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Welcome back to Advent of Carols from VerseNotes. I’m Jerry Towler, and today we’re looking at “The First Noel”, a carol that feels like it should be simple—because it is—but then it speedruns two different Gospels, adds some confused astronomy, cultural imperialism, and somehow finishes with Revelation, creation, and the cross all in one breath.
If you want to listen to the song before we dive in, you’ll find some links in the show notes.
Let’s start with that title: Noel.
We tend to hear the word Noel as Christmas, and in fact it comes from the French word Noël meaning Christmas, which eventually comes from the Latin word natalis, meaning birth, or birthday, or something like that.
But the older English spelling—N-O-W-E-L-L—which has been attested since at least 1255 in The Canterbury Tales, is treated more like an exclamation. It’s like shouting joy! or good news!
And that matters, because the first verse of this song isn’t talking about the angel’s song—that beautiful Gloria in excelsis Deo—so much as the angel’s announcement of the good news.
Now, if you’ve been listening along to this podcast, you know that this was not, in fact, the first Noel. The first hymn of Christmas was Mary’s Magnificat in Luke 1.
So if we’re being pedantic—and we are—Mary has the true “first Noel.”
Let’s look at this song.
Verse one starts off with the shepherds, the announcement from the angel. That’s Luke 2, like so many Christmas carols.
But then it swerves hard left into the star and the wise men from Matthew 2, and it spends most of its time right there. Three of the six verses are about the wise men.
Now, that’s not a mistake. It’s more of an attempt to, I think, bind the entire season together.
It combines Advent—the announcement of the birth—with Christmas—born as the King of Israel—and then Epiphany—the magi following the star, symbolizing the nations coming to the light of Christ.
So the carol isn’t just saying, this is what happened. It’s telling us that this story is for shepherds and for kings, for locals and for foreigners, for you and for me.
Now, this song is a little bit muddled, and it’s a little bit simple.
That’s because it’s a traditional carol from Cornwall in England—cold winter night and all. Very much England, not Bethlehem weather, just like [In the Bleak Midwinter].
But “traditional” doesn’t mean unchanged since forever. It just means it lived in the wild for a long time.
This one might have been around since the 1400s, but it doesn’t get written down until the early 1800s, which is quite late for a carol this old.
The earliest transcription we have of this song and melody dates from 1816, and that version was published in 1823 in a book called Carols, Ancient and Modern. Don’t get that book confused, by the way, with Christmas Carols, New and Old—that 1871 book where we first find What Child Is This?
The hymn was published again in 1833 with a completely different melody and a very confusing harmony part. The result is that it feels like a descant sung over a monastic chant, which sent scholars down rabbit holes for decades trying to find the originals.
But the version that you probably know—the version that I definitely know—was published in that 1871 Christmas Carols, New and Old, alongside The Holly and the Ivy, What Child Is This?, God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen, and many, many others.
And the reason that these lyrics and details vary so much is that this is a traditional carol.
It’s not one pristine original; it’s more like a family of songs that traveled around the English countryside for a couple hundred years.
The lyrics then stay roughly similar from the 1800s onward. But over the hundred years between 1830 and 1930, scholars collected a ton of different melodies, which is likely the result of church choirs learning these songs by ear.
Anyway, back to the hymn.
Like the melody, the lyrics are also a little bit muddled in their details.
Did the shepherds see the star? Scripture doesn’t mention that, but the carol kind of implies that the star is for everybody.
Older versions of this carol even turned “certain poor shepherds” into three specific shepherds, which comes from a medieval mystery-play tradition that needed to make everything countable.
In fact, they even named the shepherds: Harvey, Troll, and Tud—which are exceptionally not Palestinian names from 4 BC or any other time.
This is part of the long tradition of adapting stories from other cultures into your own.
And then we have the astronomical challenge—or maybe it’s geographical?
The magi follow the star shining in the east, but it wasn’t shining in the east. The wise men were in the east. They traveled west, meaning the star had to be in the west.
Now, this is a well-known problem, and modern Bible translations often fix it this way: they translate Matthew 2:2 as saying:
We saw his star at its rising.
That is, the magi saw the star when it first appeared, not specifically there on the compass.
You can imagine how “at its rising” and “in the east” could sound the same in ancient languages, because things rise in the east—the sun, the moon, the stars all rise in the east, at least if you’re on Earth.
My point for us today in talking about this is not to worry too hard about this song in particular, but to recognize that this is how our Christmas mental movie—and honestly a lot of our ideas about the Bible—gets built.
It’s part Scripture, part translation choices (especially the choices made by the King James Version in the 1600s)—and then centuries of Christian imagination building stories on top of the story.
So this hymn is good to sing, but it’s also good to go back and check which parts of this are actually in Scripture, and which parts of it just sound good.
In the final stanza of this song, the camera gets pulled way, way back.
Jesus has made heaven and earth of naught.
That’s creation from nothing—from the void—Genesis 1.
And then the song says:
With his blood our life hath bought.
That’s fast-forwarding not just from Genesis to the manger, but from the manger straight to the shadow of the cross—Jesus’ sacrifice for our sins.
And then, not content to stay there, it takes one more giant stride forward and sings:
Then let us all with one accord.
That’s not just singing together nicely. It’s the destination of the whole story.
It’s a jump forward to the gathered worship of all of God’s people, where human voices join the hundred million angels in Revelation.
So we’ve seen Genesis, Gospel, and Revelation in one verse.
The song begins with good news to a few shepherds from the angel, and it ends with the whole story of eternity—creation, redemption, and united worship.
So this season, when you hear:
Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel
don’t hear it as just background Christmas music.
Hear it as the shout of the gospel.
Good news has arrived.
Shepherds.
Magi.
You.
Me.
Come.
Follow the light.
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].
And if you enjoyed the episode, the best gift you can give me is to pass it along to someone else who would enjoy it too.