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 recognition of the fragment of the true cross in stanza 2. The hymn began: Sing, my tongue, the glorious battle, With completed victory rife, And above the Cross, the trophy...