The word carol once meant to dance in a ring. Its origin probably goes back through Old French and Latin to the Greek word Choralus, meaning a flute-player for chorus dancing. The chorus itself was originally a dancing circle and the origin of Greek drama.
The cheerful tunes of many of what we now know as Christmas carols betray their origins in dance. Unfortunately, this joyous element was an intermittent cause for their suppression by the church. It also accounts for the frequent replacement of original words with lugubrious lyrics, often at odds with their tunes.
Carols appeared in European churches in the late medieval period, having previously been shunned because of their pagan origins. Emerging at the same time as nativity plays and Christmas cribs, they spread across Europe as a populist reaction to Latin plainsong.
In England under the puritanical Commonwealth they were rigorously suppressed, as was the celebration of Christmas itself. As a result they went underground, surviving only in the poorest and most rural areas. The Restoration of the Monarchy did little to restore the status of the English carol, and in the eighteenth century they continued to decline, almost to extinction.
This was not the case in other European countries, particularly those that were Roman Catholic. But the English Christmas carol would almost certainly have been lost without the emergence of late nineteenth century literary interest in the oral traditions of folklore. In fact, by the time Dickens was writing A Christmas Carol - and effectively inventing what we now think of as the traditional Victorian Christmas - carols themselves were hardly heard at all.
In 1871 two scholars at Oxford University published Christmas Carols New and Old and began an English revival. This was dogged by its own problems. Under the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites, medievalism had become fashionable. As a result, there was a rush to compose and "rediscover" much that was quaint and highly inauthentic.
At the same time, the Victorian church was going through a period of puritanism as severe as any that had reacted against carols in the past. Their revival, therefore, had occurred in a time when the establishment was also highly likely to suppress their most authentic elements.
Despite this, the English carol did survive. Not only that, but many later compositions even manage to avoid the twin pitfalls of po-faced reverence and pseudo-antiquity to recapture the joyous simplicity of the early, folk versions.
