Flight of the Reindeer Read online

  Who is Philip N. Cronenwett, and how does he know these things with such certainty? He is the director of Special Collections at Dartmouth College’s Baker Library in New Hampshire. Baker’s is, perhaps, the finest collection of Arctic artifact and literature in the country. Cronenwett’s office is just off the dark, oiled-wood Treasure Room, where the library’s most valuable books are kept under lock and key. Cronenwett has read those books, all of them. He has put together the pieces.

  “Santa Claus is two things indisputably—he is an elf, and he is a good man,” says Cronenwett as he leans back in his chair. “I have never been able to learn where he was born, but I do know that his. . . his ‘village’ was originally situated in south-central Greenland. Makes sense, when you think about it, that he used to live somewhere else. I mean, why would anyone choose to live at the North Pole?”

  To support his theories, Cronenwett can cite chapter and verse from great antiquated volumes. ”We have writings from eleventh century Iceland,” he says, not a little proudly. “We have books depicting cave art from eleventh century Canada—or, rather, the region we now call Canada.”

  Cronenwett sketches a chronology of dramatic events: A vast community of elves, led by the one who would come to be known as Saint Nicholas or, more commonly, Santa Claus, was established in Greenland untold centuries ago. It was quite near what is now a small town known as Holsteinborg, and the citizens of Holsteinborg have found many relics from Claus’s first settlement.

  This, of course, fits well with established histories of elfin communities, none of which suggest elves emigrated south from the Pole. In fact, elves probably originated in Iceland, then quite quickly spread to Greenland, Ireland and the northern reaches of the European continent. If you are looking for an elfin Eden—a place of origin for little people—you’d do well to look at the Icelandic town of Hafnarfjördur. Relics found there indicate a veritable beehive of “hidden worlds.” On the outskirts of town, angelic beings are said to dwell on the Hamarinn Cliff and all up and down Mount Asfjall. In town, some twenty different types of elf live (or have lived in past generations). In the western sector, the conical houses of elves proliferate, and in the Tjarnargata district there is a dense community of dwarves. “We have known for a long time of another society coexistent with our human one, a community concealed from most people with its dwellings in many parts of town and in the lava and cliffs that surround it,” says Ingvar Viktorsson, mayor of Hafnarfjördur. “We are convinced that the elves, hidden people and other beings living there are favorably disposed towards us and are as fond of our town as we are.”

  A catalog of hidden beings: In Iceland, all manner of them abound—animal and spiritual.

  The variety and number of souls throughout Hafnarfjördur suggest that here is where it might have started for all the world’s small ones—and that here, indeed, is where Santa Claus’s forebears probably once dwelled. In the Town Hall there are records of who is suspected of living where, and in an afternoon’s visit you can put together an extraordinary census for Hafnarfjördur:

  Elves (in Icelandic, alfar), some twenty types;

  Gnomes (jarodvergar), related to elves but no more than seven inches tall, four types;

  Lovelings (ljuflingar), the size of ten-year-old children, usually live behind hedgerows and in woodlands, at least two types;

  Light-fairies (ljosalfar), resembling angels but tinier, dwelling near lakes, one type;

  Dwarves (dvergar), squat creatures the size of three-year-old humans, six types including the temperamental beings and the sweet-natured ones;

  Angels (englar), as many as a dozen types, to the very highest illuminations;

  Mountain Spirits (tivar), one type—but this one, living on Asfjall, is said by those who’ve seen it to be the most radiant anywhere in the world.

  Clearly, Hafnarfjördur has long been a fertile, nurturing place for what some call “the wee people.” A last point to be made, before returning to the community led by Santa Claus, is this: The citizens of Hafnarfjördur, hidden and nonhidden, have longstanding traditions of good community relations, serenity, generosity and industriousness. These are, of course, qualities often associated with Santa Claus generally, and specifically with The Christmas Mission.

  WE DON’T KNOW WHEN the Claus clan emigrated from Iceland to Greenland, but we do know that Santa Claus’s “village” in Greenland was a thriving town, and that its main concentration was manufacturing. For nearly a thousand years, from the earliest period A.D. until the turn of the first millennium, the centerpiece of this society was its annual Mission, a fantastic one-night global voyage, the intent of which was, from the first, to bring cheer to the world’s least fortunate. “We know of this intent from the testimony Will Steger brought back from the North Pole in 1986,” says Cronenwett. “What an extraordinary thing—a first-hand interview with Claus. A meeting with the elves! A tour of the village. I’ve always been deeply envious.”

  Steger tells us—because Santa Claus told him—that near the end of the first millennium the elves fled Greenland.

  History tells us why.

  In the 10th century, human beings—Inuit, Sami, Lapp—started to drift onto Greenland from Iceland, Labrador and elsewhere. Whether their presence was of any concern to Claus’s elf community is unclear, but it seems Santa Claus has always been less wary of northernfolk than of Europeans, for whatever reasons.

  In the year 982 a Viking chieftain in Iceland named Eric the Red was convicted of certain crimes, and was sent into exile for three years. His banishment took him to Greenland. On returning to his homeland, he began to sing the praises of this other, larger isle. He urged colonization, and in the spring of 986, twenty-five ships headed across the Greenland Sea laden with fowl, farm animals and 750 Icelanders. The passage was treacherous, and only fourteen ships survived. But a foothold had been gained, and in the next few years thousands of Icelanders joined their Norse kinfolk in the Osterbygd, or “eastern settlement.”

  In European art, flying animals are prevalent. The Italian woodcut, circa 1500, shows a dragon pulling a sleigh, while the 19th century Norwegian print depicts men stunned by deer.

  Word of this seeped inland, and Santa Claus decided that his own small nation had to be moved. Elves can live five thousand years, but only if they are left unharmed. They are so small and so docile by nature that they present no match for humans.

  Claus acted quickly and forcefully when he learned of a European presence on the island, says Cronenwett. He moves from his office into the Treasure Room where, from a glass case, he takes two mammoth volumes bound in leather—Journals of the Osterbygd. “Look here,” he says as he leafs through the ancient pages. “You can’t read the words because they’re in Old Icelandic, but in translation this page recounts, ‘Activity to the west. . . Eskimo? Elves?. . . Night movement sighted by scouting parties?’ And over here. . .” He turns several more pages. “This says, in translation, that the Vikings found an intact, absolutely abandoned city of five miles square, a city that would have housed people less than half their own size. You see? I think what this means is, Eric’s men found Santa’s first village! But they were too late. The whole Claus nation was able to beat it out of there before the Vikings swooped down. It’s one of the great reconnaissances in history.”

  Einar Gustavsson, a native of the northern Iceland village of Siglufjördur and an expert translator of Old Icelandic, has read the ancient texts and has worked hard to visualize this first escape of Santa Claus. In relating the tale, he propounds an extraordinary thesis, one that instantly alters what we know of western history. “They traveled overland by dogsled, then oversea by boats,” says Gustavsson during an interview in Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland. “This is not to mention overhead, via scores of provision-packed sleds pulled by the flying reindeer. The entire village simply pulled up stakes—poof!—and fled westward. Santa Claus was then, as he is today, the most knowledgeable navigator on earth. It’s clear that he plotted ev
ery latitude and longitude from the air centuries before any Europeans got around to mapping the face of the earth—that amazing route map they found in Norway in 1654 proves it. Therefore, he knew exactly where he was going. His people made landfall in what is now Labrador in Canada, then went south and set up an elfin city in what is now called Goose Bay. It’s interesting that this was the only time Santa Claus ever headed south—he’s certainly a north-bearing man. But what I find much more interesting is this: If you consider Santa Claus a European, as we Icelanders do, then you must consider him—not Leif Ericsson and certainly not Christopher Columbus—to be the very first from the Old World to discover the New!”

  Two runners-up: Leif Ericsson (left) thought he was the first European in the New World when he came ashore at Baffin Island in 1001, and Christopher Columbus (below) thought he was first when he reached the Bahamas in 1492.

  LEIF WOULD NOT BE FAR BEHIND. Eric the Red’s son became, in the year 1000, the first Viking to view the mainland of North America. And to be viewed in turn. From the harbor where his commune was taking root, Santa Claus saw Ericsson’s ships. He knew what he had to do.

  “Leaving Labrador for the Arctic was the only option available,” says Cronenwett. “He must have known the only place in the whole world where he would be left alone was on the polar ice cap. And he knew that his elves were the only beings on the planet who could survive where there was no place to grow food—no ground, no soil, nothing. How? The flying deer would allow them to establish an operation that imported food! My guess is that Santa knew that whatever provisions they needed in those difficult early years could be scavenged at night throughout Europe, Asia and North America by reindeer-riding elves, who would then fly back to the Pole. In a way, they were the original homeless people of the northern world. Until they got the village up and running, they basically lived on scraps.”

  “Elves are tiny, their reindeer are tiny, their city is tiny. This is why they’re so seldom seen.”

  – ORAN YOUNG, Arctic Institute director and hiddenworld historian

  The exodus of elves to the North Pole was a difficult one, over the windswept hills of Baffin and Ellesmere Islands, and finally to the Arctic cap. There, in the late spring of 1001, the elves saw the great ice of the far northern Atlantic start to break up behind them, giving way to open, frigid, impassable water. Fatal water. They looked back from their new, eternally floating homeland on the ice and knew that they had severed ties forever with all earthly continents.

  Except. . . They hadn’t. For decades they came each night for food. And, of course, once a year, every year, they—or at least he—returned to carry out the extraordinary Mission that was theirs and theirs alone. The assignment—given to them by God knows who—was to provide Christmas each 24th and 25th of December. Through struggle and courage they found the one perfect place in the wide world from which to do it.

  CERTAINLY, Claus could not have made good his flight were it not for a number of factors peculiar to him and his people. First, they’re very small.2 And elfin communities are known to be as stealthy as any the world has ever produced—stealthier by far than societies of gnomes or dwarves. Claus’s people, in particular, seem blessed with an uncanny ability to travel largely undetected (which is not to say unseen) and to leave few tracks. “Now you glimpse ’em, now you don’t,” says Oran Young, a colleague and good friend of Cronenwett’s at Dartmouth and head of the college’s Institute of Arctic Studies. “All northernfolk know they’re up there. There’s mountains and mountains of circumstantial evidence, and tons of lore that borders on fact. But if you say to the Inuit or the Sami, ‘Prove it!’ not many of them can. They say, ‘Well, I saw this,’ or ‘I saw that,’ but not a lot of them will say, ‘Look at this here elf’s cap!’ Claus and his colleagues are superb at covering their footprints. The only reason we can speak of them with any certainty is the cumulative record built over two millennia, and bits of first-hand evidence like Steger’s.”

  The elves’ size is advantageous in other ways as well. They have a unique metabolism, and need precious little food to generate enormous amounts of energy; Santa Claus certainly factored this in when he made the hard choice to head for the barren, foodless North Pole. Still, they eventually would have starved without the big factor. We’re refering to flight, of course.

  Flight is the salient point, the essential ingredient. Santa Claus’s was the first of all the world’s communities to be gifted with the ability to fly. Were it not for their tiny reindeer, they couldn’t have reached the Pole, they couldn’t have thrived at the Pole. Were it not for the reindeer, all that we know about Santa Claus would be contained in weathered Norse history books. Were it not for the reindeer, the elf nation that brings us Christmas might have ended long ago in Greenland.

  But it did not—because of Santa Claus, because of his people’s courage. And because of the reindeer.

  “ There is reindeer cave art in Australia, in Africa, in South America. You tell me how it got there! ”

  – CARLTON PLUMMER, art professor emeritus and collector of cave paintings

  NOT JUST ANY REINDEER. The deer in question is a certain species, Rangifer tarandus pearyi—the Peary caribou. These are “the little ones” spoken of by the Inuit of Kuujjuaq.3

  First, we must understand that caribou and reindeer are essentially the same animal. The Old World reindeer is the same as the New World caribou, genetically speaking. There are woodland and barren-ground reindeer, and there are several subspecies of each. The biggest woodland animals stand about as high as a man’s shoulder and weigh 600 pounds or more; the smallest barren-ground reindeer look like big dogs with horns and weigh only about 150 pounds. Most reindeer have coats that are brown on top and white on the underbelly, but one particular subspecies is snow-white in color. These are the smallest, most northern, most purely white reindeer on the face of the earth. And while other reindeer can fly, it is these that fly best, farthest, fastest.

  How old is the Peary? That’s impossible to say. The first deer of any kind appeared about ten million years ago in the Pliocene Epoch, but whether Peary were among the early species is uncertain. “Mankind has been on the earth for only several thousand years,” says Bil Gilbert, the esteemed natural history writer. “We know the Peary is much older than man. More we cannot say. But he’s a feisty animal, compact, hard to see and hard to hunt—not least because he can just take off and fly away. So I would suspect he’s probably been around and thriving for a good long while.”

  Gilbert, relaxing by the stream that passes behind his ranch in Fairfield, Pennsylvania, continues: “The Peary is a fine, peaceful animal—a credit to the plan-et. Humankind, throughout our own brief history, has always related positively to the Peary in particular, and to all reindeer generally. You can tell from all the cave art.” Indeed, in his definitive book Prehistoric Cave Paintings, Max Raphael writes of drawings made many centuries ago in Les Combarelles, France: “The horses are repeatedly represented as hostile to the bison and bulls: the reindeer as friendly to mammoths. . . . Everywhere the reindeer live a bright cheerful idyll, just as the bison live a stormy drama.” The images in Raphael’s book show buoyant reindeer that look to be dancing or, perhaps, flying.

  “Sure, there’s all sorts of iconography indicating reindeer flight,” says Carlton Plummer, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. Plummer is a painter himself, and an expert on primitive art. “But what you have to do is separate representations of myth from realistic interpretations. Were those ancient people in France drawing what they truly saw, or just what they believed? Were they journalists or mythmongers?” He pauses, then adds quietly, “Of course, there have been many, many flying-reindeer finds in the Southern Hemisphere too, and that’s the rub. The reindeer is an Arctic animal—strictly Northern Hemisphere—so how would people down there have known of it back in ancient times? I mean, of course, unless they saw one. And how could they have seen one, unless . . . . Well, unless one h
ad flown over!”

  A reindeer on a rock wall in southwestern France, painted by the Lascaux artists sometime between 12,000 and 30,000 years ago, clearly shows the animal in an attitude of liftoff.

  LET US BE CONSERVATIVE and say that, on the evidence of cave paintings, man has been thinking about flying reindeer for at least 5,000 years. That’s fine, because our interest is in the Santa Claus story, and that is a story which, it appears, extends back only 2,000 years. So by the time Claus and his people started making their efforts known to the rest of the planet, reindeer flight was a commonly regarded phenomenon.

  And then, suddenly, in the earliest years A.D., gifts started falling from the sky. “It’s almost a footnote to history,” says Forrest Church, pastor of All Souls Church in New York City and author of Everyday Miracles and several other books about religion. “This is the mysterygifts phenomenon that occurred in Africa and southwestern Asia back then. Those were the only cultures on Earth with reliable chroniclers, and when you read their reports about these strange visitations, you develop an odd impression—that this was just an incidental thing to these writers, a very small thing.”