The Twelve Days of Christmas - A Documentary Hypothesis

by Todd Aglialoro - December 23, 2009

Reprinted with permission.

It's Christmas time again, and that means, among other things, that revelers around the world are quaffing nog, getting figgy with their pudding, and lifting their voices in song. "Christmas carols are the creed of Christendom," wrote Frederick Wilhelmsen, and I don't think he's half wrong. It's a pleasure to sing the ancient songs, as replete with incarnational goodness as they are devoid of banal modern diction. Liturgists mauled the Mass and demythologizers ruined the Bible for us without so much as one spoiler alert, but surely the Christmas carol remains a refuge of rhetorical felicity and sturdy doctrinal orthodoxy. A bastion of untainted tradition.

Or so I'd thought until yesterday, when, in the microfiche section of my local seminary library (I was looking for the water fountain), I came across the following piece of pedantry, reproduced for your edification. Be vigilant, my friends.

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The question of the origins of the popular Christmas (or "Christmas") carol, "The Twelve Days of Christmas," has long divided carolers and carol critics alike. The mainline (though waning) opinion is that it is merely a colorful but nonsensical ditty flung together by some anonymous Victorian nursery-rhymer. A minority of addled fundamentalists imagine its verses to represent certain Christian dogmas, at one time employed either as a mnemonic device or as a code for use in unfriendly lands.

But modern source-critical methods of Christmas carol exegesis have greatly advanced our understanding of the true roots of the song (or "song"), allowing us to see, with academic certainty, just how it came about.

On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me
A partridge in a pear tree.

In its earliest – and, therefore, most authentic – form, "The Twelve Days of Christmas" was not a carol at all, but a note in an accounting ledger: "On the first day of Christmas, Truloff [or perhaps "Trulov"] gave to me: a pear tree." (Some early versions have it as a peach tree, while others omit any mention of fruit. Likely a later accretion.)Trees were very valuable, providing shade, food, and – especially during the cold, damp English winters – fuel. The idea that one would be given as a gift is laughable – pure midrash. Likely Truloff owed a debt to the original source author (whom we'll call simply "Me," or "the Singer"), and settled all or part of it with the tree.

On the second day of Christmas, my true love gave to me
Two turtle doves

By the time the second "verse" appears on the scene, perhaps 40 years after the original ledger entry about the tree, several things have begun to happen. "Truloff" (or "Trulov") has become "true love," likely reflecting the romantic poetry that had become fashionable in the period; and the items, from this point onward, have become gratuitous gifts – almost certainly a fantasy projection influenced by the spare, cruel living conditions of industrial England's working classes.

We also see introduced the mark of the carol's second main redactor: the "Proto-Avian" source. This ornithology enthusiast would be responsible for revising the ledger entry by placing a "partridge" inside the pear tree, and then adding new stanzas in which the "true love" gifts the Singer with a turtle dove (despite the fact that the migratory Streptopelia turtur spends its winters far to the south of Britain) and a French hen.

Later followers of the Proto-Avian school would increase the numbers of the birds consecutively, adding an extra turtle dove and two more French hens to the Singer's improbable bounty, setting a tradition of escalating numbers that would carry on for the rest of the song's development.

Four calling birds

Most scholars today believe the "four calling birds" line to be a clumsy forgery or prank. Textual criticism certainly reveals an anomaly: Note that, instead of the proper naming exhibited by the Proto-Avian source and his disciples, here we find simply "birds"; note too that for the first time, the winged creatures are in action. Yet despite the line's apocryphal origin, that latter characteristic would be subsequently adopted, as we shall see.

Five golden rings

As legendary higher carol critic Adolf Bullman has demonstrated beyond question, in the earliest form of the line, the fifth day of Christmas had presented "Me" not with rings but with five golden finches:bringing the carol to a kind of coda and rounding out the work of the Proto-Avian source. How "finches" became "rings" remains a mystery. The French carological school has long conjectured that a rival lyrical community, preferring precious metals to birds, gained the upper hand long enough to make one lasting change in the song before being put down (this would explain the victorious emergence of the Deutero-Avian source shortly thereafter), whereas German scholars think that "finches" just got smudged with a bit of gravy and no one noticed.

Six geese a-laying
Seven swans a-swimming

The Deutero-Avians take up the mantle of their forebears and produce the last and most fully realized examples of their tradition. Supplanting useless songbirds and flightless domestic animals are the tasty goose and the majestic swan. They are active a-laying and a-swimming – a clear indicator that the later Avian redactors were diverse in their thinking, not afraid to borrow from the "calling birds" interloper that their predecessors considered (and traditionalists to this day still consider) an apostate. It is no surprise, therefore, that there is a growing movement of carolers who reject the rest of the song in favor of this purest, most elemental couplet, containing within it the essence of what Truloff (or "Trulov") gave his associate all those centuries ago.

Eight maids a-milking
Nine ladies dancing

Perhaps 30 years after the climax of the Avian tradition, we see here the emergence of a new voice: The "gifts" have evolved, as it were, into anthropomorphic forms. Strongly influenced by the era's suffragettes and nascent feminism, the source of these penultimate lines speaks only briefly, but powerfully. Her subject is women, and what's more, women from across the day's full socioeconomic spectrum: from the rough-handed milkmaid on her farm to the grandes dames of London's ballroom set. Our carol seems to be on the verge of realizing a wonderfully progressive new hermeneutic.

Ten lords a-leaping
Eleven pipers piping
Twelve drummers drumming

But, startlingly, the "Womynist" source vanishes as suddenly as she arrived. As Rosanna Roto-Rutabaga writes in her seminal study Lords Leaping, Ladies Weeping, "The Womynist's brief, shining hope of imbuing XX-mas with feminine ideals – maids nourishing and healing the earth with the milk of justice, ladies offering to Gaia a joyous dance of rebirth – was shattered, as it is in every age, by the pipes and drums of the phallocracy's war machine."

The carol's final redactor is indeed a striking contrast, perhaps a counter-reaction, to the one that preceded it. England's young nobles are on the front lines of the Great War, leaping from trench to trench, as the drums call them to advance and the doleful pipers mourn the millions slaughtered. Dairy maids and debutantes are the last things on the mind of our "BEF" source, no doubt some poetic Tommy cowering in his gas mask and hoping that the twelfth day of Christmas will bring an end to the madness of war.

Which brings us to the end of this study. Carol criticism may be an inexact science, but the latest "Twelve Days" scholarship strongly supports this five-source theory. However imperfect, it's certainly more plausible than the old idea that some one person, in a fit of artistic "inspiration," just wrote the song by himself. Talk about your crazy theories.

Todd M. Aglialoro is the editor for Sophia Institute Press and a columnist and blogger for InsideCatholic.com.