reindeer

Reindeer, Rangifer tarandus, are a species of deer native to the arctic and subarctic of Europe, Siberia, and North America. The word is a borrowing from the Scandinavian languages—it’s hreindýri in Old Icelandic and rendjur in Swedish. (The usual word in Swedish is simply ren, but rendjur is an older form.) The first element of reindeer is from the Germanic root rein, which is of uncertain origin, but is likely a reference to the creature’s antlers. Deer is a Germanic root meaning animal or beast, which only later specialized to mean the species of ruminant mammals. So the original, literal meaning of reindeer was likely “horned beast.”

The word makes one appearance in Old English, in an account of a voyage to Norway that is found in the translation of Orosius’s history. It is not so much an example of an Old English name for the creature as it is the use of a foreign word:

Þa deor hi hatað “hranas”; þara wæron syx stælhranas, ða beoð swyðe dyre mid Finnum, for ðæm hy foð þa wildan hranas mid.

(They call those deer “rein[deer]”; six of them were decoy-rein[deer], which are very dear to the Finns, for they catch the wild rein[deer] with them.)

The hran in this passage is an Anglicization of hrein.

This early use of the word did not catch on, however, and it doesn’t appear again in English until the fifteenth century, when it appears c. 1440 in the Alliterative Morte Arthure:

Than they roode by þat ryuer þat rynnyd so swythe,
Þare þe ryndez ouerrechez with reall bowghez;
The roo and þe raynedere reklesse thare ronnen,
In ranez and in rosers, to ryotte þam seluen.

(Then they rode by that river that ran so swiftly;
There the trees reached over with stately boughs;
There the roe deer and the reindeer ran reckless there,
In bushes and in roses to amuse themselves.)

The shorter form rein, without the -deer, was also common in English once, but has faded from use.

The association of reindeer with Christmas and Santa Claus dates to early nineteenth century New York. It was Clement Moore’s 1823 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” that firmly established the eight reindeer that pulled Santa’s sleigh in the cultural consciousness, but Moore was not the first to depict a reindeer pulling Santa’s sleigh. In 1821, New York printer William Gilley published a booklet that included an anonymous poem with the lines:

Old Santeclaus with much delight
His reindeer drives this frosty night,
O’er chimney tops, and tracks of snow,
To bring his yearly gifts to you.

The drawing accompanying the poem shows a single reindeer pulling Santa’s sleigh. 

Sources:

The Alliterative Morte Arthure. New York: Burt Franklin, 1976, lines 920–23. Lincoln Cathedral 91 (Thornton Manuscript), fols. 53a-98b. Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse. TEAMS has a version with modernized spelling and glossing that’s easier to read.

The Children’s Friend, number 3. “A New-Year’s Present, to the Little Ones from Five to Twelve,” part 3, New York: William B. Gilley, 1821, 1. Yale University: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Dictionary of Old English: A to Le, 2024, s.v. hrān, n.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. rein-der, n.

Orosius. King Alfred’s Orosius, part 1. Henry Sweet, ed. Early English Text Society. London: N. Trübner, 1883, 18. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, third edition, December 2009, s. v. rein, n.2; reindeer, n.

Whipp, Deborah. “The History of Santa’s Reindeer.” Altogetherchristmas.com. n. d.