Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Great Four Anglican Hymns

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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was merge‎ to Hymnology (tentatively), though I would note there is nothing at all wrong with a merge into more than one article, so certainly there is no issue with also merging some content to Anglican church music or any other appropriate target as well. Seraphimblade Talk to me 09:01, 27 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Great Four Anglican Hymns[edit]

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Great Four Anglican Hymns (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)
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I hate to have to do this, but I see no way that this passes GNG. This gets relatively few GHits, and by and large they are passing references in pages concerningother other work cited one of the four hymns (generally either Lo! He Comes With Clouds Descending or Hark! The Herald Angels Sing). Meanwhile, the English Hymnal was a quarter century away from publication, and at this very late date I would have to imagine that if one compared all the different current Anglican hymnals one would find far more than four hymns appearing in nearly all of them— I dare say that there are probably a couple hundred which appear in every last one. Of the runners-up, "Sun of My Soul, Thou Savior Dear" didn't make it into the 1940 Episcopal Hymnal and while "Jerusalem The Golden" was retained in the The Hymnal 1982, the other three sections of Bernard's hymn were not, and I have never in half a century sung it. I would also point out that hymnals of the era did not officially assign tunes to the texts, which further blunts things: some recent survey in the Episcopal Church identified "Alleluia, Sing to Jesus" as the favorite hymn, but it's a cinch that the preferred American tune, Hyfrydol, plays a large part in that. Furthermore, one can look in in the original work and see that this notion of a "great four" isn't his idea: it comes from the other work cited, by David Briggs, who I would point is not, at least by school affiliation, an Anglican in the first place (his school, Western Theological Seminary, which is in the Reformed tradition). Both of these works are more theological and devotional in character and are primarily interested in the writing of hymns in various eras, and not so much on the statistics. When all is said and done this just doesn't seem to have been that important an idea, and by the time the second edition of Briggs's work, it's likely that the number of such hymns was many times larger than four. Mangoe (talk) 21:52, 28 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

See, this is the thing: I can find a fair number of references like these, about one of the hymns, I'm not seeing anything that has any interest in them as a set, and indeed, as I said above, even the original source doesn't mention them as a set at all: his "First Rank Hymns" number 105. "O Come All Ye Faithful" is in this group, at position 75 because for whatever reason only thirty-four hymnals of the set included it. At the time Oakeley's translation was forty-four years old; now, of course, its inclusion in English language hymnals must be well-nigh universal. But nobody is going to remark on it being one of over a hundred. So this "four" is really not a thing in itself; it's just a factoid which gets brought up when talking about some of the four hymns, and indeed, if I put in a date range before this article was published, I get almost no hits at all on the phrase, and just a couple of those are legit. It appears to me that the only reason why so many of these pages on the individual hymns mention this is because our pages on those hymns all mention this. Wikipedia is the source for all these mentions, as far as I can tell. Mangoe (talk) 02:29, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak keep - I find the argument by Pbritti above to be convincing, while Great Four (hymns) is probably a better title for the article. My vote is "weak" for a couple of reasons: we have specific rules on grouping things together at WP:NLIST, and the term "Great Four" seems to be less important now than it was a century ago. It also appears that Rev. King may not have coined the term himself. However, it appears that the term is used fairly often today to add some heft to professional discussions of the hymns: [1], [2]. Also, a Google Books search for the term "Great Four" leads to dozens of results for books discussing the hymns themselves and/or the musicological work of Rev. King when he did his study. Here are two examples: [3], [4]. ---DOOMSDAYER520 (TALK|CONTRIBS) 15:00, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: More discussion on the extent of sourcing would be helpful.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, — Red-tailed hawk (nest) 02:18, 5 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  • I don't have an opinion at this time, but if a consensus forms for deletion, a merge/redirect to Anglican Hymnology should be considered; the book seems very likely to be notable. I volunteer to create the book article if needed; ping me. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 04:53, 12 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, NotAGenious (talk) 10:49, 12 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comment. I'm a bit puzzled (as someone who was a practising Anglican for around 30 years) that there is only one of these "four great Anglican hymns" is at all familiar to me, namely Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. I'm not sure I've heard of all of the other three, and I don't think I've ever sung any of them. Missing, on the other hand, is Oh come all ye faithful, which may well have been the most popular of all Anglican hymns in my youth. I'm therefore wondering if Anglican is being used in an American sense (Episcopalian) rather than the more usual sense (Church of England). If forced, I would probably vote delete, but I shan't lose any sleep if the decision is to keep. Athel cb (talk) 17:59, 12 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: Any thoughts on LEvalyn's redirect proposal?
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, asilvering (talk) 22:39, 19 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  • After reading Benham 1887 which is (a) contemporary and (b) William Benham, it is clear that the number four as the focus is quite wrong. Benham gives King's Hymnology and King's ranking of hymns almost an entire half page and does not mention the number four once. Benham discusses why it's going to be increasingly outdated (from the viewpoint of 1887!) as the years go by, too. LEvalyn might have the right idea here. We either cover this as the Anglican Hymnology specifically, or under an Anglican hymns topic of some sort. I lean toward the former.

    But — people! — if we don't include Benham's observation and Julian 1892, p. 343 rubbishing King's methodology then Wikipedia isn't even as comprehensive as the encyclopaedias of the 19th century were in poking holes in this. We've sourced our article uncritically and primarily to the originator of the idea, with not even the third-party analyses that have been available since within a decade of its publication.

    That said, looking for 20th century sources turns up Marks 1938 which confirms what this article says about Louis FitzGerald Benson doing a U.S. equivalent as The Best Church Hymns in 1898. (James F. King was vicar of the then St Mary's in Berwick-on-Tweed, Athel cb.) So limiting this to Anglican Hymnology might be a mistake. There's a hint in another source that Robert Ellis Thompson did the same as King and Benson with his 1893 The National Hymn Book. There's definitely a subject here, and the 19th century encyclopaedias suggest that it's somewhere under hymnology. See their article titles. But almost no-one mentions the number four.

    The ball is in your court, LEvalyn and Mangoe. ☺

    Uncle G (talk) 16:57, 20 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  • Merge to hymnology as AtD. Uncle G's research is thorough and persuasive. I do think some of the information at the original article would improve the hymnology article, which is currently a bit slight. Not having looked closely at Uncle G's sources it doesn't seem like the Great Four Hymns are a "thing" even if King's identification of them attracted comment; rather, it seems like there's a broader discourse by which people were trying to identify the best/most-used hymns. If we don't merge somewhere, I think the article should be deleted. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 23:49, 20 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - Far above, I voted "weak keep" with a suggested title change, but in light of the more extensive research done by the subsequent commenters, I can support this latest idea to Merge. ---DOOMSDAYER520 (TALK|CONTRIBS) 14:53, 22 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
references
  • Benham, William, ed. (1887). "Hymns". The Dictionary of Religion: An Encyclopedia of Christian and Other Religious Doctrines, Denominations, Sects, Heresies, Ecclesiastical Terms, History, Biography, Etc. London: Cassell. pp. 535–536.
  • Julian, John (1892). "England Hymnology, Church of". A Dictionary of Hymnology: Setting Forth the Origin and History of Christian Hymns of All Ages and Nations. London: J. Murray.
  • Marks, Harvey Blair (1938). The Rise and Growth of English Hymnody (2nd ed.). Fleming H. Revell Company.
  • comment All of the talk about merging or some similar resolution are not dealing with the issue I pointed out earlier, which is that it seems entirely likely that all the citations for this besides the primary sources are derived from our articles on these four hymns— well, two of these articles, because nobody seems to care to write articles in the popular press about the other two since nobody sings them any more. If we deleted those passages and this article, new citations would dry up because (as I've said before) once the term was coined, there seems to have been no interest in the idea until someone stated mentioning it in WP articles. And that's hardly surprising, because by the time of coinage, the original survey was quite dated, the English Hymnal having been published a little over a decade later. But at any rate,I just don't see why we need to keep promoting this notion, which is what we ae doing. Mangoe (talk) 04:14, 23 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge to Anglican church music#History. Perhaps a separate article can be justified but from an editorial viewpoint, we're better off integrating this material into a broader article that gives more context. --A. B. (talk • contribs • global count) 17:26, 26 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge as suggested, although which target is up to the closing admin's sound discretion. FWIW, I am a practicing Episcopalian. Bearian (talk) 18:00, 26 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: Relisting for consensus for a merge target.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, The Herald (Benison) (talk) 08:55, 27 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
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