Tidings are news, in old or formal use. Glad tidings, bring tidings, tidings of great joy.
It survives almost entirely in carols and in deliberate archaism — glad tidings and tidings of great joy are both biblical. It is always plural. The word is related to tide in its old sense of a time or season, so tidings are what the time brings. Note betide, meaning to happen to.
1nountidingsNews.
“The messenger brought grim tidings from the battlefield.”
tidings is news.
Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire