so I'll pass them along here in case any of the details are of interest. The hymn numbers cited are from The Hymnal 1982, which was used at the event, as it was presented at a house of the Episcopalian religious order Neale founded, the Society of Saint Margaret.
(A few of the details below are not directly from Dr. Daw's talk, but from what I found looking in other sources about these hymns.)
----- "O come, O come, Emmanuel" (56) Neale didn't translate all the "O" Antiphons or put them in the original order; his version had these stanzas: "Emmanuel", "rod of Jesse's stem", "Dayspring", "Key of David", and "Lord of might".
Editors have revised his text so much over the years that the 1982 Hymnal didn't include his name in the attributions. In his "Mediaeval Hymns", the first stanza began:
Draw nigh, draw nigh, Emmanuel, And loose Thy captive Israel, That mourns in lonely exile here, Until the Son of God appear! Rejoice! rejoice! Emmanuel Is born for thee, O Israel!
"Mediaeval Hymns" is available at : https://archive.org/details/mediaevalhymnsse00neal/page/118/mode/2up ----- "O very God of very God" (672) is one of several hymns Neale wrote on specific articles of the Creed. ----- "When Christ's appearing was made known" (131) has a first stanza added in the 20th century, but Neale's stanzas 2-4 outline the mysteries of the Epiphany: the Magi, the Baptism, and Cana. ----- "O wondrous type! O vision fair!" (137) is listed in the Epiphany section of "The Hymnal 1982" because one of the Sundays after Epiphany, in the Episcopal Church's calendar, presents the Gospel of the Transfiguration. ----- "Sing, my tongue, the glorious battle" (166) is also found in Neale's "Mediaeval Hymns". In that book he translated eleven (!) stanzas of "Pange lingua gloriosi ... certaminis", but most hymnals use only about half of them; some just aren't very appealing.
His verse 1 originally ran:
Sing, my tongue, the glorious battle, With completed victory rife, And above the Cross's trophy Tell the triumph of the strife, How the world's Redeemer conquered By surrendering of His Life.
-----
The first stanza of "Blessed feasts of blessed martyrs" (238), in contemporary hymnals, follows those words with "holy women, holy men", but in the original version, the line focused on the feasts and spoke of "holy days of holy men". In the 1905 "Catholic Church Hymnal", the line was edited to "saintly days of saintly men". (See: https://hymnary.org/hymn/CCH1905/page/228 )
----- "Strengthen for service, Lord" (312) was not written by Neale, but influenced by him. His prose translation of a St. Ephrem hymn in the Syriac liturgy of the Church of Malabar led Charles Williams Humphreys (1840-1921) to make this rhyming version:
Strengthen for service, Lord, the hands that holy things have taken; let ears that now have heard thy songs to clamor never waken.
Lord, may the tongues which 'Holy' sang keep free from all deceiving; the eyes which saw thy love be bright, thy blessed hope perceiving.
The feet that tread thy hallowed courts from light do thou not banish; the bodies by thy Body fed with thy new life replenish.
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