Be Thou My Vision

The words go back to an Irish prayer, Rop tú mo baile, of a kind called a lorica, a prayer for protection. It has been credited to Saint Dallán Forgaill in the sixth century, but the language of the poem puts it several hundred years later, and it survives only in two manuscripts copied later still. Mary Byrne translated it into English prose in 1905, in the journal Ériu, and Eleanor Hull turned her translation into verse in 1912. Hull's version is the one sung now.

The tune is older in print than the pairing. Patrick Weston Joyce published it in 1909 in Old Irish Folk Music and Songs as the melody of a ballad called With My Love on the Road. Hymnals name it SLANE, after the hill in County Meath where, the legend goes, Saint Patrick lit a fire on Easter eve in defiance of the High King. The legend is folklore. The name is a hymnal convention, which names a tune after a place. The words and the air were put together in 1919, and a harmonization by David Evans in the Church Hymnary of 1927 carried them into hymnals around the world.

It is sixteen bars, four lines of four. The first line starts low and turns up to the F sharp. The second climbs higher, to the B. The third is the top of the hymn, the only place it reaches the high d, with a quick turn around it, and the fourth comes home. Most of the notes are quarter notes, one to a syllable, and the few eighth notes are where one syllable stretches over two.

On a mandolin in D the melody sits in first position, from the second fret of the G course to the fifth fret of the A course. The low A and B in the second bar and the twelfth are the two moments on the G course. The held notes at the end of each line want a gentle tremolo that lasts the whole bar, and the fourth bar walks down from the F sharp in two eighth notes to the E where the next line starts.