Reindeer Question

One of the earliest things that I remember from Christmas was hearing Gene Autry singing Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer. I was probably around 3-4 years old, and didn’t yet know the word “history”.
I thought he was singing “you’ll go down in his story” instead of history.

Naturally, I wondered how I would go down in Rudolph’s story, so I asked my mom how that could happen.
It took her a little bit of me explaining what I thought the song said, before she understood my question; so then she had to explain to me what the word history meant, and that this was what the song was saying.
I liked it better the first way……

 

Moore lived from 1779-1863
Livingston lived from 1748-1828
So their lives in New York certainly overlapped, but Livingston was 31 years the elder and passed away at the age of 80 when Moore was 49. So I would assume that were not contemporaries...but I don't really know.

The attribution to Moore didn't even come up until 14 years after the publication of the anonymous poem (11 years after Livingston's death), and even then it was raised by some 3rd party in a book of poetry. Perhaps the poem did not become all that well-known until after Livingston's death...he was 75 when it was published and died 5 years later (which was 8 years before the Moore attribution was made.)

The question of who really wrote it was first raised pretty recently by a college professor who is our age, and may have been raised just to draw attention to himself. The professor's specialty was investigating well-known works and questioning their authorship. The professor "retired" when someone successfully sued him for defamation in connection with one of his assertions.

 

So you're asking what "Donner" and "Blitzen" mean?

Well, The Donnor Party is known to most of us here, so I imagine the other reindeer never asked "What's eating you?"

And Blitzen is a German state of being on Christmas Eve...which is why Rudolph is the lead reindeer.

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But the interesting thing is that they were changed from the way the poem was written when it was first put in the paper. I imagine there may be an interesting story there as to who did that and why.

I just discovered that "Donner" means "to give" in French, sort of like our word "donor."
And "Blitzen" is German for "flash."

I have no idea if that's what the typesetter had in mind, or why French & German were OK but Dutch was not.

 

Interesting. I still think Livingston has a case with the Dutch reindeer names on the original poem.