Encyclopedia of Trivia

Santa's reindeer were introduced in the poem "A Visit From St Nicholas" written by Clement Clarke Moore in 1823. He named eight reindeer. Rudolph was only added in 1939.

Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, was created in 1939, in Chicago, for the Montgomery Ward department stores for a Christmas promotional booklet. The lyrics were written as a poem by Robert May, but weren't set to music until 1947. Gene Autry recorded the hit song in 1949.

Promotional booklet cover of the original story by Robert L. May. Wikipedia

The original Rankin-Bass holiday favorite Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer first aired Sunday, December 6, 1964 on NBC.  It is currently the longest running Christmas special on US television.

Rudolph is copyrighted - Chuck Berry had to pay up when he wrote a rock song about the famous reindeer ("Run Rudolph Run").

The idea of ‘Rudolph The Red Nosed-Reindeer’ having a bright red nose was originally rejected as a red nose is a signifier of chronic alcoholism.

Rudolph's nose would actually be useful to Santa's reindeer—their ultraviolet winter vision would be rendered useless by fog.


Rudolph should probably be depicted without antlers as male reindeer shed theirs in winter.

The best-known and probably the most often used book among the scriptures is the Book of Psalms. They are a collection of poetic hymns and prayers dating from various periods in the history of Israel. The collection was assembled so that it could be conveniently used at worship services.

Scroll of the Psalms. By Pete unseth - Wikipedia

The Psalms were written not merely as poems, but as songs for singing. More than a third of the psalms are addressed to the Director of Music.

The word 'psalm' literally means 'twang' or 'pluck', referring to the stringed instruments that were used to accompany the singing of psalms.

David Playing the Harp by Jan de Bray, 1670.

The book of Psalms contains 150 of the poetic hymns and songs and prayers. It is the longest book in the Bible.

King David is traditionally reckoned on having written 73 of the 150 Psalms in the Bible. These songs and prayers stand out as great poetry. They spotlight the heights and depths of human experience. "The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want. He lays me down in pastures green" he wrote in the famous Psalm 23.

An 1880 Baxter process illustration of Psalm 23, from the Religious Tract Society's magazine The Sunday at Home

The biblical poetry of Psalms uses parallelism as its primary poetic device. Parallelism is a kind of rhyme, in which an idea is developed by the use of repetition, synonyms, or opposites Synonymous parallelism involves two lines expressing essentially the same idea. An example of synonymous parallelism:

The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? 
The LORD is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? 
(Psalm 27:1)

The Psalms contain several prophecies that were later fulfilled in Jesus' lifetime. One example is Psalm 22 16-18 in which David gave an amazingly accurate description of the suffering the Messiah would endure hundreds of years later on the cross:

"Dogs have surrounded me. A band of evil men have encircled me, they have pierced my hands and my feet. I count all my bones: people stare and gloat over me. They divide my garments among them and cast lots for my clothing.”

When David wrote in verse 16 "they have pierced my hands and feet" he was prophesying the crucifixion centuries before the Romans introduced it. Two verses later he prophesies: "They divide my garments among them and cast lots for my clothing" predicting the custom of Roman soldiers, referred to in the Gospel passage, of dividing up the clothing of executed criminals among themselves.

When Augustine of Hippo lay dying, he had the penitential psalms copied onto parchment and attached to the wall of his bedroom so he can read them during his last hours.

In 1640 Pilgrim settlers in Massachusetts published the first book in America, the Bay Psalm Book, which were metrical translations of psalms into English. Thirty learned and devout ministers translated them from the original Hebrew.

Title page of the Bay Psalm Book.

Matthew Maury (January 14, 1806 – February 1, 1873) used Psalm 8 as a guide when he discovered ocean currents in the 19th century At one time, when Maury was in bed recovering from a badly broken leg, he asked one of his daughters to fetch his Bible and read to him. She chose Psalm 8, the eighth verse of which speaks of "whatsoever walketh through the paths of the sea," he repeated "the paths of the sea, the paths of the sea, if God says the paths of the sea, they are there, and if I ever get out of this bed I will find them."

As soon as he was strong enough, Maury began his deep sea soundings and he found that two ridges extended from the New York coast to England. In 1847 he published the Wind and Current Chart of the North Atlantic, which showed sailors how to use the ocean's currents and winds to their advantage and drastically reduced the length of ocean voyages.

Charles Lindbergh's gravestone epitaph quotes Psalms 139:9, It reads: “Charles A. Lindbergh Born: Michigan, 1902. Died: Maui, 1974. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea.”

The Epic of Gilgamesh is an epic poem from ancient Mesopotamia that is often regarded as the earliest surviving great work of literature. The essential story is about the relationship between 'Bilgamesh' (Sumerian for 'Gilgamesh'),, a king who has become distracted and disheartened by his rule, and a friend, Enkidu, who is half-wild and who undertakes dangerous quests with Gilgamesh.

The literary history of Gilgamesh begins with five Sumerian poems about Bilgamesh, king of Uruk, dating from the Third Dynasty of Ur (circa 2100 BC). These independent stories were later used as source material for a combined epic. The first surviving version of this combined epic, known as the "Old Babylonian" version, dates to the 18th century BC.

Partially broken tablet V of the Epic of Gilgamesh

Poetry in ancient Greek literature was accompanied by the lyre. It could be sung by an individual (monody) or by a chorus accompanied by dance as well as music, composed for a religious festival.

The choral performances of Greek poetry, together with the song and dance in the ceremonies honoring Dionysus in Athens, laid the foundations for the Greek theatre, both tragedy and comedy.

Around 600 BC Sappho and Alcaeus, both living on the island of Lesbos, composed lyric poetry to celebrate their emotions and concerns; remarkable fragments of their work survive.

The longest poem in the world is the Mahābhārata, a Hindu text. It's literally 5 times the length of the Bible and the Iliad and the Odyssey combined! It has 220,000 verses and about 1.8 million words, The bulk of the Mahābhārata was probably compiled between the 3rd century BC and the 3rd century AD, with the oldest preserved parts not much older than around 400 BC.

The first great English epic poem, Beowulf, was written in Old English in c750. An anonymous and untitled work until 1805, it was a Christian poem that exemplified early medieval society in England and exhibited roots that reach back to Old Testament laws.

The first folio of the heroic epic poem Beowulf, written primarily in the West Saxon dialect of Old English

The well known lullaby "Hush-a-bye baby, on the tree top", is said to have been the first English poem written on American soil, when a boy that sailed with the Pilgrim Fathers was inspired by the natives' custom of propping babies cradles in tree tops.

The Kyrgyz oral poem, the Epic of Manas, is the world’s longest poem, 20 times longer than the Odyssey, and has been recognized by Unesco as intangible cultural heritage. Manas is a traditional epic poem dating to the 18th century but claimed by the Kyrgyz people to be much older.

A traditional Kyrgyz manaschi performing part of the epic poem at a yurt camp in Karakol

"If -" was written by British writer Rudyard Kipling in 1895 and first appeared in print in his 1910 collection of short stories and poems, Rewards and Fairies.

Kipling modeled his ideal on the character of the British colonial statesman Dr Jameson, who in 1896 led the Jameson Raid in South Africa in support of the non-Boer colonists there, in an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the government. Despite his failure, the British press considered Jameson to be a hero in the midst of a disaster.

"If -" was voted the UK's favorite poem in a 1995 poll of BBC listeners.

Some consider it to be the world's most successful poem, having been translated into 27 languages.

Every year there is a national poetry and singing competition called the Eisteddfod in which individuals and choirs from all over Wales participate.

The first eisteddfod was held in Cardigan, Wales in 1176.

The present-day format owes much to an eighteenth-century revival arising out of a number of informal eisteddfodau. Its eight days of competitions and performances, entirely in the Welsh language, are staged annually in the first week of August, usually alternating between north and south Wales.

The National Eisteddfod of Wales is the largest festival of competitive music and poetry in Europe.

The closest English equivalent to eisteddfod is "session"; the word is formed from two Welsh morphemes: eistedd, meaning "sit", and bod, meaning "be.”

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