Sorry, but it's the Orange Brick again

I have decided that the only way to deal with the manifold sins, omissions and schoolboy howlers in the Orange Brick is to document them one by one as I (and my team of highly trained blooper-spotters) come across them during divine service, where the convention is that you do not hurl your hymnal at the nearest member of the PCC with a cry of "rubbish!"

So here is this morning's crop of boo-boos (from the "revised and corrected" edition of Complete Anglican Hymns Old & New.)

OB 473

Best of all is in 473, a new setting of the music, and the words, of the 13thC hymn by St Thomas Aquinas, Pange, lingua, corporis gloriosi mysterium (the last two verses of which constitute the Tantum ergo, by the way.) A literal translation of the first line would be something like "tell, my tongue, the mystery of the glorious body...".

THE WORDS

There are two versions of the first two lines in use - "Of the glorious body telling..." (EH; NEH; etc) and "Now, my tongue, the mystery telling..." (A&M; OB), and of the two, I prefer the second, where at least "tongue" (L. lingua) comes near the beginning, even if "sing"  (actually, "compose") (L. pangere) doesn't.

So far, so good.  EH and A&M then follow with only minor variations the translation by J M Neale (1818-1866) as amended by Edward Caswall (1814-1878) and a few others, which give v4 as:

Word made flesh, by word he maketh

very bread his flesh to be;

Man in wine Christ's blood partaketh:

And, if senses fail to see,

Faith alone the true heart waketh

To behold the mystery.

The Orange Brick, whose editors aim for inclusiveness above all else, even apparently above the rules of English grammar and syntax, changes the third line to:

"we, in wine, Christ's blood partaketh",

a howler which would have had Bunter in Quelch's study instanter.

To refresh your memories, Orange Brick people: the archaic suffixes  -est and -eth were used only in the singular, 2nd person and 3rd person respectively, and never in the plural. So - I partake, thou partakest, he/she/it partaketh:  we partake, you partake, they partake.

THE MUSIC

The old plainchant melody has survived in many forms, all slightly different one from another.  But in general plainchant was intended to be sung unaccompanied. The resurgence of ancient forms of chant in the Anglican church in the 19thC (mainly by the efforts of the Oxford Movement) mirrored the resurgence of Gregorian chant in the Roman Catholic church, but it was not until 1906 that Ralph Vaughan Williams, in the first edition of the English Hymnal, introduced plainchant for congregational use, implying the need for some sort of accompaniment.

RVW, already steeped in the theory and practice of the old church modes, was ideally placed to "invent" a form of harmonic accompaniment for plainchant that discreetly supported congregational singing without being unduly assertive.

But in the Anglican church, however high, hymns are sung in English, and English is a language which lacks those subtleties (and complexities) of Latin versification which inform the rediscovery of Gregorian chant by the monks of Solesmes Abbey in the 19thC. Plainchant, in English, enjoys a freedom of word-setting that makes Anglican plainchant very distinct from true Gregorian chant.

This freedom does not, however, extend to the mis-accentuation of words and mutilation of melodic line as in Andrew Moore's "arrangement" in the orange brick, which has just about as much historical truth in it as a photograph of Attila the Hun in a bikini, and is, if anything, slightly less subtle.

OB 85

Brightest and best of the suns of the morning, Reginald Heber's Epiphany hymn, is set in OB to Joseph Francis Thrupp's tune Epiphany, complete with Thrupp's curious bass line in the last but one bar of the third line - 

OB also gives Bach's Liebster Immanuel as the second tune (albeit in A minor, a tone down from EH1906, but manages to drop a clanger in the first bar of line 4, where the bass A should be an F (otherwise the D-minor chord lacks its necessary third).

But there is a worse clanger in the words of v4, which should read:

Vainly we offer each ample oblation,

Vainly with gifts would his favour secure:

Richer by far is the heart's adoration,

Dearer to God are the prayers of the poor.

The sense of those lines is, I would have thought, clear enough.  So why did the editors deliberately confuse the meaning by changing "ample" to "humble"? Do they simply not understand what the words meant? Do they think "vainly" here means "in vain"? The OED gives three meanings for the adverb "vainly" - futilely;  foolishly (obs. since the end of the 18thC); and conceitedly, with vanity.  It is pretty obvious from the context that Heber's usage is this last.

Pretty obvious to anybody reasonably well-read and competent in the English language, that is - but these are evidently qualities not considered important in a text editor in the Kevin Mayhew kingdom.