The most beautiful Christmas carol you've never heard

Many years ago, I bought a CD of Christmas music by Canadian artist Bruce Cockburn. I'm a big fan of his music, and this release was especially appealing because it contains Cockburn’s rendition of The Huron Carol. 

As Canada’s oldest Christmas hymn, The Huron Carol may well be the oldest song of its type in all of North America. It was written in the 1640s by Jean de Brébeuf, a French Jesuit missionary who lived and worked among the Hurons, also known as the Wendat or Wyandot.

Brébeuf, who was killed by the Iroquois in 1649 and is now considered a saint by the Catholic Church, spoke Huron and wrote the lyrics of The Huron Carol in that language. He set the lyrics to a French melody, and used the carol to help explain the Christian nativity story to the Huron people.

Cockburn sings the carol in Huron. He lists the title on the liner notes as Jesus Ahatonnia, which translates as "Jesus is born." An Anglicized version of the carol appeared in the early 20th century.

I became fond of this carol in part because my wife Liz has a Huron branch in her family tree. (Liz is a direct descendant of Martin Prévost and Marie Olivier Sylvestre Manitouabéouich, whose 1644 wedding in Québec was the first recorded marriage in Canada of a Frenchman and an Indigenous woman.) I find the carol to be simultaneously haunting, uplifting and melancholy, even though I don't understand the words in Cockburn's Huron rendition.

It seems fitting that Canada's oldest Christmas carol was written in the language of one of the First Nations, as Indian tribes are known in Canada. Unlike so many classic carols, which are European in origin, The Huron Carol commemorates the holiday in a truly North American fashion.

***

Here's a link to an orchestrated English performance of The Huron Carol. To hear Cockburn's version in Huron, click here. A beautiful children's book entitled "The Huron Carol," illustrated by Frances Tyrrell, was published, in English, in 2003 by Eerdmans Books for Young Readers. The illustration at the top of this post is from that book.