Totally unrelated to the prior entry:
Dec. 18th, 2002 09:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynJust heard 'Hark The Herald Angels Sing' on the CD. The second verse - at least I think it's the second - contains the following lines:
Mild he lays his glory by,
Born that man no more may die
Born to raise the sons of earth
Born to give them second birth
Hark the herald angels sing,
Glory to the newborn King!
I can never listen to that part of the song without wanting to laugh. See, when I was little - I dunno, maybe first or second grade - I was given the Chronicles of Narnia for Christmas. I read them all multiple times; I think my favourites were The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Horse and His Boy. In the books, Aslan was always careful to use the proper forms of address, whatever those might be for the species and gender of the addressee. Boys were sons of Adam, girls were daughters of Eve, mice were, yanno, noble mice or something, and dwarves... dwarves were sons of Earth.
This makes Hark The Herald Angels Sing is the only Christmas song I know of specifically addressing the concerns of dwarves, unless you can make a case for king #1 in We Three Kings of Orient Are being dwarvish by virtue of giving gold as his token of highest esteem. Moria was sort of in the East, wasn't it? 'course, that leaves the question of who the remaining kings were; is frankincense an Elvish sort of thing, or can we chalk that up to men and have the elves giving myrrh in recognition of the fact that, yanno, other races die? (None of the kings could be hobbits. Hobbits are in the west.)
Er. Anyway. you get the idea.
Mild he lays his glory by,
Born that man no more may die
Born to raise the sons of earth
Born to give them second birth
Hark the herald angels sing,
Glory to the newborn King!
I can never listen to that part of the song without wanting to laugh. See, when I was little - I dunno, maybe first or second grade - I was given the Chronicles of Narnia for Christmas. I read them all multiple times; I think my favourites were The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Horse and His Boy. In the books, Aslan was always careful to use the proper forms of address, whatever those might be for the species and gender of the addressee. Boys were sons of Adam, girls were daughters of Eve, mice were, yanno, noble mice or something, and dwarves... dwarves were sons of Earth.
This makes Hark The Herald Angels Sing is the only Christmas song I know of specifically addressing the concerns of dwarves, unless you can make a case for king #1 in We Three Kings of Orient Are being dwarvish by virtue of giving gold as his token of highest esteem. Moria was sort of in the East, wasn't it? 'course, that leaves the question of who the remaining kings were; is frankincense an Elvish sort of thing, or can we chalk that up to men and have the elves giving myrrh in recognition of the fact that, yanno, other races die? (None of the kings could be hobbits. Hobbits are in the west.)
Er. Anyway. you get the idea.
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no subject
Date: 2002-12-18 11:01 am (UTC)Every year in my elementary school, we'd do the Jesse Tree celebration, which involved a small fake tree in the library and these large laminated ornaments. There'd be a kid with an ornament, and they'd have to read a little thing about what the symbol meant, and then they'd put the ornament on the tree, and we'd all sing this odd little song:
Bless this tree
And all the children here
Make us live in branches
Growing through the year.
It always puzzled me. Live in branches? Why? What did living in trees have to do with anything? Were we growing, or was it the branches?
I think I figured it out in grade six, my last year at elementary school. Make us living branches. On the Jesse tree. Aaagh.
no subject
Date: 2002-12-19 06:56 pm (UTC)I never thought of that. But you're right. Absolutely right.
*giggles more*