Conditor Alme Siderum

I've just completed a course in Medieval Latin. My goal (besides earning credit towards my STL) was to learn enough to translate the hymns of Adam of St. Victor.

Adam's specialty was the sequence--a devotional hymn about the feast of the day. Nowadays we sing them before the Alleluia at Mass, but it seems that at one point sequences were a longish Alleluia versicle.

At the Council of Trent, one of the liturgical reforms was the deletion of most sequences. Five were kept and are still in use--well, four are in widespread use now--bonus points to anyone who can name them all.

Our most prolific source of translations of Latin hymns into English was an Englishman named John Mason Neale. Among his many, many translations is the Advent hymn Conditor Alme Siderum--Creator of the Stars of Night.

Creator of the stars of night,
Thy people’s everlasting light,
Jesu, Redeemer, save us all,
And hear Thy servants when they call.

Thou, grieving that the ancient curse
Should doom to death a universe,
Hast found the medicine, full of grace,
To save and heal a ruined race.

Thou cam’st, the Bridegroom of the bride,
As drew the world to evening-tide;
Proceeding from a virgin shrine,
The spotless Victim all divine.

At Whose dread Name, majestic now,
All knees must bend, all hearts must bow;
And things celestial Thee shall own,
And things terrestrial, Lord alone.

O Thou Whose coming is with dread
To judge and doom the quick and dead,
Preserve us, while we dwell below,
From every insult of the foe.

To God the Father, God the Son,
And God the Spirit, Three in One,
Laud, honor, might, and glory be
From age to age eternally.

The tune is a good hymn adaptation of a chant melody. It's haunting. When I was in school in Santa Fe I asked a Buddhist freshman who lived in my dorm, Andrew Hui, to come to Mass with me one Advent Sunday and accompany this song on his violin. It was incredibly pretty.

Medieval Latin was a good course. We learned to do some hands-on work with manuscripts in addition to translation of texts that were already transcribed. But I still have a long way to go with the morphology. I suppose that one of these days I'll just become tired of looking up every single word, and just sit down and memorize noun and verb endings.

But I think that I can begin to approach Adam.