503- 505) is just such a melody. Now a great many of 17
tery, snuck the women out on Holy Saturday 1523 in, or hidden among, fi sh barrels. Given the size of such wagons and the number of people involved, this is highly unlikely. Also, Luther, who was the fi rst to write an account of this escape, never mentioned it. But Luther and his fellow believers in Wittenberg
knew just how dangerous this was. T at same year in a neighboring Saxon duchy controlled by Luther’s sworn enemy, Duke George, a man was hanged for aid- ing another such escape. Koppe’s rescue was a capital off ense.
Luther got the melody for “A Mighty Fortress” (or other hymns) from a barroom. Here, perhaps, truth is stranger than fi ction. T e asso- ciation with “bars” comes from a mistaken understand- ing of a term modern hymnologists use to describe the form of Luther’s hymnody: “bar form.” Bar form simply means that the melody would begin
with a theme repeated once before introducing a sec- ondary theme and then ending with the last part of the original theme—rather like A-B, A-B, C, B. “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” (Evangelical Lutheran Worship,
18
www.thelutheran.org
Luther’s tunes come from medieval modes and chants that he slightly revised to fi t the rhymed German hymns he was producing. For example, he reworked an Advent hymn attrib- uted to Ambrose of Milan, “Savior of the Nations, Come” (ELW, 263), setting the German translation to a medieval chant. But some of Luther’s original hymn tunes were
criticized for being too upbeat. He was one of the fi rst to employ a major key for some of his hymns, includ- ing “A Mighty Fortress.” One scholar notes that Luther’s opponents complained about another such hymn, “Dear Christians, One and All, Rejoice” (ELW, 594) for being far too joyous a melody to be sung in church. Such melodies that Luther, and quickly other
Lutheran Christians, used sometimes had their origins in dance melodies and folk tunes—but probably not bars.
Luther thought himself a reformer of the church. Here historians answer, “Yes and no!” We can trace changes in theology and practice in the churches of early modern central Europe to Luther. But he didn’t oſt en—if ever—call himself a reformer. For one thing, the word “reformatio” was used for reconstituting prac- tices and wasn’t a particularly radical word in his Latin vocabulary. For another thing, Luther thought of himself more as
a forerunner to the true reformation of the church that Jesus Christ would bring in, rather like the images of
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