Jesse Edgar Middleton

Jesse Edgar Middleton was a Canadian journalist, author, music critic, historian, poet, and choirmaster born in Wellington County, Ontario, in 1872. He trained as a teacher before entering journalism in the 1890s and worked in Quebec and Toronto, including service with the Mail and Empire and later Saturday Night. He also sang with Toronto's Mendelssohn Choir and directed the choir of Centennial Methodist Church for roughly four decades. His books included substantial histories of Toronto and Ontario.

Middleton encountered the history of the Wendat Christmas song through Ernest Myrand's Noëls anciens de la Nouvelle-France and later prepared the English poem beginning 'Twas in the moon of wintertime in 1926. His pamphlet The First Canadian Carol appeared in 1927. Modern scholarship stresses that Middleton's text is not a literal translation of the surviving Wendat words. It is a new English reimagining that adds early twentieth-century pan-Indigenous imagery, including terminology and cultural details not present in Brébeuf's attributed text.

Middleton's version nevertheless became the form through which the carol entered many English-language hymnals. Because his English poem has its own authorship and history, he is best described as the author of the familiar English text rather than simply as Brébeuf's translator.