Comment: Are 2 reindeers’ names a clue as to who wrote classic?

By Justin Fox / Bloomberg Opinion

A poem appeared anonymously 201 years ago this month in a newspaper in Troy, New York, telling of a jolly St. Nicholas with twinkling eyes, dimpled cheeks and a jelly-like belly, who transported gifts in a sleigh drawn by reindeer named Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Dunder and Blixem.

All of that probably sounds familiar, except those last two names. Aren’t they supposed to be Donner and Blitzen?

Well, maybe. New York City landowner and seminary professor Clement Clarke Moore, who claimed authorship of the poem in the 1830s, rendered the names as Dunder and Blitzen when he published his collected poems in 1844, and Donder and Blitzen in several handwritten manuscripts from the 1850s and 1860s. The use of Donner seems to have become widespread only after his death in 1863 (one still encounters Donders). Meanwhile, the evolution from Blixem to Blitzen has become a key pillar supporting the theory that the poem was really the work of Henry Livingston Jr., a gentleman farmer and Revolutionary War veteran from Poughkeepsie, New York, with Moore stealing the credit after Livingston died in 1828.

Several years ago, I encountered Something Wrong on the Internet; the at-the-time universally accepted claim that Clement Clarke Moore was an enslaver and opponent of abolition, which fell apart almost as soon as I started digging into it. After that I invested what some might term a ludicrous amount of time learning more about the poem, originally titled “A Visit From St. Nicholas” and now generally known as “The Night Before Christmas,” and the early 19th century New York environment from which it arose. Along the way, I became about 97 percent convinced that Moore is the author.

There are times when I wonder whether anyone else cares about all this. But just in the past couple of weeks:

• The New York Times reported on a newly discovered 1853 manuscript of the poem, handwritten by Moore, on sale at Christie’s and expected to fetch a price near $500,000; it mentioned the Livingston authorship claim.

• Troy filmmaker Lisa Grace emailed me a link to her new documentary on the authorship controversy, which includes a few moments of me pooh-poohing the case for Livingston but mainly plays up the debate (because authorship controversies are fun!).

•A friend texted out of the blue to report that he had just witnessed a Moore-Livingston debate while waiting in line at the Philz Coffee in Lafayette, Calif., with the pro-Livingston party much more “um … passionate” about the topic.

So I’m not the only one interested. And while I doubt anything I write will convince a passionate Livingston supporter, the argument that the replacement of Dunder and Blixem with Donner or Donder and Blitzen somehow proves that Moore stole the poem has been bothering me for a while. What follows is a Christmas-season attempt to dismantle it.

The gist of the argument, popularized by since-retired Vassar College English professor Don Foster in his 2000 book Author Unknown, is that Livingston was the epitome of a New York Dutchman, the phrase “dunder and blixem” — thunder and lightning — the epitome of New York Dutch, and subsequent alterations thus evidence of inauthenticity. Wrote Foster:

The first major interventions were made by Charles Fenno Hoffman, who in 1837 ascribed the poem to Clement Clarke Moore: Hoffman changed “Blixem” to “Blixen,” for a perfect rhyme, and “Dunder” to “Donder.” … [T]he change from “Blixem” to “Blixen” was a deliberate sophistication by which Hoffman fixed an off-rhyme and corrupted the original author’s perfectly correct Dutch. To the eyes of Clement Clarke Moore, who knew German but not Dutch, neither “Blixem” nor “Blixen” looked right. Reprinting “A Visit from St. Nicholas” with his 1844 Poems, Moore called the eighth reindeer “Blitzen”: Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen! On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donder and Blitzen! … In the manuscript copies, as in the printed Poems, Moore makes the same telltale error, writing “Donder and Blitzen,” not suspecting that Saint Nick is a Dutchman who says “Dunder!” and “Blixem!”

Despite the Scottish surname, Livingston was indeed of almost entirely Dutch stock. His great-grandfather Robert Livingston the Elder, born in Scotland in 1654, grew up in religious exile in Rotterdam and subsequently married into the Dutch elite of Albany, New York. His father and Livingston grandfather also married into Dutch families. (Henry Jr. broke the streak, marrying women with the un-Dutch surnames of Welles and, after her death, Patterson.)

The rest of Foster’s account is iffier. Hoffman was editor of an 1837 anthology that was the first to credit the poem to Moore, but Moore later said he had submitted the text, and it was not the first time Blixem was changed to Blixen. The New-York Evening Post did that in a front-page reprinting of the poem in December 1828. As already noted, Moore’s 1844 collection had it as Dunder, not Donder. And there’s no evidence that Moore knew German. He taught Hebrew and Greek at the Episcopal General Theological Seminary in Manhattan, for which he donated the land. In an 1813 poem he also claimed proficiency in French, Italian and Latin. But not German.

The bigger issue is that “dunder and blixem” was not, in fact, a phrase only a Dutchman would be familiar with, and changes to it not necessarily evidence of inauthentic, un-Dutch tampering. To start with, it is not “perfectly correct Dutch”; the Dutch word for thunder was and is donder. My searches of old Dutch newspapers revealed some uses of dunder as an archaic spelling of dunner (thinner), but not as an alternative to donder. Blixem was the Dutch word for lightning, although in the early 1800s it was beginning to change to bliksem as part of an effort inspired by the French Revolution to rationalize Dutch spelling.

New York Dutch spelling was often different from that of the home country, so the substitution of dunder for donder doesn’t signify much. More significant is that versions of the phrase had by the 1820s become a standby of English-language writers depicting Dutch or German people in gently mocking fashion. The first appearance I’ve found in a New York newspaper was as “Donders and Blixum,” in a parody report from Downing Street in London published in the Nov. 25, 1773, issue of Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer that attributed it to “a German Lady of Great Interest with the Queen” speaking in “High Dutch.”

Such conflation of Dutch and German was common at the time, with the term “Dutch” derived from the Dutch word for German and even the Dutch referring to their own language as Nederduitsch, or Low German. In English, High Dutch was supposed to mean German and Low Dutch Dutch, but the author of this piece couldn’t even get that right, putting Dutch words in the mouth of a German. This author was presumably English; the article had first run in London’s Public Advertiser in early September.

The earliest evidence I found of an American writer using the phrase is from December 1803, in the New York Morning Chronicle, house organ of the Aaron Burr faction of the Republican Party. The spelling was “dunder and blixum,” and the author, writing under the pseudonym Dick Buckram, was soon-to-be-famous humorist Washington Irving, the 20-year-old younger brother of the paper’s editor. (The image here is from the Chronicle’s twice-a-week edition for out-of-towners because it’s clearer than the original.)

Here Irving wielded “dunder and blixum” to describe a theatrical representation of thunder and lightning, using words meant to sound Dutch because his story was set in Albany, then still a distinctively Dutch city. Six years later, in his career-making History of New York From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, it was an epithet: “Dunder and blixum! swore the dutchmen, splitter and splutter! cried the Swedes,” is how Irving depicted the 1655 struggle for control of what is now Delaware.

The phrase popped up often in New York newspapers after that, with Irving’s spelling appearing most frequently but lots of other variants making it into print. “Dunder and blixem” was second most common, but most of its occurrences were in reprints of “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” (My tallies rely on incomplete newspaper databases and fallible optical-character-recognition software, so I would guess that there were many more appearances of “dunder and blixum” and its variants than shown in the chart but can at least hope that the relative frequencies are somewhat accurate.)

The third most common spelling, interestingly, was “donner and blitzen.” This was surely due to the popularity of Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott’s 1815 bestseller Guy Mannering, in which a Dutch ship captain repeatedly shouts the phrase. Scott was a fan of Irving’s History. He was also, unlike Clement Clarke Moore, fluent in German, so he may have felt more comfortable with the German words for thunder and lightning than Irving’s Dutch-ish ones. It’s not a phrase an actual Dutch ship captain would have ever uttered.

“Donner und Blitzen” is probably not something a German ship captain would have shouted, either. The phrase isn’t a German expletive (“Donnerwetter,” thunder weather, is the closest thing), and in 1972 a writer for the Hamburg-based weekly Die Zeit deemed it “comical” that so many British and American writers seemed to think it was. “Donder en bliksem” has occasionally been wielded as an expletive in Dutch, but a dictionary of popular usage dates its first appearance to 1926. My search of the Royal Library of the Netherlands’ historical newspaper database turned up hundreds of “donder en blixem” appearances in the 17th and 18th centuries, but as best I can tell they’re all descriptions of weather.

In the 1950s, Cornell University English professor Charles W. Jones credited Washington Irving with inventing Santa Claus by means of the multiple depictions of St. Nicholas in the History. That’s not quite right, as I’ve found a New York newspaper article with a chimney-descending Santa Claus that predates the book, but Irving’s History did spread the word in a big way. Similarly, there were precursors to Irving’s “dunder and blixum,” but use of the phrase and its variants only took off in New York after he popularized them. Were Dutch New Yorkers really in the habit of shouting “Dunder and Blixem!” whenever they “were startled or angry or delighted,” as Foster claimed? Perhaps. But after Washington Irving, non-Dutch New Yorkers definitely got in the habit of depicting their Dutch neighbors as saying that, with varying spellings.

None of this really points to either Livingston or Moore as the likelier author of the poem, but given that the reindeer name changes have been seen as lending significant support to the Livingston cause, that in itself seems like a big deal. Also important to consider is how the poem made its way to Troy. The generally accepted, if not fully documented, account is that Harriet Butler, a family friend of Moore’s, heard him recite the poem in New York City, then copied it down and brought it home to Troy, where she passed it on to a friend who gave it to a local newspaper editor. Livingston’s descendants don’t dispute this; they simply propose that their ancestor wrote the poem in the first decade of the 19th century, after which the text somehow made its way to Moore.

There were so many opportunities for inadvertent word and spelling changes in this chain of transmission that it seems ridiculous to put much weight on them in judging the poem’s authorship. Moore might have started out with reindeer named Donner and Blitzen, showing Scott’s influence, or Dunder and Blixum following Irving, or Donder and Blixem on the advice of his wife Eliza, who was of partly Dutch ancestry (and was Henry Livingston Jr.’s third cousin twice removed). Then Butler might have changed the spelling in writing down the poem, or there may have been a typesetting error in Troy. The rationale for switching to a name that rhymed with Vixen is obvious, and Moore was enough of a detail freak that he may have been bothered by the made-up word Blixen. In a New York that by 1855 had the third-largest German population of any city on earth, pairing the Dutch Donder with the German Blitzen might have seemed an elegant solution.

Or not. We don’t know exactly why the wording changed the way it did, and we don’t know with absolute certainty who wrote the poem. But after this exploration of Dunder, Blixem and their descendants, I’m now up to 97.5 percent sure it was Moore.

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”