CAROLS FROM KING’S:

The Stories of our Favourite Carols from King’s College

Alexandra Coghlan

BBC Books ISBN 978-1-78594-094-1 208pp (hb) £9.99 rrp

The title of this book is a misnomer, but in a good way, for what the reader gets here is considerably more than a skim over the potted histories of ‘favourite carols’ sung annually at the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College, Cambridge.

There is, for one thing, a fair amount of material on how Christmas itself developed. Alexandra Coghlan traces its origins to the pre-christian Roman festival of Saturnalia, and the solstice festival of Yule in Scandinavia. Saturnalia in particular could be a wild occasion, with cross-dressing, partying and social insubordination run riot. Sound familiar?

Some of these pagan influences affected the development of Christmas in England, where boisterous, occasionally obstreperous ‘wassailers’ traipsed from door to door with a bowl of spiced ale or cider, inviting householders to drink and offer food in recompense to the singers. The songs they sang are among the earliest carols, and some survive to the present.

Coghlan sprinkles plenty of interesting information about the individual carols featured in her text, and is refreshingly irreverent in places. Had you ever imagined, for instance, that the ‘prickle’ of

The Holly and the Ivy might have phallic implications? Or that Deck the Halls originated in a Welsh folk song extolling the softness of a lover’s bosom?

The section on the Nine Lessons service itself is quite extensive, and though Coghlan occasionally skirts hagiography, she can be sharp too, conceding that some listeners find the sound of the King’s Choir ‘too precious’, and repeating David Willcocks’s anecdotal comment about the chapel’s famously rich acoustic: ‘It could turn a fart into a sevenfold amen’.

Although the inclusion of a highlights CD would have helped, this is a lively, informative survey, and an ideal gift for those enamoured of the King’s College Christmas experience.