“God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” is an English traditional Christmas carol. It is in the Roxburghe Collection (iii. 452), and is listed as no. 394 in the Roux Folk Song Index. It is also known as “Tidings of Comfort and Joy“, and by other variant incipits. An early version of this carol is found in an anonymous manuscript, dating from the 1650’s. It contains a slightly different version of the first line from that found in later texts, with the first line “Sit yow merry gentlemen” (also transcribed “Sit you merry gentlemen” and “Sit yo merry gentlemen”).
The earliest known printed edition of the carol is in a broadsheet dated to c. 1760. A precisely datable reference to the carol is found in the November 1764 edition of the Monthly Review. Some sources claim that the carol dates as far back as the 16th century. Others date it later, to the 18th or early 19th centuries.
Although there is a second tune known as ‘Cornish’, in print by 1833 and referred to as “the usual version” in the 1928 Oxford Book of Carols, this version is seldom heard today. The better-known traditional English melody is in the minor mode; the earliest printed edition of the melody appears to be in a rondo arrangement for fortepiano by Samuel Wesley, which was already reviewed in 1815. Soon after, it appeared in a parody published in 1820 by William Hone. It had been associated with the carol since at least the mid-18th century, when it was recorded by James Nares in a hand-written manuscript under the title “The old Christmas Carol”. Hone’s version of the tune differs from the present melody in the third line: the full current melody was published by Chappell in 1855.
An article in the March 1824 issue of The Gentleman’s Magazine complains that, in London, no Christmas carols are heard “excepting some croaking ballad-singer bawling out ‘God rest you, merry gentlemen’, or a like doggerel”. The carol is referred to in Charles Dickens’ 1843 novella A Christmas Carol. It is also quoted in George Eliot’s 1861 novel Silas Marner.
The historic meaning of the phrase “God rest you merry” is ‘may God grant you peace and happiness’; the Oxford English Dictionary records uses of this phrase from 1534 onwards. It appears in Shakespeare’s play As You Like It and the phrase “rest you merry” appears in Romeo and Juliet; both plays date from the 1590s. The transitive use of the verb rest in the sense “to keep, cause to continue, to remain” is typical of 16th to 17th century language. However, in the present day, merry is often misinterpreted as an adjective modifying gentlemen. Etymonline.com notes that the first line “often is mispunctuated” as “God rest you, merry gentlemen” because in contemporary language, rest has lost its use “with a predicate adjective following and qualifying the object” (Century Dictionary). This is the case already in the 1775 variant, and is also reflected by Dickens’s replacement of the verb rest by bless in A Christmas Carol.
