Wer weiß, wie nahe mir mein Ende

Wer weiß, wie nahe mir mein Ende. Ämelie Juliane Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt* (1637-1706). This hymn was written on 17 September 1686, according to a note in the manuscript, preserved in the Church Library at Gera. It was published in an Appendix of 1688 to a hymnbook for the Rudolstadt community, the Rudolstadt Gesang Buch (1682). Almost two hundred years later, Catherine Winkworth* translated it into English as ‘Who knows how near my end may be’*. According to James Mearns*, who gave the information above in JJ, it was the subject of ‘an unpleasant controversy’. Georg Michael Pfefferkorn (1645-1732; see JJ, pp. 892-3) claimed authorship in 1707, a year after Ämelie Juliane’s death. Mearns...