Deer That Know How to Fly

         “The Christmas Song,” aka “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire,” written in 1945 by Robert Wells and Mel Tormé famously asks “if reindeer really know how to fly.”  The popular idea of Santa Claus riding in a sled pulled by flying reindeer goes back to the 1823 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”  It’s unclear where credited author Clement Clark Moore came up with this concept - Santa Claus/St. Nicholas had been known to use goats, donkeys, and horses in various other traditions.  There is an illustration of the sleigh with one reindeer in an American children’s booklet from 1821, so perhaps publisher W.B. Gilley or his anonymous

writer made it up.  At the very least Moore certainly popularized the idea of flying reindeer.  To brush up on this enormously influential fantasy poem, revisit my prior post about “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”  Rudolph, by the way, didn’t join the team until 1939, the invention of the Montgomery Ward department store’s marketing team.

        The Christmas reindeer fly by purely magical levitation, since they don’t have wings or any other physical means of flight — but reindeer are not the only deer that know how to fly.  Let’s consider the peryton, a winged deer described by Jorge Luis Borges in his Book of Imaginary Beings (1957).  (You can read my review of The Book of Imaginary Beings in this post on Creature Collections.)  Borges claimed that the peryton was mentioned in a medieval manuscript, and you will occasionally find it listed in various sources as genuine medieval folklore.  There is a

fourteenth century depiction of a winged stag in an armorial list, but in fact, however, Borges seems to have made up the peryton himself, slyly slipping it in amongst the genuine mythical and metaphysical beasts he was discussing.

        If a peryton were simply a winged deer, however, that wouldn’t be anything too remarkable in the realm of fantasy creatures.  (Read my post on Flight to consider how slapping a pair of wings on any normally earthbound animals immediately makes them a fantasy marvel.)  Perhaps the strangest thing about the peryton is that despite being shaped like a bird-deer hybrid, its shadow is shaped like a human.  That is, until it kills a human, after which its shadow becomes a proper winged-deer-shape.  This makes it sound considerably more sinister,  and Borges claimed they were mortal foes of humans.  Many fantasy worlds, such as Dungeons & Dragons, have cast the peryton as a monster.  Much better to have reindeer than perytons landing on your roof in the night!

        The exact appearance of this species is somewhat in question, however.  Although many sources depict it looking like an ordinary deer with ordinary wings, some give it the front half of a stag and the back half (including wings) of a bird, like the hippalectryon.  Borges’s own description gives it the body of a bird, with wings and tail, but the head and all four legs of the stag.  I actually couldn’t find any illustrations that seemed exactly right to me.

        Finally, perytons’ original native habitat was Atlantis.  They escaped the destruction of Atlantis (about which you can read in this prior post) by flying, which makes me wonder what other flying Atlantean wonders might also have survived.

        Are there any other magical flying deer species in the Realms of Imagination?  I can’t think of any - except the 20th century (now retired) winged springbok* logo of South African Airways - but I certainly wouldn’t be surprised to learn of some.  Can you think of any creatures that fit the category?  (*Yes, I know antelope and deer belong to different families, but I think they play similar ecological and cultural roles, so I’m counting them as the same broad category for purposes of fantasy!)

[Pictures: Santa with his reindeer, postcard from 1906 (Image from Sandra Lee’s Shoppe on ebay);

Santa and his reindeer, colored engraving by Arthur J Stansbury(?) from The Children’s Friend, Number III, 1821 (Image from Yale University Beineke Library);

Winged white stag of Charles VI, illumination from Songe du vieil pèlerin by Philippe de Mézières, c. 1390 (Image from La France pittoresque);

Perytons, image by BlueFrackle(?) (Image from Fandom);

Flying Springbok, South African Airways logo, 1948.]