“How Great Thou Art” is one of the most widely sung hymns in the English-speaking world, but its roots lie in Sweden. The poem began as “O Store Gud,” written in 1885 by the Swedish minister and poet Carl Boberg, reportedly after he was caught in a sudden thunderstorm and moved by the calm that followed.
The hymn traveled a long way before reaching its familiar English form. Boberg’s poem was translated into German and then Russian, and it was the Russian version that the English missionary Stuart K. Hine encountered in the 1930s. Hine made his own English paraphrase, completed in 1949, giving the hymn the soaring refrain known today.
The hymn became enormously popular in mid-century America, carried to vast audiences through Billy Graham’s crusades, and it crossed easily into country and bluegrass gospel.
