The Narrator
The poem is a first-person narrative recounted by an unnamed speaker. All that is known about him for sure is that he is married, has young children, enjoys an elevated appreciate of the whimsical and absurd, and is not a gun-toting, “stand your ground” paranoid lunatic. If the events he is describing are to be believed, the consequences had he been that sort of person could have turned dire indeed: he is describing nothing more than less than a breaking and entering of his own home.
The Old Man aka St. Nick aka Santa Claus aka Father Christmas
The illegal entry of the narrator’s house through the questionable and quite shady entry point of the chimney on a snowy winter night should by all rights inspire a bit of paranoia or at least an alarm in the narrator since the loud arrival of the intruder actually wakes him from the sleep into which he has just then fallen. Having hear a loud noise on his lawn, the narrator peeks through an opened window and provides an eyewitness account to what surely seems the preface to a criminal act: a fat old man whose means of transport is a sleigh requiring the horsepower—as it were—of no less than eight reindeer. The narrator will go to identify the man dressed all in fur and carrying a large sack as Saint Nicholas who has been known to widely operate under the alias Santa Claus, among others.
Dunder and Blixem
In its original form published anonymously in 1823, six of the eight reindeer bear names which have never been altered, but two of the names are variations of the popularly known names of Santa’s reindeer, both of which have undergone at least three different iterations in the public consciousness. The final two deer named by St. Nick which the narrator hears are “Dunder and Blixem.” Over time, Blixem was transformed into Blixen in what appears to be a concerted attempt to perfect the rhyme with Vixen. Subsequently, the name was once again altered to allow for a more aesthetic fusion: “Dunder and Blitzen” subtly creates imagery thunder and lightning which contextualizes the reindeer’s ability to fly somewhat. The slight alteration from Dunder to Donder may trace to a translation or simply a printing error, but the modern-day misapprehension that the name of this reindeer is Donner is likely a simple case of
