This is one of four original carols that Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) contributed to The Oxford Book of Carols, first published in 1928. William Morris’s epic poem The Earthly Paradise was published between 1868 and 1870 and has been held to have established Morris’s reputation as a poet. It tells of mediaeval travellers who meet a surviving colony of ancient Greeks, with whom they exchange stories. John, the central character of the poem The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon, remembers the song of ‘Outlanders’ with news of the Christmas story. Each verse has a refrain both in the middle and at the end, and Vaughan Williams extended the closing refrain in order to enhance the poem’s character as a carol, composing something rather like a folk song to accompany it.