Now thank we all our God

Hymnals do not often include a section specifically headed ‘Thanksgiving’. If they did, this Victorian paraphrase of a German table grace would surely have pride of place. In Germany it is even more prominent as a hymn for national celebrations. As it is, the elements of family, guidance, provision, adoration, praise of the Trinity, and more, assign it to various parts of the book. Here it is the Trinitarian structure which determines its placing. Martin Rinkart wrote his original Nun danket alle Gott for his family, ‘A short prayer at table’, while minister of Eilenberg in Saxony. During the Thirty Years War (1618–48) the walled town was a haven for thousands of refugees who inevitably turned it into an extended and disease-ridden prison-cumhospital- cum-mortuary, not without its own internal crime and violence. As its only pastor, himself of frail physique, he conducted the funerals of thousands including that of his own wife; in the plague-year 1637 up to 50 were buried at once, until even that became too slow and uncounted bodies were piled in trenches with no service at all. To the text of stzs 1–2, based partly on the apocryphal Ecclus (Sirach) 50:22–24, the doxology (stz 3) was added before it was printed, probably in 1636. It was sung at the Peace of Westphalia which ended the war in 1648. Over 2 centuries later, in 1858, Catherine Winkworth’s translation appeared in her Lyra Germanica, 2nd Series, headed ‘The chorus of God’s Thankful Children’. Most hymnals have made small changes to her text, and here ‘wondrous’ and ‘blessed’ have been replaced in stzs 1 and 2. Most revisions of stz 3 aim to include a specific reference to the Holy Spirit (rather than either ‘Holy Ghost’ or ‘him who reigns with them’). The version printed here is closer to the traditional text than some others; but see Marcus Wells in HSB Vol 17 6 (April 2004), pp158–9. No-one yet seems to have suggested making 1.5 gender-inclusive. As befits a hymn with at least one prominent ‘all’ in every stz (cf 100A), it is ‘one of the universal hymns’ (Routley), ‘which transcends all national and denominational boundaries and is known and sung the world over’ (Colquhoun).

For once, the best-known tune has been associated with the words for three and a half centuries, being composed for and printed with them within a decade or so. Johann Crüger published his original melody NUN DANKET, with a rhythm more varied than its later smoothed-out mode, in his Praxis of 1647. The tune has had other names which have not lasted. Bach and Mendelssohn, among others, used the tune in other organ and orchestral works. Geoffrey Beaumont’s lively tune GRACIAS, much used in the 1960s and 70s, still enjoys some popularity.

b Eilenburg on the Mulde, Saxony 1586, d Eilenburg 1649. The Latin School at Eilenburg; chorister at St Thomas’ Sch, Leipzig. Univ of Leipzig 1602, where music teaching helped to pay his bills; MA (theology) 1616. In June 1610 he began as a teacher at the Eisleben Gymnasium and Kantor of St Nicholas’ Church; then Diaconus of St Anne’s Ch 1611, and in 1613 he became pastor nearby, at Erdeborn and Lyttichendorf (Lutjendorf). The town council at Eilenburg then invited him to return as Archdiaconus from 1617. He remained for 32 years, most of them spent among the terrors, invasion, robbery, violence, famine and plague of the Thirty Years War. He famously addressed his congregation, ‘Come, my children, we can find no mercy with men. Let us take refuge in God.’ In spite of the pressures of ministry involving mass burials including that of his wife, he engaged in much historical and musical study, writing a cycle of 7 dramas to mark the centenary of the Reformation. Described by James Mearns as a voluminous writer and a good musician, in view of his often desperate situation he unsurprisingly lost many of his publications; others survive in single copies only. His poetry dates from his early youth onwards, but his hymns appeared mainly between 1630 and 1645. No.161.

b Ely Place, Saffron Hill liberty, Holborn, London 1827, d Monnetier, Savoy, France 1878. Her early life was spent in the Manchester area, where with her eldest sister Susanna she was educated; in 1850 she moved with her silk-manufacturer father to the suburb of Alderley Edge, encouraged in her German studies by (the Rev) William and Mrs Gaskell, as later by the Prussian Minister in London, Baron Karl von Bunsen. She made the first and most decisive of 4 visits to Germany in 1845–46, mainly in Dresden. After a business recession she settled with her father and sisters at Clifton, Bristol, in 1862. Here she pioneered the higher education of women, as a governor of Red Maids’ Sch and founder of Clifton High Sch for Girls, member of the Clifton Assn for the Higher Education of Women and the council of Cheltenham Ladies’ Coll, envisaging eventually a university college for Bristol. Most significantly, she did for German hymns what J M Neale (qv) had done for Lat and Gk. She translated over 400 hymns by 170 authors, mainly from Bunsen’s collection of texts, combining faithfulness to the original with fluency in English. Her 2 series of Lyra Germanica: Hymns for the Sundays and Chief Festivals of the Christian Year (1855) ran to 35 edns, the title complementing Susanna’s 1854 translation of Theologia Germanica. These came without tunes; not being a musician, CW did not attempt to reproduce German metres in English. The Baron, however, urged the need of music; so with editorial help from the leading composer Sterndale Bennett and the fine musicologist Otto Goldschmidt, husband of the international soprano Jenny Lind, she produced in 1863 the influential Chorale Book for England. This also had a ‘church’s year’ arrangement, and was followed in 1869 by Christian Singers of Germany (‘a landmark in the Victorian reception of German culture’).

More than most, Winkworth understood the genius of the two languages and styles of worship, and also translated 2 German biographies. Though informed by varied theological influences she remained ‘a firm if sometimes unsatisfied member of the CofE’ (P Skrine 1991, who described her as ‘perhaps the best known and most effective mediator between the German and English-speaking worlds in the second half of the 19th cent’). She travelled to Switzerland in search of better health, but died at the age of 50 from a sudden heart attack near Geneva. She translated at least 27 of P Gerhardt’s hymns, 4 of them in two versions. Two American Evangelical Lutheran hymnals from the 1990s included respectively nearly 60 and nearly 80 of her texts and versions; 21 are included in the Moravian Book of Worship (USA, 1995), 19 in Evangelical Lutheran Worship (2006), 17 in the 1965 Anglican Hymn Book, 15 in The BBC Hymn Book (1951), 8 in Hymns of Faith (1964) and 6 in the Scottish Church Hymnary 4th edn (2005). Susanna had begun to collect Catherine’s letters, but many had been destroyed and she died with the work unfinished. One surviving letter from CW to SW relates a dinner with some distinguished VIPs: ‘I had to talk politics in Italian and French, and felt I was making an awful hash of my languages!’. Another describes in detail at extraordinarily vivid dream about St Chrysostom; others from the 1870s express great anxiety about the threat of war. In 1908 Memorials of two Sisters was published by their niece Margaret J Shaen. See also the HS Occasional Paper, 2nd series no.2, Susanna and Catherine Winkworth (1992); and Robin A Leaver’s study of CW’s translations (1978). Julian, endorsed by T B Hewitt in 1918, rates her as ‘the foremost in rank and popularity’ among translators of German hymns, a position which has not been seriously challenged. Nos.161, 196, 349, 457, 556, 730, 761, 845.