Is this wrong?

Upon the hay?
Would still scan and be unarguable, too.

I'm with Nelliemoser on this because when a lyric grates on the ear it spoils the message being sung.
Mind you, I'm so pedantic that I get annoyed every time I see the '10 items or less' sign at the checkouts. "10 items or FEWER", I rage to myself!

Violette - I am from Yorkshire so the words af the child sound perfectly ok to me !!

many carols/hymns were written in the 19th Century - they are meant to be sung joyfully not analysed by our grammer/language standards

Why not just sing the words, enjoy the music, and the story which is being told? Not everything has to be perfect.

Thanks iPad. Contraire

Au contrarie, my friend.

Maybe you don't have enough to think about Bellanonna!

'In the hay'. But it wouldn't scan. #poeticallicence

Elegan - I love that song, not sure I ever knew what it was all about though!

Lllyflower - impressive! Wondering what he grew up to be!

'Among' and 'amongst' are prepositions which have no plural forms.
They are interchangeable; 'among' is the earlier version (Old English) and 'amongst' came later (Middle English). I think it all depends on the following noun as to which sounds better, e.g. among the crowd, but amongst all the people, in other words whether there is a vowel or consonant following. 'Among' seems to be more widely used in the US with 'amongst' more popular in the UK.

After all that, I still agree that 'among the hay' sounds wrong!

I didn't know that about Alnwick. I'll impress the S.O. with that in a couple of weeks when I'm oop there.

Good point Ana, I agree. Away in a Manger does something different, the words give us to an image of Jesus asleep on the hay. Whereas in Nelliemoser's it's about Jesus among other people/things around him. To me the words are meant conjure up a safe, secure image. I think the writer chose 'among' carefully and was right. I don't know that though, obviously!

I sometimes think the more you look at words the more the language seems to jar. To be honest this read fine to me although in many old carols this might have had amongst rather than among. However I believe this is a modern carol - Christmas Night John Rutter? I put the lyrics for that through a spell and grammar check and the use of heav'n for heaven was the only item highlighted and that is just shortened form used to fit the melody. Language evolves.

Well, the one who wrote Away in a Manger must have thought differently!

In the context of the carol I think "among" is right. The words are not really about saying that Jesus sleeps in or on hay. If it were a statement of fact, then yes it would be better to say Jesus sleeps upon the hay. But the words are actually saying that all's well with the world because Jesus is there, he's sleeping, there are guardian angels, Mary's watching over him. It's right because it puts the emphasis on Jesus being present ... oh, and there's hay which just happens to be there too.
It's a subtle (OK, pedantic) difference but I think the old carol writers knew what they were doing!

I had a laugh at this question ...not because I have any particular thing to add, I like the Christmas carols, etc the traditional way they always have been ....but, when we moved from Essex up to Nottinghamshire, a former mining village, my daughter;s first Christmas play, in the local Church, with the new (to us) dialect, I found it lovely when the Inn Keeper announced "Ain't no room int inn, but there's a barn wi straw on t'floor' and the narrator then pronounced later that t'babby were here in t'manger, wi t'straw'....no amongst, or amidst, but with ........still laught about it now, some 30 odd years later .....lovely !

Tried the among thing out in my head and decided a plural is needed somewhere. "I was among friends" is fine and "asleep among the flowers" would be too, but "among the hay" does sound wrong IMO.

In Alnwick (Northumberland) we have Bondgate Without and Bondgate Within.
The link shows a photo of the Bondgate from 'without'.

piningforthewest.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2010/08/a-alnwick-gate.jpg

And we Scots still use 'outwith' to mean outside of apart from.

I think you need to get out more

"Without" is still used to mean the opposite of "within", even in pop songs - "Come all without, come all within. You ain't seen nothing like the mighty Quinn"

Reminds me of a story my DH tells of when he was five and at primary school. When the headteacher explained that 'There is a green hill far away without a city wall...' meant the eminence had no surrounding protection he told her that actually the words indicated that 'without' meant'outside' the perimeter. Hilarious. He was a precocious chap.

I wouldn't say "among" the hay - among the many hay stalks perhaps, but hay is a bulk term. I see nothing wrong with asleep on the hay? Amidst the hay perhaps, if his mother had heaped it up around him to keep him warm, very likely as she wouldn't have brought a load of bedclothes with her.

The language of psalms, hymns and prayers often doesn't meet modern rules of translation and that perhaps adds to their uniqueness and charm.