Bede was born in 673 in an English village that is now the town of Jarrow, near the mouth of the River Tyne, in the country of Tyne and Wear. Becoming an orphan early in life, Bede was set by his relatives to be educated at the nearby monasteries of Wear mouth and Jarrow. For the rest of his life he “found it sweet to learn, or to teach, or to write,” to use his own words. Besides observing the usual discipline and daily rituals of a monk in a monastery, he found time to write his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation. He is also known and respected for his contributions in the areas of grammar, philosophy, religion, biography, and poetry. This Ascension hymn “Hymnum Canamus Gloriae” first appeared in Latin, and later was translated into English. The Venerable Bede died in 735; his bones were removed to Durham Cathedral in the eleventh century. 

This present English text is the work of two translators, Elizabeth Rundle Charles (see SDAH 70) in his The Hymnal Noted, 1854 with some further reversions from Lutheran Book of Worship, 1978. There were six stanzas in the original, of which SDAH has Nos. 1,5, and 6, plus an added doxology. See SDAH 2 for comment on LASST UNS ERFREUEN. The tune is also used for SDAH 91, “Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones,” where it is in a lower key.

-from Companion to the Seventh-day Adventist Hymnal by Wayne Hooper and Edward E. White