Away in a Manger Anonymous, 1885

No one knows who wrote the first two stanzas. The earliest known printing is in the Protestant Churchman on December 24, 1868, inside a short fictional story, with the lines in a different order than today. The carol went quiet and came back in the early 1880s. Around the 400th anniversary of Martin Luther's birth in 1883, printers began crediting it to him. Luther did not write it. It is not in his hymn collections, and no German version appeared before the English one.

The first hymnal to carry it was the Lutheran Little Children's Book for Schools and Families in Philadelphia in 1885, with a tune called ST. KILDA that did not last. In 1887 James R. Murray published the tune most Americans know in Dainty Songs for Little Lads and Lasses. His book called the song Luther's Cradle Hymn, which kept the false credit alive for decades. The tune is now called MUELLER because later collections wrongly credited it to Carl Müller. William J. Kirkpatrick published a second tune, CRADLE SONG, in 1895.

Charles H. Gabriel added the third stanza in Gabriel's Vineyard Songs in 1892, with no name attached. A 1937 book credited John T. McFarland with that stanza. The Hymnology Archive finds the claim doubtful because the stanza was already in print in 1892.

Baptist Hymnal 1991 prints MUELLER in F major. CRADLE SONG is also in F major.