Angels From The Realms Of Glory: A Song History
The words are by James Montgomery (1771–1854), a Scottish-born poet raised among the Moravians who spent more than three decades editing a Sheffield newspaper, the Iris, and was jailed twice for what he printed in it.[1] His poem, then titled “The Nativity” and signed only “J.M.,” appeared in that paper on Christmas Eve, 1816.[2] Its five stanzas move from the angels to the shepherds, the wise men, the saints in heaven, and finally sinners, and that last stanza is usually dropped from hymnals today.[3] The poem first entered a hymnal in Thomas Cotterill’s 1819 collection; Montgomery changed a few words for his Christian Psalmist of 1825, and that revised form is regarded as the authorized text.[2]
Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn), The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds, etching and drypoint, 1634. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).
Montgomery named no tune for his words, and several have been used.[2] In the United States and Canada the usual choice is REGENT SQUARE, written in the mid-1860s by the London organist Henry Smart, who lost his sight entirely at fifty-two yet, relying on memory, went on playing the organ.[4][2] The tune takes its name from the Regent Square church of James Hamilton, text editor of the English Presbyterian hymnal in which it first appeared, and it was paired with Montgomery’s words in the United States by 1871.[4][2] In England the usual tune is instead the French carol melody best known from “Les anges dans nos campagnes,” a pairing that goes back to the Oxford Book of Carols (1928); in that use the tune is called IRIS, after Montgomery’s newspaper.[2][5]
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