Christ the Victorious, give to your servants

Christ the Victorious, give to your servants. Carl P. Daw, Jr.* (1944- ). Published in Daw’s A Year of Grace (Carol Stream, 1990). Daw states (p. 148) that this hymn on the ‘Christus Victor’ theme alludes to the book by Gustaf Aulen, Christus Victor (English translation, 1931). It opens and closes with this idea (verse 1 is repeated as verse 4), but is more centrally concerned to be a paraphrase of the Kontakion for the Departed in the Order for Burial in the Eastern Orthodox Church rite: ‘It was written specifically for the tune RUSSIA in order to preserve some of the flavor of the original text for congregations unable to sing the traditional Kiev melody for the Kontakion’ (A Year of...