Be Thou My Vision: A Song History
"Be Thou My Vision" began as an Irish religious poem, which survives in three manuscripts: two sixteenth-century copies in the Royal Irish Academy and one of the fifteenth or sixteenth century in the National Library of Ireland.[1] Sources differ on its age. Hymnary.org and a United Methodist history both place it as early as the eighth century.[2][3] The Hymnology Archive says the language fits the Early Middle Irish period of the tenth or eleventh century, although the poem is sometimes credited to the sixth-century saint Dallán Forgaill.[1] Hymnary.org also tells a story that it labels mythology. In it, St. Patrick lit a fire on Slane Hill against a royal decree forbidding fires during a pagan festival, and the poem was later written to honor his faith.[2]
Glendalough, County Wicklow, Ireland. Photochrom print, c. 1890–1900. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.
The road into English ran through Irish scholarship. Mary Byrne (1880–1931), a Dublin scholar of the language, transcribed the Royal Irish Academy copies and published them with a literal prose translation in the journal Ériu in 1905.[1][3] Eleanor Hull (1860–1935), founder of the Irish Texts Society, turned that prose into rhymed couplets for her Poem Book of the Gael (1912).[1][3] In 1919 the editors of the Irish Church Hymnal adopted Hull's verses, with changes, and set them to an Irish folk melody they called SLANE.[1][3] The tune seems to have been taken from "With My Love on the Road" in Patrick W. Joyce's Old Irish Folk Music and Songs (1909). Its hymn name recalls the hill of the Patrick story.[1][4] The Welsh composer David Evans arranged it for the Church of Scotland's Church Hymnary of 1927, which Hymnary.org treats as the start of the pairing.[2][4] Most hymnals print four of Hull's five stanzas and leave out the one built on images of armor.[2]
The hymn reached American hymnals in the years after the Second World War.[3] Hymnary.org now counts the text in 205 hymnals and SLANE, which also carries other texts, in 321.[2][4] The melody has also found a place in mountain dulcimer repertoire. Stephen Seifert includes it in Join the Jam: Gospel Edition, a collection of hymn and gospel songs for mountain dulcimer in DAD tuning.[5]
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