What were Donner and Blitzen original names?

During a Christmas party a few years ago, a group of revelers broke out in song: “You know Dasher, and Dancer, and Prancer, and Vixen, Comet, and Cupid, and Donner, and Blitzen. But do you recall, the most famous reindeer of all …?”

The answer, of course, is Rudolph, the red-nosed reindeer.

But I focused on Donner. “It’s Donder, not Donner,” I thought.

So I googled “Donder” and entered a world of literary confusion. In “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” first published anonymously on December 23, 1823, 195 years ago, in New York’s Troy Sentinel, Santa called to the eight reindeer — “Now, Dasher! Now, Dancer! Now Prancer and Vixen! On Comet! On Cupid! On, Dunder, and Blixem!”

“Dunder” and “Blixem” are Dutch for “thunder” and “lightning,” so their use is appropriate. The question is how these names morphed to “Donner” and “Blitzen.”

For 13 years after its original publication, “A Visit from St. Nicholas” was reprinted many times in newspapers and magazines, and its author was rumored to be Clement C. Moore, a Bible professor at New York’s General Theological Seminary. Finally, in an 1836 reprint, Moore was credited as the author, and in 1844 he included the famous Christmas poem in a collection of his own works.

All the while, there were whispers that the true author of the poem was Henry Livingston, a New Yorker of Dutch descent. That “Dunder and Blixem” was a common Dutch exclamation at the time lends some credence to Livingston as author.

In 1837 a version of “A Visit from St. Nicholas” appeared in which “Blixem” was changed to “Blixen” (to rhyme with Vixen), and Dunder became Donder. In Moore’s 1844 book of poems, he adopted these changes, and it was that version that became the Christmas classic.

The evolution of “Donder” to “Donner” can be traced to the 1939 publication of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer in which author Robert L. May made the switch. Ten years later Gene Autry recorded the Johnny Marks song by the same name, and Autry, too, used the name “Donner.” The rest is history.

So much for legendary reindeer. The question on everyone’s mind in December is, are reindeer real? The short answer is, “yes.”

In North America we call them caribou. Europeans call them reindeer. All populations, however, belong to a single species, Rangifer tarandus. They are large members of the deer family — much bigger than white-tailed deer. Male reindeer weigh 275 to 600 pounds; females 200 to 300 pounds.

Caribou distribution in North America is limited almost exclusively to Canada and Alaska. European reindeer roam northern Scandinavia and Russia. Much of the European herd, though, is domesticated as an important source of meat, milk, and leather.

Unlike other members of the deer family, both sexes of caribou grow antlers. Racks tend to be much larger than those of white-tailed deer. Bucks shed their antlers shortly after breeding. Females retain theirs until spring calving. This gives pregnant females weapons to protect themselves from wolves and grizzly bears. (It also means Rudolph and the gang were girls because only females have antlers in late December.) Females also use their antlers as shovels to scrape away snow to find winter food. Both sexes often eat their own shed antlers because tundra soils contain so little calcium.

Caribou live in the arctic tundra and the surrounding coniferous forest. Woodland caribou wander throughout the year in search of food, but they cover relatively small distances. Barren-ground caribou, on the other hand, are noted for long-distance migrations across the frozen tundra. Because caribou herds deplete the limited supplies of lichens, grasses, sedges, and willow and birch browse, they move almost constantly in search of food. Some herds travel as far as 3,000 miles each year.

For protection against the cold, caribou wear a coat of thick fur. Their fine, dense under fur is covered by a layer of coarse, hollow guard hairs. These outer hollow hairs insulate the body and improve the caribou’s buoyancy. Consequently, caribou are excellent swimmers; they must be to negotiate the many rivers that cross their migratory routes. I doubt, however, that they are buoyant enough to fly.

Be warned, those two lines are a lot more complicated than they look. Over and over I try to get people to recite them as written and, with almost 100 percent results, they fail. The problem is the rhythm. We know this rhyme so well, we CAN'T read it as written. We read it as we KNOW it's written. But we DON'T know. That's the problem.

The way we learned to read the lines was

Ignoring, of course, the last two funny reindeer names. But that isn't the way the first publication bounces along. In 1823 they read it as

The problem is that Henry Livingston was a pretty sloppy poet. He wrote fast and he was happy if the general feel of the poem was right. Details would fix themselves. This problem shows up in his music manuscript, too. A measure has a certain number of notes, right? Well, not for Henry. He writes fast and he writes A LOT! And sometimes the number of notes in the measures turns out to be in those pesky details. He would undoubtedly fix the problem while he was playing his violin or flute. To get the transcriptions for this website, though, I've had to "fix" Henry's measures again and again.

And that's what editors do to poetry. If they don't like the way it sounds, they "fix" it.

Beats there the heart of an editor that doesn't think they could do a better job than the original writer? Well, it seems that for Night Before Christmas, the answer is a resounding NO!

Almost every editor who published the Christmas poem changed SOMETHING! Here we're just going to look at who did what to the reindeer names.

So what have we learned from this exercise?

We've learned that poor Blixem was doomed from the start. His name first changed to Blixen in McClure's 1825 Almanac.

We've learned that the name Donder first appeared in Hoffman's 1837 New York Book of Poetry, and reappeared in Hoffman's 1840 Poets of New York.

We've learned that Norm Tuttle is responsible for the rhythm of the reindeer names in his 1830 Troy Sentinel Broadsheet, but that he kept the original reindeer names. His rhythm was slow to catch on, and for years it was mix and match of Tuttle's rhythm on one line and the original rhythm on the next.

We've learned that Clement Moore went back to Tuttle's reindeer rhythm, and that it pretty much stayed there after that. And we've learned that Moore is responsible for the change of the reindeer name to Blitzen.

Whew!

Two more reindeer stories that you might be interested in.

That handwritten note on the Troy Sentinel Broadsheet might just be a smoking gun against Moore.

And there's a story I was told after Don's book came out. I was awakened one morning by an enthusiastic gentleman, Robert Hancock, with a wonderful story about Dunder and Blixem. Laurence Hancock, his father and a judge then still on the New York bench, had been a friend of an Episcopalian priest and Henry descendant, Father Harold Thomas. I had already received one letter from someone else who wanted to tell us about this wonderful man.

The story with which Father Thomas had frequently regaled his friends was about Henry's authorship of the poem. The names of the reindeer, Father Thomas had said, were those of the horses in Henry's stable! Now that would have set me back on my heels if I weren't already flat on my back. What a wonderful way to wake up. The idea was simply perfect and felt so right. But my attempts, and those of my cousin Steve, to follow this particular thread have, so far, led nowhere. A pointer to another Henry descendant, Maud Katzenbach, brought out more anecdotes of Father Thomas, but she and her sister had been too young to be interested in an old man's stories, and had paid them no mind. Henry's Day Book was no help because when thinking about the horses as sources of debt or credit, Henry used descriptions rather than names.

What is Donner's real name?

How did Blitzen get his name?

What does Donner and Blitzen mean in English?

What language is Donner and Blitzen?