The Dirige is an antiphon that opened the Matins service in the Office of the Dead. It has its source in the Psalm 5 as translated in the Vulgate. It is probably the origin of the English noun dirge (according to the Online Etymological Dictionary).

Tolkien included this text together with the Gloria Patri doxology at the end of his poem The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s son, and this is the text we give here. Note that Tolkien used a slightly abbreviated version; the fuller antiphon has Dirige, Domine, Deus meus, in conspectu tuo viam meam.

We have supplemented the text with macrons to mark etymologically long vowels.

The translation given here is made after the translation of the Psalm 5 in the New Revised Standard Version (1989), supplemented by the rendering adopted for the Gloria Patri.

The text’s transcription emulates the capitalis rustica, a style of the Latin alphabet that was in use in the imperial Rome and Late Antiquity for writing on papyrus or parchment with a reed pen. We made use of Hasan Guven’s typeface Vatican Rough Letters.