Sing, my tongue, the glorious battle

Sing, my tongue, the glorious battle. Venantius Fortunatus* (ca. 540- early 7th century) translated by John Mason Neale* (1818–1866). This translation of Fortunatus’s ‘Pange lingua gloriosi proelium certaminis’* was printed in Neale’s Mediaeval Hymns and Sequences (1851), with a note saying that the original text was ‘in the very first class of Latin Hymns’ and that it was ‘retained, with a few ill-judged retouchings, in the Roman Breviary’. Neale’s translation had 11 stanzas, faithfully following Fortunatus’s ten plus the Doxology added by the Medieval church. There have been so many alterations and amendments to Neale’s 1851 text that we have printed it in full, together with an example...