The melody to the Christmas carol "What Child Is This?" goes all the way back to the 1500's. It was known at one time as "Greensleeves." But most of the world would never have known the melody of this song, much less the words as we know it today, if it had not been for an insurance salesman named William Chatterton Dix.

In 1865 as Christmas was approaching, this insurance salesman sat down and wrote a poem in one afternoon that he entitled "The Manger Throne." Dix imagined visitors walking by a manger 2,000 years ago confused about who the child was that lay before them. From this perspective Dix wrote a story of this child's birth, life, death, and resurrection. But it was not until an unknown Englishman took Dix's poem and combined it with the melody "Greensleeves" that it became a wor…