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Welcome back to Advent of Carols from VerseNotes. I’m Jerry Towler, and today we’re looking at two almost-lullabies: “Away in a Manger” and “Infant Holy, Infant Lowly.”
If you want to listen to the songs before we dive in, you’ll find some links in the show notes.
These are really simple songs—ones that practically every Advent service uses—even though most adults seem to greet them with, you know, mild dread. Or maybe that’s just me.
But why do they feel so simple?
I think the reason is that both of them have easy melodies. They’re super-easy words, they’re really easy to sing—they’re like children’s songs. That’s not a bad thing, but it does contrast with some of the more spectacular songs we’ve looked at so far.
Except, of course, In the Bleak Midwinter—but I promise this episode is not like that episode.
Away in a Manger, especially, has the vibe of a mother’s prayer over her baby, even though the lyrics are actually in the first person, from the baby. But you can kind of envision the mother standing over the cradle and singing this about her child.
Neither of these songs is really musically spectacular either. They’re arranged into these nice harmonies, but they’re very simple. They’re not complex tunes. They’re not epic, operatic things you wait all year to hear.
But simplicity has its place, right?
These songs are about Jesus as a baby. They highlight for us His vulnerability. And we don’t need big songs to think big ideas.
So let’s take a look at that baby Jesus.
In Away in a Manger, he has “no crib for a bed.” He’s a defenseless human child. We’ve talked about this again and again, but it’s really important that Jesus was human—a flesh-and-blood baby laid on real wood, around real animals.
And here’s a really important theological moment that gets smoothed over by the Christmas-industrial complex:
Jesus wakes up when the cow _moo_s.
I mean, okay—the song sounds prettier: “The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes.” And the lyric afterward is maybe a little too idyllic: “No crying he makes.” Eh. Unlikely.
Human babies cry. That’s okay. It doesn’t make Jesus less divine that he cried as a kid. In fact, it might make him more divine.
Infant Holy really is no better. The cows are mooing again, which makes us two for two on barnyard noise in these carols.
But let’s move up to something maybe a little bit bigger, because these songs are not totally devoid of big theology.
In Away in a Manger,
The stars in the sky looked down where He lay.
That’s cosmic attention. Maybe they’re stars because the universe is watching—or maybe those are angels. Either way, this child is important.
And in Infant Holy, we sing:
Swift are winging, angels singing,
because heaven can’t help breaking into song.
Both of them get at the point that Christ the babe is Lord of all. Even laying here in the hay, here is the Lord of glory.
And not just lordship—we even get a little bit of salvation hiding in these lyrics.
In Away in a Manger, we sing:
Fit us for heaven to live with thee there.
That’s salvation language: “Make us ready for heaven.”
And how do you get ready to live with Christ in heaven? You accept him as your Savior, and then He makes you ready. He forgives your sins. He dresses you in glory. He unites us with himself. And then He says, Come and eat.
In Infant Holy, we skip over this tiny little line:
Free from sorrow.
It’s short, and we don’t pay it any attention—except in this podcast, because that’s what we’re doing here.
“Free from sorrow” is end-times language. That’s when God wipes away every tear. Not at the manger. There’s still crying at the manger. I mean—maybe not Jesus, I guess—but there’s crying in the world. There’s darkness tonight and every night.
But in Revelation, that’s when we see God wipe away every tear. Then, when Jesus comes in glory—not in a manger—we will, in fact, be free from sorrow.
So these little, simple tunes are gesturing here not at just incarnation, but at redemption and restoration, even if we’re not paying that much attention.
And until this year, I certainly wasn’t.
Here’s something I just noticed. I hadn’t thought about this, but these songs—I paired them together because they’re both about the baby Jesus. It’s not a complex statement.
But Away in a Manger is really a prayer. “Be near me, Lord Jesus.” That’s what it’s asking.
Whereas Infant Holy is a proclamation: “Christ the babe is Lord of all.”
That first one is inviting Jesus close, to be with us. It’s intimate. And the other is announcing Jesus to the world.
Which is kind of a cool dichotomy that I didn’t really mean to do. I was just trying to put together two songs about the baby.
So anyway, these songs—they’re about the baby, but we’ve seen that we get a little bit of theology just kind of snuck in there.
So where did they come from?
Let’s start with Away in a Manger. And this is weird.
No one knows who wrote this song.
In 1882, it just shows up fully formed, credited to Martin Luther. In fact, it’s credited to him over and over again—1882, 1883. But it turns out that it’s totally American. It’s not German at all, and there’s no evidence that Luther wrote this song or anything like it.
I guess they were just trying to sell more copies.
It was originally printed, like I said, in 1882, but at that time, it had no music, and it only had two verses. And the third stanza—the one that goes “Be near me, Lord Jesus”—doesn’t even show up until ten years later.
And just like a lot of Christmas carols, two different musical settings have become very popular for it.
The first—the one that I know—is by an American named James R. Murray, and the reason I know it is because that’s the one that became popular in the United States. The other one, though, was actually written also by an American, named William Kirkpatrick, but that one became popular in the UK and Ireland, and, for some reason, Canada.
It’s kind of interesting that I actually know both of these tunes for this song. It’s not common that I know both tunes across a transatlantic divide like that, but in this case, it just happens to be true.
And also, there are all these tiny, weird little lyrical variants that sound like the hymn has been sung, and then transcribed, and misheard, and then sung again. It’s words like laid versus lay, and sweet head versus wee head.
Listen to these two:
Lay down his sweet head
Laid down his wee head
You can kind of understand why people might get confused when they’re just singing, “Lay down his sweet head,” right? You can just write whatever you want there.
And this is actually really fascinating: this song became a Christmas staple basically immediately. It was being sung in church choirs in 1883, just one year after it was first published. And it’s said that by 1891, it had become ubiquitous in the United States.
And that’s really quick adoption for a song like this. I mean, we’ve seen songs that didn’t become popular for hundreds of years after they were first written.
And I think it’s probably because of that simple music, those simple lyrics. There’s beauty in simplicity. It’s nice when people can actually sing your songs.
Yeah, I’m looking at you, Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming.
And second, Infant Holy, Infant Lowly.
This song, it turns out, is actually originally a Polish carol that I’m not really going to try to pronounce, but it translates to “In the Manger He Lies.” It was translated to English in 1920, but apparently the song might go back as early as the 13th century, which is nuts.
That makes it the second-oldest lyrics we’ve seen so far.
The tune was written by nobody, apparently. It’s a traditional Polish dance known as a polonaise. You can actually kind of feel that rhythm in three, because it really is a dance tune.
So that’s where these poems came from.
These carols, they’re not glorious. They’re not anthems. They’re not really even fit for big choirs—although obviously they’ve been arranged for big choirs.
They remind us, sort of like O Little Town of Bethlehem, of the smallness of Jesus; of how He came as a baby, not yet as a conquering king.
The Lord of all arrives lowly—crying, getting woken up by cows. And somehow, this little child is the hope of all the world.
And that’s why we sing.
Thanks for joining me today for Advent of Carols. If you’d like to help make more projects like this possible, check out VerseNotes Commons at: versenotes.org/commons.
We’ll be back tomorrow with another Carol of Christmas.
If you’ve got thoughts about today’s carol, I’d love to hear them. You can always reach me at [email protected].
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