Words of Thanksgiving

There is a story Boswell tells about a dinner Doctor Johnson attended at St. Andrew’s in 1773. “After grace was said in English, in the usual manner,” writes the biographer, “[Johnson] in very good humour, said, ‘I should have expected to have heard a Latin grace, among so many learned men: we had always a Latin grace at Oxford. I believe I can repeat it.’ Which he did, as giving the learned men in one place a specimen of what was done by the learned men in another place.” What the good Doctor recited at that point is not recorded—probably it was the postprandial grace of his alma mater, Pembroke College, but in fact he might have chosen from any number of other possibilities. Almost every college of Oxford and Cambridge has at least one Latin grace—some have two, others have as many as four—and all of them have been collected with translations by Reginald H. Adams in this slender volume published by Oxford’s Bodleian Library.

What is the purpose of a Latin grace? In some sense, it seems like a bit of outdated decorum, akin to dusting off grandmother’s silver and china for Christmas dinner. The meal may not taste any better than it would served on a paper plate, but the whole affair seems more solemn as a result. So it is with the formality of a pre-dinner prayer in Latin. While the call for a blessing at mealtime is of great antiquity no doubt, the earliest known grace formula in the West is found in the eighth-century Gelasian Sacramentary which reads simply, Benedic Domina dona tua, “Bless, Lord, your gifts.” As Adams notes in his brief but engaging introduction, the oldest colleges at both Oxford and Cambridge incorporated this simple monastic wording into their original graces and wove various sorts of embellishment around it. Over time some of the prayers grew lengthy—and peculiar as well. University College Oxford, for instance, boasts the longest such grace still in regular use—delivered antiphonally by a scholar of the College and the master at the high table in turn, each line is taken from a different Psalm. All participants were expected, until 1958, to recite their parts from memory; even today, though, it remains a point of pride to avoid referring to the printed cards that are provided.

The chronological arrangement of the graces in Adams’s book makes it possible to see how the language has developed over time, with medieval prayer forms developing in the Renaissance into a more fluid verse style. The loveliest of these poetic graces has got to be Magdalen College’s Hymnus Eucharisticus, written sometime in the seventeenth century and set to music shortly thereafter. The elegance of the grace’s iambic tetrameter can be seen in the final stanza:

Triune Deus, hominumsalutis auctor optime,immensum hoc mysteriumovante lingua canimus.

Adams offers an eighteenth-century translation in matching meter:

Almighty everlasting three,no other God we have but thee,thy glorious works, immortal Kingin triumph thus we daily sing.

The hymn continues to be sung during feast days in the college and, more famously, at daybreak on May Morning from the top of Magdalen Tower, when all Oxonians turn out to hear it, as they have done now for several centuries.

By the nineteenth century these elaborate invocations began to give way to more abbreviated blessings, notably the two-word Benedictus benedicat, “May the Blessed One give a blessing,” now routinely heard in most colleges. This short form, Adams notes, was “welcomed as an alternative to long preambles at meals, the length of which, it was argued, not only lessened appreciation of their literary quality but had a deterrent effect upon attention. More to the point the dinner might be getting cold.” Certainly the desire to dive right into dinner without suffering through a bunch of mumbo-jumbo is understandable—though to my mind, steak-and-kidney pie is hardly much better when warm, and...