Author: John Chivers via YouTube
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"Mirie it is while sumer ilast" (often translated as "Merry it is while summer lasts") is one of the earliest surviving secular songs in the English language, with both lyrics and musical notation. It survives in a single manuscript source: a damaged parchment flyleaf (Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson G.22), added to a late 12th-century Latin Psalter and containing this song.
Scholars date the manuscript for "Mirie it is while sumer ilast" (the only surviving source) to sometime around 1225 on paleography and linguistic features. This makes it the earliest known surviving secular song in English.
As with its companion song of a few years later, "Sumer is icumen in", the song, in typically English fashion, concerns itself with the weather. In the case of "Sumer is icumen in", it’s a pure celebration of the arrival of summer (or more accurately spring), but in the case of "Mirie it is", it’s pure lamenting of how cold, hungry, and miserable the singer is in the midst of winter, in contrast with how comparatively fleeting the summer is. Suitable then that I recorded it close to the winter solstice during the time of long nights the author laments.
Recorded at the end of December 2025, just in time for it to mark 800 years since the song’s initial ‘release’. Recorded in Cubase Pro 14 using a combination of virtual instruments, including virtual psaltery, hurdy gurdy, the usual range of keyboards and Kontakt’s Sunburst guitar range, along with the excellent Superior Drummer 3, triggered using the Alesis Crimson 2 electric drum kit, and a real hand-played frame drum (riddle drum or bodhrán).
Lyrics:
Mirie it is while sumer ilast ƿið fugheles song
Oc nu necheð ƿindes blast and ƿ[ed]er strong
Ey ey ƿhat þis nicht is long
And ich ƿið ƿel michel wrong
Soregh and murne and fast
Merry it is while the summer it lasts with sweet birds’ song
Oh but now the cold wind blasts it blows so strong
Oh, oh, but this night is long
And it does to me much wrong
Sorrow and mourn and fast
More information on the song:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirie_it_is_while_sumer_ilast
