Silent Night: The Lyrics, All Six Original Verses and the Night of 1914

The Silent Night lyrics as they are sung today

The English words most people know were written by John Freeman Young, an Episcopal priest at Trinity Church in New York, in 1859. He translated three of Mohr’s six verses.

All six original verses, with an English translation

Mohr wrote six verses. Young’s carol follows the first, the sixth and the second; the other three are almost unknown in English. Here is the German as Franz Xaver Gruber wrote it down around 1860, each verse followed by a word-for-word translation of our own. It is not meant for singing, only to show what Mohr actually wrote.

The three forgotten verses widen the view from the stable to the whole world. The third speaks of salvation for the world, the fifth of mercy for all. The fourth says it most plainly: Jesus, “as a brother”, embraces the peoples of the world.

Silent Night to print

Who wrote Silent Night, and how did it begin?

Joseph Mohr wrote the poem in 1816 as a young curate in Mariapfarr, high in the Lungau. By 1818 he was assistant priest in Oberndorf on the River Salzach. On Christmas Eve he asked Franz Xaver Gruber, the village schoolmaster and organist, to set it for two voices and guitar. That night the two men sang it for the first time, at the crib in St Nicholas’ Church: Mohr took the first voice and played the guitar, Gruber sang the second.

You will often read that the organ had broken down, the bellows eaten by mice. There is no evidence for it, and why Gruber wrote for guitar is not known for certain. The church itself has gone; a small Silent Night Chapel now stands where it was.

How did it travel the world?

An organ builder made the first move. Karl Mauracher from Fügen in the Zillertal knew both men and took the song home with him. It was sung at Midnight Mass in Fügen as early as 1819, and the Rainer family from the church choir took it into their repertoire. The Strasser siblings, who sold gloves at fairs, had it with them when they set up their stall at the Leipzig Christmas market in 1831, and the first printed copy appeared in Dresden in 1833, on a broadsheet.

Soon people knew the carol but not its authors. In 1854 the Prussian king’s court chapel asked St Peter’s Abbey in Salzburg for a copy, believing it to be by Michael Haydn. That led them to Gruber, by then living in Hallein. On 30 December 1854 he wrote his “Authentic Account” of how it began, setting out who had written the words and the music. Five years later Young’s translation appeared in New York, and it is still the version the English-speaking world sings, from carol services to Christmas Eve by candlelight.

Christmas Eve 1914: Silent Night in no man’s land

By December 1914, German, British, French and Belgian soldiers faced each other in trenches from the North Sea to the Swiss border. On Christmas Eve, Germans in many places in Flanders and northern France set small trees with candles on their parapets and began to sing. Stille Nacht was among the songs. From the other side came carols in reply.

How the carol carried across no man’s land that night, and what men on both sides wrote about it, is told in the second chapter of The First to Stand Up. You can read it free in the sample.

What happened the next morning is on our page The Christmas Truce of 1914: What Really Happened

A true story from those days to read aloud, with hymns for a service: The Candles Were Still Burning