God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen is an English traditional Christmas carol. It is in the Roxburghe Collection (iii. 452), and is listed as no. 394 in the Roud Folk Song Index. It is also known as Tidings of Comfort and Joy, and by variant incipits as Come All You Worthy Gentlemen; God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen; God Rest Ye, Merry Christians; or God Rest You Merry People All.
Contents
It is one of the oldest extant carols, dated to the 16th century or earlier. The earliest known printed edition of the carol is in a broadsheet dated to c. 1760. The traditional English melody is in the minor mode; the earliest printed edition of the melody appears to be in a parody, in the 1829 Facetiae of William Hone. It had been traditional and associated with the carol since at least the mid-18th century, when it was recorded by James Nares under the title "The old Christmas Carol".
The carol is referred to in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, 1843: "... at the first sound of 'God bless you, merry gentlemen! May nothing you dismay!', Scrooge seized the ruler with such energy of action that the singer fled in terror, leaving the keyhole to the fog and even more congenial frost."
This carol also is featured in the second movement of the 1927 Carol Symphony by Victor Hely-Hutchinson.
Lyrics
The first recorded version is found in Three New Christmas Carols, dated c. 1760. Its first verse reads:
God rest you merry, Gentlemen, Let nothing you dismay, For Jesus Christ our Saviour Was born upon this Day. To save poor souls from Satan's power, Which long time had gone astray. Which brings tidings of comfort and joy.The transitive use of the verb rest in the sense "to keep, cause to continue to remain" is typical of 16th to 17th century language (the phrase rest you merry is recorded in the 1540s). Etymonline.com notes that the first line "often is mis-punctuated" as "God rest you, merry gentlemen" because in contemporary language, rest has lost its use "with a predicate adjective following and qualifying the object" (Century Dictionary). This is the case already in the 1775 variant, and is also reflected by Dickens' replacement of the verb rest by bless in his 1843 quote of the incipit as "God bless you, merry gentlemen". The adjective merry in Early Modern English had a wider sense of "pleasant; bountiful, prosperous". Some variants give the pronoun in the first line as ye instead of you, in a pseudo-archaism.
A variant text was printed in 1775 in The Beauties of the Magazines, and Other Periodical Works, Selected for a Series of Years. This text was reproduced from the song-sheet bought from a caroler in the street. This version is shown here alongside the version reported by W. B. Sandys (1833) and the version adopted by Carols for Choirs (OUP, 1961), which has become the de facto baseline reference in the UK.