We Three Kings: A Song History
John Henry Hopkins Jr. (1820–1891) wrote both the words and the tune, which is known as KINGS OF ORIENT. The carol takes its story from the Magi in Matthew 2. The Gospel calls the travelers magi rather than kings, and although it names three gifts, it never says there were three visitors; the idea of one magus per gift is tradition. Hopkins gave one stanza to each gift, gold, frankincense and myrrh, and in the first printed version three male soloists sang them, one for each king.[1] Hopkins, an Episcopal clergyman, had been the first instructor in church music at General Theological Seminary and was the founding editor of the Church Journal.[2]
Albrecht Dürer, The Adoration of the Magi, woodcut, 1511. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).
Many references say the carol was written in 1857 for a Christmas pageant at the seminary, or as a holiday gift for Hopkins’s nieces and nephews.[1][3] In a 2024 study for the Hymnology Archive, David W. Music reports that he found no contemporaneous evidence for either story. The earliest trace he found is a Church Journal notice of December 1858 announcing the carol as forthcoming. That same month, the paper listed it as new on a Trinity School program in New York. A separate edition, Three Kings of Orient: A Carol for Christmas Tide, seems to have followed in December 1858.[4] Hopkins then reprinted it in his collection Carols, Hymns, and Songs (1863), and an illustrated edition came out in 1865.[3][4]
Hopkins’s minor-key verses move to a major-key refrain. Music describes the verse melody as almost entirely stepwise and suggesting “something ancient, exotic, and mysterious.” Hymnals later reset it in four-part harmony, and an 1862 rival setting by other composers eventually lost out to Hopkins’s own tune.[4] Carlton R. Young observed that, before Appalachian folk carols were collected, hymnal editors long counted it as the United States’ lone addition to English-language carols.[2] Hymnary.org considers it best suited to Epiphany.[1]
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