King Alfred’s War Song–it’s been a while since I posted this. Today seems a good day for us.
“For the Lord is our defense: Jesu defend us!” If you know a better prayer than that, I’d like to hear it.
Sung here at the Antioch Baptist Church.
Tag: King Alfred the Great
Again! ‘King Alfred’s War Song’
I thought we could use another belt of this today.
Around the year 800, Christian England was overrun by pagans, most of them from Denmark. It was the Viking Age. They came for loot and plunder, leaving a trail of death and destruction in their wake.
By the providence of God, Alfred, King of Wessex, overcame many defeats–one of which left him a hunted fugitive in his own land–and finally won the war. The Christians won not only peace and security: the invaders converted, settled down, and became part of the population.
We seem to be entering such a time of trial in our own day. The difference is that our heathen are home-grown, turned against us by our schools and colleges. They hate their own country and want to subject it to a “fundamental transformation”–into what, God only knows.
Defeat them and convert them. Trust in the Lord and hang tough. And, like Alfred, never give up.
Bonus Post: The White Horse of Uffington
Hi, this is Mr. Folklore. Mr. Nature dragged me out of the broom closet to tell you about this.
The Uffington White Horse adorns a hilltop in Oxfordshire, England. It’s some 300 feet long (sorry, I don’t go in for that metric stuff), and was made by digging its shape about three feet into the earth and filling the trenches with crushed chalk. And the people in the area, for hundreds of years, periodically clear it of vegetation and replenish the chalk.
Legend has the White Horse connected with King Alfred, but it was already a thousand years old when Alfred came along. No one knows who created it, or why. Boundary marker? Propaganda? Religious symbol? In the absence of written records, it’s anybody’s theory. All that can be said for sure is that the horse has been there since long before the Romans came to Britain. Its artistic style, though, resembles the somewhat abstract depiction of horses on pre-Roman British coins.
Before there were airplanes, the best way to see the horse was from another hilltop. No one has yet suggested that the horse was carved into the top of a hill so that aliens could see it from their spacecraft. I will not be the first to make that suggestion.
Soul Food: ‘King Alfred’s War Song’
I feel the need for the spiritual nourishment that this hymn provides. If it really was written by King Alfred the Great, it comes to us from a time when it must have seemed, to many, that the light of Christianity was going to be snuffed out by violent paganism in an overwhelming host of enemies.
It wasn’t! For how can Almighty God ever be defeated?
Not then, not now, not ever…