A thunderstorm in Sweden, a church bell, and a translation through three languages: the story of “How Great Thou Art”
In 1885, a young Swede named Carl Boberg was walking home from church in Mönsterås, on the southeast coast of Sweden, when a thunderstorm broke over the bay.
After the storm passed, he saw a rainbow over the water and heard a church bell ringing. The scene moved him to write a poem of praise: “O Store Gud”, “O Great God”. It would become one of the most sung hymns in the world, “How Great Thou Art”, but only after a journey through three other languages.
From Sweden to Russia
Boberg, who later became a member of the Swedish parliament, published the poem, and it was set to a Swedish folk melody. It spread in Scandinavian churches. A German translation followed, and from German it was translated into Russian by the Baptist leader Ivan Prokhanov.
Stuart Hine in Ukraine
Stuart K. Hine, an English missionary, heard the Russian version while working in Ukraine in the 1930s. He began translating it into English, and the first verses came to him in the Carpathian Mountains, where the thunder and the landscape echoed Boberg’s original inspiration.
Hine added verses of his own. The third verse, about Christ’s death on the cross, and the fourth, about Christ’s return, were written by Hine, the last after the Second World War, when he met displaced people longing for home. His English version was published in 1949.
The crusades
The hymn became world famous through Billy Graham’s evangelistic crusades. George Beverly Shea, Graham’s soloist, and Cliff Barrows, his music director, sang it night after night at crusades in the 1950s, including the huge New York crusade of 1957. Audiences took it home, and churches around the world added it to their hymn books.
It has since been recorded by hundreds of artists, including Elvis Presley, whose recordings won Grammy Awards, and it is regularly voted among the most loved hymns in Britain and the United States.
What the words say
The first verse looks at creation: “O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder, consider all the worlds Thy hands have made.” The hymn moves from the stars and the thunder, to the forests and the birds, to the cross and finally to the return of Christ. The chorus answers all of it: “Then sings my soul, my Saviour God, to Thee: how great Thou art.”
That movement, from creation to redemption to hope, is why the hymn works at funerals as well as festivals. It lets worshippers see their own lives inside a much larger story.
A reflection
Boberg did not set out to write a famous hymn. He wrote what he felt after a storm. The song reminds believers that worship often starts with paying attention: to the sky, the sea, the sound of a bell, and the God behind them.
A storm over a Swedish bay in 1885 produced a poem. Translators in three countries, and a soloist in a stadium, turned it into a hymn sung in churches from Accra to Seoul.
