Was Donder Ponder Really a Dunder Blunder?

Tuesday, December 16, 2003

Page 7

AFFAIRS OF STATE (Column)

Was Donder Ponder Really a Dunder Blunder?

By DAVID KLINE

Stop the presses! Last week’s column praising Donder as Santa’s real reindeer and berating Donner as an imposter was off the mark, according to reader Jean Briare of Carmichael.

“You’ve got it all wrong, and I’ll show you why,” she said in a phone call.

And she did, too, stopping by the office with several pieces of evidence. The cornerstone of her case was a large, worn book—copyrighted in 1888 by McLoughlin Bros. of New York—titled, “The Night Before Christmas or A Visit of St. Nicholas.”

Briare opened the tome and pointed to Exhibit A:

And he whistled, and shouted, and called some by name—

Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!

On! Comet, on! Cupid, on! Dunder and Blitzen;

To the top of the porch, to the top of the wall!

Now, dash away, dash away, dash away all!”

Who in Sam Hill is Dunder? Does this mean the case of Donder v. Donner must be reopened? Must we overturn Donder’s favorable verdict in light of this new John Doe?

Briare said her evidence quite clearly proves that Dunder is the real reindeer, and that Donder—like the detested Donner—is a fraud.

Even without a defense attorney present, I prepared to claim a loophole. The text cited by Briare says St. Nick called some by name. Not all, but some. Maybe Donder was there right under Dunder, but St. Nick didn’t need to call him

Or could it be time to admit that Briare is correct, and Dunder indeed was the name used in the original poem by Clement Clarke Moore.

Back to the Internet we flew for more research on the subject.

There is agreement that the poem was first published in the Troy Sentinel newspaper in 1823, author unknown. The final two reindeer names in that first version were “Dunder and Blixem.”

Over the years, the poem appeared in a variety of publications, and in 1836 Moore finally was credited as the author.

Then it gets confusing. According to a pair of researchers who run the very informative Web site www.snopes.com, in 1837 a publisher decided to make a number of changes before printing the poem. Among other things, he changed “Dunder” to “Donder” and “Blixem” to “Blixen.”

Other reports have other publishers making similar changes, and there are some who refer to the final sleigh-puller with yet another variation—“Bliksem.”

In 1994, Washington Post reporter Guy Gugliotta went to the Library of Congress to research the matter. There, he found that in 1844, Moore published the poem himself and used “Donder and Blitzen.” To top it off, Gugliotta said, Moore wrote a longhand version of the poem the year before he died, and again used “Donder and Blitzen.”

For those keeping score at home, it’s worth noting that the names actually mean something. In the Dutch language, “Dunder and Blixem” translates to “Thunder and Lightning.” And how’s this for a curve —in German, the words for thunder and lightning are “Donner and Blitzen.” That leaves last week’s hero, Donder, pretty much out in the cold, even though he was Moore’s ultimate choice.

Oh, and there’s another problem. The poem in question—“A Visit of St. Nicholas,” aka “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” aka “The Night Before Christmas,” aka “’Twas the Night Before Christmas”—may not have been written by Moore in the first place.

In “Author Unknown, On the Trail of Anonymous,” author Don Foster presents evidence that Henry Livingston Jr., a poet of Dutch descent, is most likely the true author of the yuletide poem. Foster studied a number of writing samples from Livingston and Moore, and concluded that Moore didn’t write the famous poem. This conclusion, though, has been mightily challenged by others who offer evidence that Moore did, in fact, pen the piece.

So where does that leave us? The name was Dunder, then Donder, and eventually morphed into Donner — the problem that got this whole discussion going in the first place. Blitzen went through similar changes, but doesn’t seem to have as many fans who care. If we’re relying on the author’s original intent for a definitive answer on what the correct names are, well, we’ve got some problems because we can’t even be 100 percent sure who the author is.

Perhaps the true names of the reindeer are destined to remain a mystery, much like how they fly, how they haul more toys than a convoy of Wal-Mart trucks and how these presumably male reindeer all have antlers in late December.

So Merry Christmas to all, and to this topic, good night!

— Capitol News Service