Next Time You Visit The Library Write Down The Titles Of Three Biographies You Would: Fill & Download for Free

This is the story of a forgotten woman.…But the reason why she’s forgotten might be an understandable one.…But maybe she’s worth remembering anyway.I dunno.You be the judge.In her lifetime she was a bestselling author, whose second novel was taken seriously enough by a British prime minister that he wrote a 10,000-word negative review of it.She was, for several years, a towering figure in the culture of her time, late Victorian and Edwardian England. She was friends with Theodore Roosevelt and Henry James.She was a serious and ambitious writer, a public intellectual, whose works sold hundreds of thousands of copies.She also worked for good causes, like the education of the poor, and founded what was basically Britain’s first kindergarten.She lived long enough to visit the Western Front in World War 1, and report on it.But she doesn’t show up in popular books about goodnight stories for rebel girls, or celebrations of great women in history.Not simply because people haven’t heard of her; but because those who do know about her, are aware that, frankly, she kind of wasn’t a rebel girl.Still, I’m willing to bet that most of you have not heard of her, or that if you have, all you know is her rather strange pen-name.Dear friends.It’s my melancholy pleasure to introduce Mary Augusta Ward.Known to her contemporaries, and to posterity, as Mrs Humphry Ward (1851–1920.)Mary Ward, c. 1890.She was born Mary Arnold in Tasmania, then known as Van Diemen’s Land, where her father Tom was an Inspector of Schools at the time. His father had been Thomas Arnold, the legendary headmaster of Rugby public school, which meant that Tom’s brother, the poet and critic Matthew Arnold, was Mary’s uncle.When Mary was very small, Tom Arnold did something that would turn out to have a lasting influence on his eldest daughter.He converted to Catholicism.This made his position as a school inspector untenable, and in 1856, the family, which by then included Mary’s two surviving younger brothers Willie and Theodore, moved to England.Five-year-old Mary was left at the family home with her grandmother and aunt, while her mother, father and brothers went to Dublin, where he’d been made a tutor at the new Catholic university.In 1858, seven-year-old Mary was sent to boarding school.In 1861, ten-year-old Mary was sent to another boarding school.In 1865, she was sent to another boarding school, the rest of the family having moved in the meantime to Oxford. Her father had converted back to Anglicanism again. (He would later re-convert back to Catholicism.)In Oxford, she finally went to live with her family, after nine years of being away from them. She had, in the meantime, acquired five new siblings.The young Mary Arnold was apparently quite a firecracker. She was frequently disciplined at school for unruly behaviour, and her modern biographer John Sutherland notes that at the age of 14, she seems to have fallen seriously in love with one of her teachers, Miss May, a passion she later wrote about in her 1894 novel Marcella, where Miss May appears as ‘Miss Pemberton’:A tall slender woman with brown, grey-besprinkled hair falling in light curls after the fashion of our grandmothers on either cheek, and braided into a classic knot behind—the face of a saint, an enthusiast—eyes overflowing with feeling above a thin firm mouth—the mouth of the obstinate saint, yet sweet also: this delicate significant picture was stamped on Marcella's heart. What tremors of fear and joy could she not remember in connection with it? what night-vigils when a tired girl kept herself through long hours awake that she might see at last the door open and a figure with a night-lamp standing an instant in the doorway?Maybe it’s just the literary conventions she worked within, but her fiction retains a lot more enthusiasm for female beauty than for the male version. Mary Ward’s men are seldom very vividly described, but she lingers over the physical appearance of her female characters.Miss May wasn’t the only woman that Mary was attracted to. Years later, as a young married woman in her early thirties, she met and, according to her memoirs, ‘fell in love with’ the beautiful Laura Tennant, a young socialite, ‘one of the most ravishing creatures I have ever seen’. Laura Tennant married Alfred Lyttleton and died in childbirth aged 24.To the best of my knowledge, little to nothing has been made of the queer figurations that are in Mary Ward’s writing; nobody cares enough about her work to want to.But anyway, Victorian society soon taught her to suppress any tendencies to unruly behaviour or same-sex passion.She was unlucky in her education, and she knew it.She went to school when primary schools in England were almost entirely unregulated, the Elementary Education Bill of 1870 being some years off, and for the rest of her life she resented the fact that her shiftless younger brother Willie got a better education at Rugby than she’d received, simply because he was a boy.In Oxford, although she wasn’t a student, the adults around her recognised that she was intelligent. She got much encouragement from male educators such as the Rector of Lincoln College, Mark Pattison, who almost certainly fancied teenage Mary (he had a well-known thing for much younger women), and who obtained permission for her to browse undisturbed in the lower parts of the Bodleian Library. She later remembered those times of reading old (and new) books as among the happiest of her life.Mark Pattison, livin’ the dream, as you can see.Through Pattison, she met George Eliot, arguably the greatest English novelist of the era, and sat at the great woman’s feet, imbibing her wisdom.Slowly, Mary Arnold began to try her hand at writing, and to think of herself as someone who had something to say.In 1871 she met Humphry Ward, a Fellow at Brasenose College, and they formed what used to be called an ‘understanding’.I would show you a picture of Humphry, but I’ll explain later why I have not.In 1872, Humphry and Mary got married. She was only 20.Mary Ward in her wedding gown, aged 20: photograph by Lewis Carroll.Over the next ten years, the Wards attempted to establish themselves as a couple of some substance in Oxford society.Mary got herself established as a journalist and columnist, writing pieces for The Times, the Saturday Review, the Pall Mall Gazette and other periodicals.She had three children, Arnold, Julia and Dorothy.Dorothy went on to become her mother’s devoted assistant and disciple.Julia, who loved her mother but was no stooge, married George Macaulay Trevelyan, who would go on to write the 1944 classic English Social History, and Julia herself would write her mother’s first biography.Of Arnold…we will talk later.In 1881 Mary wrote a children’s book, Milly and Olly, which she published under the married name that she would use for the rest of her life.In 1884 she published her first novel for adults, Miss Bretherton. Neither book exactly set the world on fire.By the late 1880s, Mary and Humphry Ward were a couple with a young family who had great ambitions for themselves, but were getting basically nowhere, socially and professionally speaking.It didn’t help that Humphry, who the society of the time would have considered the natural achiever of the family, was a right glass of warm water, failing to distinguish himself in most of the things he attempted. He lacked…vim. He behaved as though opportunities ought to just come to him. They didn’t.However, in Victorian England this was not necessarily an obstacle to a chap’s advancement, as long as he was well-spoken and had been to the right college, which Humphry had.In 1882, Humphry got a permanent position as art critic of The Times, where over the next few decades he earned a place in art history as the critic whose finger was absolutely not on the pulse of the most exciting things in modern art. The story was told that he once told the painter James Whistler what he thought was good and bad about his work. In response, Whistler was crushing as he only could be:My dear fellow, you must never say this painting is good and that is bad. Good and bad are not terms to be used by you. Say ‘I like this and I don’t like that’ and you’ll be within your right. And now come and have some whisky. You’re sure to like that.It’s now time for me to explain why I haven’t decorated this answer with a picture of Humphry.If you do a google image search for ‘humphry ward’, there are no pictures of him.Only of his far more productive and talented wife.In 1885 Mary sold her planned but as yet unwritten second novel Robert Elsmere to the publisher Smith, Elder & Co.It took her three more years to actually write it, and it was only published after George Smith, her publisher, had asked that it be cut down from its original enormous length.In the course of writing it, she suffered a serious physical breakdown and developed the writer’s cramp that she’d suffer from for the rest of her life.But when Robert Elsmere was finally published, it sold over a million copies.What is Robert Elsmere about, and why did it sell so well?Robert Elsmere is, as you can see, a novel of heroic dimensions. The above is the original three-volume library edition. My paperback copy, a reprint of the one-volume sale edition, has 576 pages.In brief: in the wild fells of Westmoreland (present-day Cumbria) lives the fragile widow Mrs Leyburn and three daughters: beautiful, pious and dutiful Catherine; sarky, sexy, violin-playing Rose; and the reserved and sardonic Agnes (who, if this were a contemporary novel, would probably be the protagonist.) The late Mr Leyburn was hella pious, and drummed into his children the importance of duty above all else, but Catherine’s the only one who really internalised the lesson.Early on, we are introduced to the title character, Robert Elsmere, the local rector, a young, passionate, intellectual red-headed bloke who’s committed to good works. He falls hard for one of the Leyburn girls.Is it Rose, the most entertaining one? No! It’s Catherine, the boring one! Never mind, because although Catherine Leyburn is devoted to doing what her father wanted to do, even at the expense of her own happiness, she’s not a total cipher, a mere straw woman of duty and piety. Much against every inch of her religious upbringing, she finds herself falling in love with Elsmere, and the enormous first third of the novel ends with them getting married.In the second part of the novel, we join Robert and Catherine Elsmere in his parish in Surrey, where he’s visited by his old tutor Langham, a rather cynical freethinker. Langham, for his part, starts to get all quivery in the presence of Rose, who for her part finds him Byronic and fascinating with all his talk of, um, ‘thought’.But the real meat of the novel is in the conflict between Elsmere and the local squire, Mr Wendover.Wendover is a bitter and sarcastic old man with a fantastic library full of German philosophy. He’s allowed his agent Henslowe let the estate fall to ruin, with tenants living in hovels, because he lives for his hobby of study and reading and ain’t give a damn about charity. Elsmere manages to persuade Wendover to see for himself just how crappy his tenants’ lives are, whereupon Wendover overcomes his distaste for the good-working clergyman and becomes more friendly.However, the middle of the novel is taken up with Elsmere’s confrontation with Wendover, in which Wendover’s corrosive scepticism ends up destroying Elsmere’s faith. Robert Elsmere ceases to believe that Jesus did miracles, was the son of God, was resurrected, etc.And here’s the crucial thing:Mary Ward herself had ceased to believe those things too. Her hours of reading in the Bodleian Library had opened her eyes to the groundbreaking scholarship of the likes of Strauss and Feuerbach.The rest of the novel is the working-out of the consequences, and includes some decent social comedy, and some romance between Rose and Langham, and some fairly heart-rending conflict between Robert and Catherine, who still believes.In the context of late Victorian society, Robert Elsmere cut to the heart of how the public was feeling about religion. It laid out in the most detailed and authentic way just how and why many people were losing their faith.And because it laid these things out in terms that the average reader could immediately grasp, it was a hit.Mary Ward wrote about how she’d been on a train waiting to depart, and a young woman had rushed up to the carriage, having just got the first volume from the library, and was boasting to a friend about it. Mary didn’t reveal that she herself was the author, but sat in the compartment while the young woman devoured the book.Robert Elsmere made her reputation. She was 37 years old.William Ewart Gladstone, who was at the time in between serving a term as British prime minister, read it and couldn’t put it down. He was astounded by what he regarded as its heretical qualities, and decided to write a long review about how dangerous the book was.The result was that the book sold even more copies.After Robert Elsmere, Mrs Humphry Ward wrote another 22 novels. But she never quite reached that level of fame and success again.One of them, 1898’s Helbeck of Bannisdale, is regarded by many people as better than Robert Elsmere, and not just because it’s considerably shorter. (I’ve started it, and my first impression is that it probably is—it’s certainly tighter.)But for the most part, although she often succeeded in getting very lucrative deals for novels such as The Marriage of William Ashe and The Case of Richard Meynell and Diana Mallory, her sales slowly dropped off.And here we have to ask the question:Why did Mary Ward publish her books using her married name, rather than her own?From her very first book, Mary used ‘Mrs Humphry Ward’ as her authorial name.She had a lifelong tendency to form friendships with intellectual men and—this is crucial—seek their approval. Some of this is due to the looming presence in her life of her grandfather, Thomas Arnold, and uncle Matthew.When she wrote anything, she tended to offer it to the men in her life who she regarded as her intellectual superiors, to see if they thought it was okay. She didn’t do this with Robert Elsmere, but she did do it with later works.If they didn’t approve, which happened whenever they thought she was being too controversial, she would tone the book down.Robert Elsmere itself had been even longer in its original draft. Her modern biographer John Sutherland commented that it would have been better if she’d written it as a saga, because the need to cut it down to novel-length meant cutting out a lot of the intellectual disputation, which resulted in a book that was both very long and also curiously underwritten.Mary Ward fairly quickly became the breadwinner in her family, and she was so successful as a writer that she won a lot of bread.But as time went by, she was also consumed by the need to seem successful and respectable. One of her most-used phrases in later life was What will people think?In spite of her reputation in early middle life for religious unorthodoxy (a 1976 book about Robert Elsmere is entitled Victorian Heretic), as she got older, she started to go to church, which she hadn’t done in a long time.She bent over backwards to encourage her husband and son in their professional lives, while not doing the same for her daughters. Humphry dabbled in art collecting, and wasted tons of the money she earned on ‘Rembrandts’ that weren’t Rembrandts. Mary could barely bring herself to mildly tick him off about this.Her son Arnold seems to have been a complete tool. Quarrelsome, arrogant, addicted to gambling and not very talented, he had an undistinguished career in the military and then was a largely insignificant Tory MP. Mary steadily paid off his gambling debts with the profits from novels she pumped out too often; she should have written less and taken more care about her books, but the family always needed money to support the lifestyle it wanted.She did valuable charity work. She helped found Somerville College, one of the first two women’s colleges in Oxford. She went on to found the Passmore Edwards Settlement, an organisation for working with the London poor, and on her death it was renamed the Mary Ward Settlement. It’s now the Mary Ward Centre, an adult education college. The centre’s website does not mention who Mary Ward was.But in 1908, she did the thing that is probably the main reason why she’s not celebrated today.1908 was a year when the women’s suffrage movement was really getting going, and the resistance to it was really hotting up.In that year, Mary was approached by Lord Curzon and the Earl of Cromer and asked if she’d like to be the figurehead of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League.According to her daughter Janet, Mary ‘groaned but acquiesced’.She couldn’t say no to a request for help from powerful men, even if, as in this case, she was supporting something as transparently boneheaded as the anti-suffrage movement.For the next several years, she appeared at one meeting after another, making speeches about how voting was not the business of women, and having to listen to idiot men rant on about how weak and stupid women were.What was her argument? It certainly wasn’t that women were too stupid to vote—at least, it wasn’t quite that. She pointed out that in her twenties she’d helped found a women’s college, and had inaugurated a series of educational lectures for women.Instead, she argued that the growth of the British Empire meant that the country was facing a host of new problems:constitutional, legal, financial, military, international problems—problems of men, only to be solved by the labour and special knowledge of men, and where the men who bear the burden ought to be left unhampered by the political inexperience of women.It was a circular argument, really: Women shouldn’t be allowed to gain political experience because they’re too politically inexperienced.And as the reader has probably guessed, it impressed fewer and fewer people as time went by. In 1918, the Representation of the People Act granted the vote to women over 30 who met certain property qualifications, and ten years later all women over 21 were granted the vote.Mary Ward wasted most of her last years in a futile effort to delay women getting the vote. She thought that men in general knew better, and that a woman’s place was to support the men in her life, in spite of the fact that she was easily the most intellectually gifted and energetic member of her own immediate family.Mary Ward in 1914.The books kept coming out; some good, some not so good.Theodore Roosevelt got her to write a series of reports about Britain’s efforts in the war, and she duly got permission from the Government Propaganda Department to go to the front and write some stirring stuff about our boys. She duly delivered, along with some outraged sentences about the horribly unpatriotic Irish having their beastly Rising while a war was going on.The Coryston Family drew on the troubles of her own family with honesty and power. She wrote novels that dealt with the experience of war: Sutherland recommends The War and Elizabeth, which captures the uncertain mood of 1917, and Harvest, which is about violent crime. I haven’t got to them yet.She published her memoirs, A Writer’s Recollections, which contained fond memories of departed friends like Henry James.In 1920, she died from heart failure, after a long period of chronic bronchitis and heart disease.In 1917, Mary Ward’s nephew, Aldous Huxley, who would go on to be, well, Aldous Huxley, met Virginia Woolf at Heal’s in London. They strolled up and down talking about his aunt. Woolf recalled the conversation in her diary:The mystery of her character deepens; her charm and wit and character all marked as a woman, full of knowledge and humour—and then her novels. These are partly explained by Arnold, who brought them near bankruptcy four years ago and she rescued the whole lot by driving her pen day and night.Huxley loathed Arnold Ward, as did Arnold’s sister Janet. In fact, most people who knew Arnold Ward ended up disliking him.Mary Ward was an intelligent and talented woman, whose career shows how such a person’s energies can be wasted if they find themselves in a society which doesn’t value them. She herself shared a lot of the values of that society, which is why she allowed her tyrannical sense of duty to lead her into the anti-suffrage movement. She groaned, and acquiesced.And then, as Virginia Woolf said, her novels.You can buy most of Mrs Ward’s fiction in Kindle form for a few quid, or read it on Gutenberg, if you so wish; at long last her work is valued at the same price as classic writers who are far more famous.There was very little public mourning at her death. The Times gave her a two-column obituary. Virginia Woolf noted in her diary ‘it appears she was a woman of straw after all—shovelled into the grave and already forgotten.’There have been no dramatic revivals of interest in her work. Only recently, in the era of digital publishing and print-on-demand, has there been new scholarly editions of any of her novels. My copy of Robert Elsmere is an Oxford World’s Classic from the late 1980s, long out of print. Henry James wrote an admiring review of the book (earning her undying gratitude), in which he described very well what it’s like to read:It suggests the image of a large, slow-moving, slightly old-fashioned ship, buoyant enough and well out of water, but with a close-packed cargo in every inch of stowage-room. One feels that the author has set afloat in it a complete treasure of intellectual and moral experience, the memory of all her contacts and phases, all her speculations and studies.The literary critic Q.D. Leavis was notorious for being brutal about any hint of fakeness, ‘sophistication’ or inauthenticity in a book, and indeed for her general waspishness (which she shared with her husband F.R.), but even she found a good word to say about Helbeck of Bannisdale:The novel … incarnates a Protestant-Catholic deadlock and ends tragically, for the situation is inevitably tragic. In it Mrs Ward maintains the impartiality and wide understanding through natural sympathies that she had achieved in life, as a girl in a difficult but not unhappy home. The situation, the conflict and the insoluble deadlock have stature from being representative, not modish, and so transcend the merely personal feelings of the author …Mary Ward was once a bestselling author, a giant of her time.Other answers to this question have suggested such diverse authors as G.K. Chesterton, Somerset Maugham, and even Charles Darwin—still well-known, if not as widely read as they used to be.Mary Ward was a serious woman; even ‘heavily’ serious, like the caricature of a Victorian writer. But she had a sense of humour, even if she seldom put it in her novels. (Robert Elsmere always lightens up whenever Rose comes in.)I think she would look at the idea that these authors are not widely read anymore, and be bitterly amused.She could tell those boys what it’s like to have your entire literary career completely vanish.Thanks for reading.Sources:Henry James, ‘Mrs Humphry Ward’, in Essays, American & English Writers, 1984, Library of AmericaQ.D. Leavis, ‘Women writers of the nineteenth century’, in Collected Essays Vol 3: The Novel of Religious Controversy, 1989, CambridgeJohn Sutherland, Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-Eminent Edwardian, 1990, OUPJanet Penrose Trevelyan, The Life of Mrs Humphry Ward, 1923, accessed at The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward by Janet Penrose TrevelyanMrs Humphry Ward, Robert Elsmere, 1987, OUPMrs Humphry Ward, Helbeck of Bannisdale, 1983, PenguinMrs Humphry Ward, The Works of Mrs Humphry Ward, 2 vols, Kindle editionMrs. Humphry [Mary Augusta] Ward, 1851-1920: An Introduction to her Life and Works - a fine short online biography with pictures.

Have you ever wondered where the story of Santa Claus comes from, why he is said to bring presents to children at Christmas, why he is said to live at the North Pole, or why he is said to have a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer? Well, as it turns out, the history of Santa Claus is an incredibly long, twisted, and strange one.It involves a building project by a Byzantine emperor, a story about a father preparing to sell his own daughters into prostitution, a hoard of stolen human bones reputed to have magical properties, armies of Crusading knights, Protestant zealots, the author of “Rip Van Winkle” and “Sleepy Hollow,” a poem you probably read as a child but didn’t realize how influential it was, a “Nast”-y nineteenth-century political cartoonist, and Coca-Cola.This may seem like a bizarre assortment incredibly disparate things, but I promise you, everything I just mentioned is actually vital to the development of Santa Claus as we know him today. Let’s go all the way back to the beginning of it all in late antiquity and embark on this odyssey together to discover the origins of Santa Claus!Saint Nikolaos of MyraThe long, fascinating history of Santa Claus begins with Saint Nikolaos of Myra (traditionally said to have lived 270 – 343 AD), who is said to have been the bishop of the Greek city of Myra, which is located on the southwest coast of what is now modern-day Turkey. Nikolaos was probably a real person, although we cannot be completely sure of his historicity. He is undoubtedly a shadowy figure who abides more within the realm of legend than within the realm of history.The earliest mentions of Saint Nikolaos of Myra come from mentions of Byzantine emperors constructing churches dedicated to him. For instance, the Byzantine historian Prokopios of Kaisareia (lived c. 500 – after c. 565 AD) mentions in his treatise On Buildings 1.6 that the emperor Justinian I (ruled 527 – 565 AD) built shrines in Constantinople dedicated to Saint Nikolaos and Saint Priskos. Prokopios writes, as translated by Henry Bronson Dewing for the Loeb Classical Library:“Further on he established a shrine to St. Priskos and St. Nikolaos, an entirely new creation of his own, at a spot where the Byzantines love especially to tarry, some worshipping and doing honour to these saints who have come to dwell among them, and others simply enjoying the charm of the precinct, since the Emperor forced back the wash of the sea and set the foundations far out into the water when he established this sanctuary.”This is one of the earliest known mentions of Saint Nikolaos of Myra. Another early mention of Saint Nikolaos of Myra comes from a hagiography titled The Life of Saint Nikolaos of Sion, written sometime around 600 AD, roughly two hundred years after Nikolaos of Myra is said to have died. This account, The Life of Saint Nikolaos of Sion, briefly mentions another saint named Nikolaos of Sion visiting the tomb of Nikolaos of Myra.The fact that there was a tomb in the city of Myra that was claimed to be the tomb of Saint Nikolaos of Myra as early as c. 600 AD does not necessarily prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Nikolaos of Myra was a real person, since it is quite common for towns to misidentify tombs as belonging to legendary individuals in order to attract tourists. For instance, although Betsy Ross was a real person, there is no evidence to support the popular claim that so-called “Betsy Ross House” in Philadelphia ever actually belonged to her or anyone in her family. Furthermore, the remains in the courtyard of the Betsy Ross House, which were moved there from another location, probably aren’t really hers.We cannot be completely sure that the tomb of Saint Nikolaos in Myra was not someone else’s grave deliberately misidentified as Saint Nikolaos’s in order to attract pilgrims. If the tomb was created as a hoax to attract pilgrims, though, it certainly worked. There is evidence that, over the centuries, it became revered as a holy site. Pilgrims traveled to the tomb from all across the Byzantine Empire to pay homage to the holy saint whom they all revered. As the cult of Saint Nikolaos grew, a large body of legends became attached to him.ABOVE: Thirteenth-century Byzantine icon of Saint Nikolaos of Myra from Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, EgyptThe legend of Saint Nikolaos of MyraThe earliest surviving detailed account of Saint Nikolaos’s life is the hagiography The Life of Saint Nikolaos, which was written in Greek by the Byzantine hagiographer Michael the Archimandrite (floruit c. 814 – c. 842). Michael the Archimandrite’s account is full of miracles and legends and it is almost certainly almost completely fiction from beginning to end. As far as the historical Nikolaos of Myra is concerned, there is very little it can tell us.Nonetheless, the account preserves detailed information about the stories that people in the Byzantine Empire were telling about Saint Nikolaos of Myra in the ninth century AD. According to the account, Nikolaos was born in the city of Patara in Lykia, located along the coast of what is now southwest Turkey. His parents were extremely wealthy, but they both died not long after he came of age and he inherited all their vast wealth. Nikolaos, being a holy and devout man, resolved to as Jesus had instructed and give away all his wealth to the poor.Saint Nikolaos learned that there was a local man who was very virtuous, but, “owing to the plotting and envy of Satan,” had lost nearly all his wealth and was trapped in a desperate situation. This man had three teenaged daughters who were all very beautiful, but, because the man was so poor, he could not afford to pay a dowry for any of them, meaning he would not be able to marry them off. In those days, women who could not be married off were almost invariably forced to become prostitutes. The man, who was totally out of options, was ready to station his own daughters to work in a brothel.Nikolaos, upon hearing this, was moved with compassion for the girls. Nikolaos would have offered to pay the daughters dowries for the man, but he did not want to embarrass the poor man by forcing him to accept charity. Therefore, that night, while the man and his daughters were all sleeping, he took a large sack filled with gold coins, went to the man’s house, and tossed the sack of coins in through the window. The next morning, the man found the sack of coins and he overjoyed. he immediately used the money to pay the dowry for his eldest daughter, allowing her to marry.ABOVE: The Charity of Saint Nicholas of Bari, painted between c. 1330 and c. 1340 by the Italian painter Ambrogio LorenzettiThe next night, Nikolaos came back to the house and threw another bag filled with gold coins in through the window. The man found the bag again the next morning and was once again overcome with joy. He used the money to pay the dowry for his second daughter. By this point, only the youngest daughter was left without a dowry.The poor man, however, wanted to know who it was that was doing this wonderful and kind thing for him, so, on the third night, he stayed awake and hid, hoping to see the mysterious give-giver who was coming in the night, so he could thank him. When Saint Nikolaos came to the house and threw the third and final sack of gold in through the window, the father heard the bag land on the floor and immediately ran out of the house.Running after him, he caught up with Saint Nikolaos and threw himself on the ground at his feet, thanking him and praising him for his generosity. Saint Nikolaos raised the man up from the ground, made him promise that he would never tell anyone who had helped him, and sent him back home. The man married off his youngest daughter and none of his daughters were forced into prostitution.This heartwarming tale about the secret generosity of Saint Nikolaos was one of the most beloved tales about the saint during the Middle Ages. It was told and retold countless times and is depicted in countless images and icons. It is from this famous tale, first recorded by a Byzantine hagiographer around 1,200 years ago, that the modern story of Santa Claus was eventually born.ABOVE: Painting by the Italian International Gothic painter Gentile da Fabriano dated to c. 1425 depicting the young Saint Nikolaos of Myra secretly tossing the bags of gold in through the poor man’s windowSanta’s magical bones get stolenThe sarcophagus where Saint Nikolaos’s putative bones were held in the Saint Nikolaos Church in Myra remained a major pilgrimage site. The bones were said to exude a mysterious watery substance every year on December 6th that smelled like rosewater. This substance was known as “myrrh” or “manna” and was widely believed to possess miraculous powers.In the eleventh century, however, events began unfolding that would change the future of Saint Nikolaos’s cult forever. First, in 1054, the “Great Schism” occurred, in which the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople and the Roman Catholic legates sent to Constantinople by the Pope excommunicated each other. The Christians of the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire and the Christians of the Latin west had already been very distant from each other both in terms of their beliefs and in terms of their practices for many centuries, but the events of 1054 nonetheless marked a major increase of tensions.On 26 August 1071, the Byzantine Empire was decisively defeated by the Seljuk Turks in the Battle of Manzikert. The emperor Romanos IV Diogenes was captured and the Byzantines temporarily lost control of most of Asia Minor, including the city of Myra, which fell under the rule of the Seljuk Turks. Many Christians became fearful that pilgrims would no longer be able to travel to Myra to visit Nikolaos’s tomb.In spring 1087, a group of sailors from the historically Greek city of Bari in Apulia in southern Italy set out to steal the bones of Saint Nikolaos. They barged into the Church of Saint Nikolaos where Nikolaos’s remains were held. The Greek Orthodox clergy at the church protested and tried to stop the Italians, but the Italians were armed and Greek Orthodox clergy are forbidden from violence. Since there was no one else there to stop them, the sailors from Bari stole all the large pieces of Saint Nikolaos’s skeleton from his sarcophagus and brought them back with them by ship to their home city of Bari.ABOVE: Photograph of the desecrated sarcophagus of Saint Nikolaos in the Saint Nikolaos Church in Myra. Saint Nikolaos’s putative remains were held in this sarcophagus for centuries. The larger pieces of his remains were stolen by sailors from Bari in 1087. The smaller pieces were stolen by sailors from Venice during the First Crusade.The sailors arrived in Bari in triumph on 9 May 1087, where they were hailed by the people as heroes for having supposedly “rescued” Nikolaos’s relics from the heathen Turks. The people almost immediately began building a new church, the Basilica di San Nicola, to house the sacred relics of Saint Nikolaos that they had stolen from Myra. In 1088, Pope Urban II himself dedicated the basilica, lowering Saint Nikolaos’s bones into the tomb that had been built for them underneath the altar in the sanctuary of the church.Before his bones were stolen and taken to Bari, Saint Nikolaos had been primarily an Eastern Orthodox saint. He was certainly known to some extent in western Europe before 1087, but he was never a very popular or well-known saint there until that point. After 1087, the Basilica di San Nicola in Bari became a major pilgrimage spot. People from all across Europe came to Bari to venerate Saint Nikolaos’s relics.To the great jubilation of the people of Bari, it was discovered that, every December 6th, the bones of Saint Nikolaos continued to produce the holy myrrh they had produced when they were in Myra. The myrrh continued to be revered for its allegedly miraculous powers. Even today, the clergy in Bari still harvest the myrrh from Nikolaos’s sarcophagus.ABOVE: Painting by Gentile da Fabriano depicting pilgrims exuberantly venerating the tomb of Saint Nikolaos in the Basilica di San Nicola in BariThe Crusaders pray to SantaOn 27 November 1095, Pope Urban II delivered an impassioned sermon at the Council of Clermont urging people to go east to fight the Seljuk Turks. The attendees of the council supposedly responded to this speech by chanting “Deus vult!” which is Latin for “God wills it!” In any case, the speech directly resulted in the beginning of the First Crusade.In autumn 1096, Frankish and Norman forces preparing to sail east mustered in Bari. The Crusaders generally preferred to pray to warrior saints for protection, but, because Saint Nikolaos was the patron saint of Bari and his relics were held in the basilica there, many Crusaders chose to pray to Saint Nikolaos for success in their campaigns. When the Crusaders returned to Europe, many brought back the veneration of Saint Nikolaos to their hometowns all across western Europe, believing that the holy saint had served them well and protected them in battle.Santa goes to VeniceAccording to a single account written by an anonymous Venetian monk, the sailors from Bari who had collected Saint Nikolaos’s putative bones from his sarcophagus in Myra only took the large pieces of his skeleton. They left somewhere around 500 tiny bone fragments in the sarcophagus. In 1100, a fleet of Venetian ships was sailing along the coast of western Turkey and they happened to pass by Myra.The bishop who was accompanying them told them that they absolutely had to stop in Myra to collect the remaining relics of Saint Nikolaos. There were only a few Greek Orthodox monks guarding the Saint Nikolaos Church there, so the Crusaders were easily able to plunder the remaining bones of Saint Nikolaos as well as the bones of the other bishops of Myra who were also buried there. The Venetians brought the bones of Saint Nikolaos that they found in his sarcophagus in Myra back to Venice, where they were deposited in the San Nicolò al Lido, a church of Saint Nikolaos there.Scientific examinations of the relics held in the San Nicolò al Lido in the twentieth century concluded that they were anatomically compatible with the bones held in the Basilica di San Nicolo in Bari, meaning the bones may have indeed come from the same man. Whether that man was truly Saint Nikolaos of Myra remains uncertain.Meanwhile, the clergy at Bari sought to promote the cult of Saint Nikolaos, so, over the years, they strategically gave away small samples of his bones. At first, most of these fragments wound up in Constantinople. In 1204, however, the warriors of the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople and brought many of these minor relics back with them to western Europe. Thus the minor relics of Saint Nikolaos were dispersed across western Europe. Chapels, churches, and basilicas dedicated to Saint Nikolaos were constructed to house these relics.ABOVE: Photograph of the San Nicolò al Lido, where around 500 bone fragments purportedly from Saint Nikolaos of Myra are heldSanta resurrects dismembered and pickled childrenAs Saint Nikolaos (who became known in English as “Saint Nicholas”) became increasingly popular in western Europe, new stories about him and his reputed miracles began to emerge. One of the most famous such stories is one which led to him becoming regarded as the patron saint of children.According to the famous story, which is first attested in the Late Middle Ages, there was a terrible famine in Myra. The people were starving and meat was in short supply. A wicked butcher lured three young boys into his shop. Then he murdered them, chopped them up into pieces, and pickled them in a barrel of brine, planning to sell them to unsuspecting customers as ham.Then good old Saint Nicholas came along. The butcher told him he was selling pickled ham, but Nicholas easily saw that he was lying. He made the Sign of the Cross over the barrel and, instantly, through the power of Christ, the three innocent children who had been murdered, dismembered and pickled, were resurrected without even the slightest blemish from their ordeal.This story, as utterly gruesome, horrifying, and bizarre as it may seem to us, was wildly popular in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. It is depicted in hundreds of depictions in every medium: manuscript illustrations, stained glass windows, fresco paintings, icons, tapestries, you name it. The story was so well-known that it became incorporated into Saint Nicholas’s iconography; he was often portrayed standing next to a barrel and three naked children. Thus, Saint Nicholas became regarded as the patron saint of children.ABOVE: Illustration of the story of Saint Nicholas resurrecting the pickled children, from the Grandes Heures of Anne of Brittany, dating to between 1503 and 1508Santa slaps hereticsAnother famous legend about Saint Nikolaos that is first attested in around the fourteenth century AD holds that Saint Nikolaos attended the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. According to the legend, at the council, Nikolaos, a passionate defender of the orthodox teaching of the Holy Trinity, became so infuriated by one of the Arian heretics at the council that he slapped the heretic right across the face. Constantine I, the emperor who had convened the council, supposedly confiscated Nikolaos’s miter and pallium as punishment for this act of violence.In even later versions of the story, Nikolaos is said to have slapped not just any Arian heretic, but the arch-heretic Areios of Ptolemais (lived c. 256 – c. 336 AD), the founder of the Arian heresy himself. In these versions of the story, Nikolaos was not only stripped of his miter and pallium, but thrown in prison for the night. Then Christ and the Virgin Mary appeared to him in his cell. They set him free and restored to him his miter and pallium, saying that he was justified in slapping Areios.In reality, this story is almost certainly apocryphal. The earliest known version of the story is first attested in the fourteenth century, around a millennium after Saint Nikolaos supposedly lived. Furthermore, we have no reliable record that Saint Nikolaos was even at the First Council of Nicaea. Athanasios of Alexandria (lived c. 296 – 373 AD), who was the foremost defender of the Holy Trinity at the council, never mentions Nikolaos at all in any of his extant writings. Furthermore, the historian Eusebios of Kaisareia (lived c. 260 – c. 340 AD), who was also present at the council and wrote about it in his Life of Constantine, never mentions Saint Nikolaos either.Nikolaos of Myra is listed by the early sixth-century AD Byzantine church historian Theodoros the Lector as having attended the First Council of Nicaea. Theodoros, however, was writing nearly two hundred years after the council took place. The fact that no one who was actually at the council seems to have thought Nikolaos was there strongly indicates that he was not.ABOVE: Russian icon dating to the Late Middle Ages depicting the famous legend of Saint Nikolaos of Myra slapping the heretic Areios at the First Council of NicaeaThe birth of the tradition of presents in the name of Saint NicholasBy around the fifteenth century or thereabouts, Saint Nicholas was now being venerated all over western Europe. He was seen as a secret gift-giver, thanks to the still-popular story about him throwing the bags of gold in through the window of the poor man’s house for his daughters’ dowries. Meanwhile, he was also seen as the patron saint of children, thanks to the popular story about him resurrecting the murdered and pickled boys.People in western Europe—especially, it seems, in parts of Germany and the Netherlands—began to put all these traditions together. A tradition arose of parents giving their children gifts on the feast day of Saint Nicholas, which fell on December 5th in some places and on December 6th in others. These presents would often be left overnight tucked in shoes or in stockings that had been left by the fire to dry, so that, in the morning, the children would find the gifts Saint Nicholas had left for them.In the old days, the gifts given on the feast day of Saint Nicholas do not seem to have been terribly extravagant. In fact, they often seem to have often been fairly simple: a coin or two, a couple sweets, and so forth. Obviously, wealthy parents could always afford to give their children more and better presents than poor parents, but even wealthy parents do not seem to have been giving their children extravagant gifts on the same scale that wealthy parents give their children presents for Christmas today.There is evidence that parents were giving their children toys on December 6th in the name of Saint Nicholas at least as early as the mid-1600s. For instance, a painting by the Dutch Golden Age painter Jan Havickszoon Steen of the feast of Saint Nicholas being celebrated in a wealthy household between c. 1665 and c. 1668 shows a little girl receiving a doll for the feast of Saint Nicholas.ABOVE: The Feast of Saint Nicholas, painted between c. 1665 and c. 1668 by the Dutch Golden Age painter Jan Havickszoon Steen, depicting children receiving gifts for the feast day of Saint Nicholas. The little girl in the foreground has received a doll.The Protestant Reformation’s Crusade against Saint NicholasAt the beginning of the sixteenth century, it looked as though Saint Nicholas’s cult in western Europe was only growing. He was one of the most beloved of all saints. The tradition of parents leaving presents for their children in his name was beginning to emerge. Then the Protestant Reformation happened.The leaders of the Protestant Reformation were vehemently opposed to the veneration of saints, which they regarded as a form of idolatry. They declared that venerating and praying to saints was hardly any different from worshipping and praying to pagan deities and that all saints were human beings guilty of Original Sin who did not deserve to be worshipped.As one of the most popular of all saints, Saint Nicholas came under special attack. The German Reformation leader Martin Luther (lived 1483 – 1546) declared that people should not leave gifts for their children on December 6th in the name of Saint Nicholas. Instead, he advocated that people should leave gifts for their children on Christmas Day in the name of the Christ Child (Christkind in German).German Lutherans eventually came to largely abandon the cult of Saint Nicholas. Saint Nicholas survived as a December 6th gift-bearer in some parts of Germany, especially in parts where people were predominately Roman Catholic, but, in predominately Lutheran areas, Saint Nicholas was largely replaced with the Christkind.ABOVE: Portrait of the German Reformation leader Martin Luther, painted in 1529 by Lucas Cranach the Elder. Martin Luther advocated that, instead of leaving gifts for their children in the name of Saint Nicholas on December 6th, people should leave gifts in the name of the Christ Child on December 25th.SinterklaasThanks largely to Martin Luther, to this day, the Christkind rather than Saint Nicholas remains the primary December gift-bringer in many parts of Germany. In other parts of Germany and in neighboring countries, however, Saint Nicholas lingered. In the Netherlands, many people held onto Saint Nicholas long after the Reformation and continued the tradition of parents leaving gifts for their children in their stockings for the feast day of Saint Nicholas on December 6th.The Dutch version of Saint Nicholas became known as Sinterklaas, a corruption of his more proper Dutch name Sint-Nicolaas. Sinterklaas continued to be portrayed in the garb of a Catholic bishop, complete with a miter and often a crozier as well. He was not usually portrayed as fat or jolly, but rather tall and thin. He did usually have a white beard, though.Father ChristmasIn England, after the English Reformation, Saint Nicholas was replaced with “Father Christmas,” who was envisioned as a fundamentally very similar figure to Saint Nicholas from the very beginning. The main difference between Father Christmas and Saint Nicholas was that, while Saint Nicholas brought presents on December 6th, Father Christmas did it on December 25th. Father Christmas was usually portrayed wearing a long coat, often bearing a close resemblance to a bishop’s robe.During the Commonwealth (lasted 1649 – 1653) and the Protectorate (lasted 1653 – 1659), the Puritans tried to completely ban Christmas, deeming it an immoral remnant of Catholicism. After the Puritans lost power, Christmas was restored. During this period, multiple writers wrote allegorical defenses of Christmas using Father Christmas as the personification of the holiday itself. Since Father Christmas was supposed to represent everything good about Christmas, he was portrayed as jolly and cheerful.ABOVE: English woodcut cartoon from The Vindication of Christmas, published in 1652, depicting Father Christmas as a white-bearded man wearing a garment similar to a bishop robe saying “O Sir, I bring good cheer” to an angry PuritanIn 1658, an Englishman named Josiah King published a pamphlet titled The Examination and Tryall of Old Father Christmas. In the pamphlet, Father Christmas is portrayed as the white-haired, bearded personification of the holiday of Christmas, who has been taken as a prisoner and placed on trial for his life by the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth has accused him of encouraging idleness, drunkenness, profligacy, and all manner of other sins and debaucheries. In the pamphlet, the defense poses this argument in favor of Father Christmas’s acquittal:“Methinks my Lord, the very clouds blush, to see this old Gentleman thus egregiously abused; if at any time any have abused themselves by immoderate eating and drinking, or otherwise spoyl the creatures, it is none of this old mans fault, neither ought he to suffer for it: for example, the Sun and the Moon are by the heathens worshipt, are they therefore bad because idoliz’d, so if any abuse this old man, they are bad for abusing him, not he bad for being abused: These Bastard of Amon, have abused him, and therefore now would banish him: far be it from my Lord, to casheir a good thing, with the base use annexed thereunto: They term his charity wasting and spoiling, the making of Idlers, and incresing of Beggars: but where too much charity hath slain her thousands, too little hath slain her ten thousands: some of these witnesses did hint at Religion, but I believe they are Maidens for that, the first that woos them may win them: they tax him of Rebellion and sedition, but how can love and peace be the Author of that? For that is his Motto.”In other words, the defense is saying that Father Christmas himself cannot be blamed if people use Christmas as an excuse for immorality and debauchery, for such things are contrary to the nature of the holiday. Ultimately, the witnesses testify in favor of Father Christmas. The jury, after deliberating for only a short time, return with their verdict: “Not guilty, with their own judgement upon it. That he who would not fully celebrate Christmas, should forfeit his estate.”Josiah King’s pamphlet is especially significant because a detailed illustration for the pamphlet depicts Father Christmas as a man bearing a strong resemblance to older depictions of Saint Nicholas. He is shown in the illustration with a white beard and long hair, wearing a long fur coat.ABOVE: Illustration from the 1658 edition of Josiah King’s pamphlet The Examination and Tryall of Old Father Christmas, depicting Father Christmas as a elderly gentleman with white hair and a beard wearing a fur coat. His appearance resembles that of older depictions of Saint Nicholas.An American Saint NicholasIn the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the various December gift-givers that had emerged from Saint Nicholas during the Protestant Reformation began to re-coalesce in the United States into a single, uniquely American figure: the figure we all know today as “Santa Claus.” Sinterklaas had been introduced to New York by the Dutch settlers of the seventeenth century. Father Christmas was introduced by the English settlers of the same time period. The Christkind was introduced by German immigrants arriving in the British colonies in North America in the eighteenth century.In terms of how we imagine him, Santa Claus most closely resembles the jolly, rosy-cheeked, English Father Christmas. His name, meanwhile, is derived from Dutch Sinterklaas. Furthermore, like the Christkind, Santa comes to bring presents on Christmas Day, not on December 6th. The Christkind has also made another surprising contribution to the figure of Santa Claus; it is from German Christkind that we get the name “Kris Kringle,” which originally referred to the Christ Child, but today everyone just takes it as an alternative name for Santa.On 6 December 1809, the American author Washington Irving (lived 1783 – 1859), who is best known today for his short stories ‘Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” published a satirical book A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty under the pseudonym Diedrich Knickerbocker in which he made fun of New York’s original Dutch settlers. In the book, Irving wrote about the Dutch Commodore Olaf Van Cortlandt experiencing a dream of Saint Nicholas riding in a wagon over the treetops, bearing presents for all the little boys and girls:“And the sage Oloffe dreamed a dream—and, lo! the good St. Nicholas came riding over the tops of the trees, in that self-same wagon wherein he brings his yearly presents to children. And he descended hard by where the heroes of Communipaw had made their late repast. And he lit his pipe by the fire, and sat himself down and smoked; and as he smoked the smoke from his pipe ascended into the air, and spread like a cloud overhead. And Oloffe bethought him, and he hastened and climbed up to the top of one of the tallest trees, and saw that the smoke spread over a great extent of country—and as he considered it more attentively he fancied that the great volume of smoke assumed a variety of marvelous forms, where in dim obscurity he saw shadowed out palaces and domes and lofty spires, all of which lasted but a moment, and then faded away, until the whole rolled off, and nothing but the green woods were left. And when St. Nicholas had smoked his pipe he twisted it in his hatband, and laying his finger beside his nose, gave the astonished Van Kortlandt a very significant look, then mounting his wagon, he returned over the treetops and disappeared.”It is unclear exactly how much basis Irving’s description of Saint Nicholas actually has in Dutch folklore. After all, Irving was writing satire, not history. Furthermore, Irving was the sort of man who cared more about a good story than the truth; as I discuss in this article I published in February 2019, Irving’s wildly popular 1828 pseudo-biography of Christopher Columbus is the book primarily responsible for popularizing the widespread misconception that people during the Middle Ages believed that the Earth was flat.In any case, even if Washington Irving was just making stuff up, his book certainly helped popularize the image of Saint Nicholas riding around in a cart full of presents for children in the United States. Irving’s description of Saint Nicholas is not totally in line with our modern conception of Santa Claus. You will notice that Irving does not mention anything about reindeer, a red fur coat, or the North Pole. Nonetheless, his description does represent an early—and recognizable—form of the Santa Claus we know today.ABOVE: Illustration from the frontispiece of Washington Irving’s A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty of the alleged author, Diedrich KnickerbockerThe birth of the modern Santa ClausIn 1821, an anonymous illustrated poem titled “Old Santeclaus with Much Delight” was published in New York City in a paperback book titled The Children’s Friend: A New-Year’s Present, to the Little Ones from Five to Twelve. The poem with its accompanying illustrations is the earliest known work to portray Santa Claus riding in a sleigh pulled by reindeer. The poem, however, only describes Santa as having one reindeer to pull his sleigh rather than eight. The first verse of the poem reads as follows:“Old SANTECLAUS with much delightHis reindeer drives this frosty night,O’r chimney tops, and tracts of snow,To bring his yearly gifts to you.”The accompanying lithograph illustration to this verse depicts Santa as a man with a long brown beard wearing a red fur coat riding in a green sleigh pulled by a single reindeer. He wears a large brown fur hat and carries whip.ABOVE: Illustration to the first verse of the poem “Old Santeclaus with Much Delight,” published in 1821, the earliest known work to portray Santa riding in a sleigh pulled by a reindeerOn 23 December 1823, the poem “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” (which is better known today by the title “The Night before Christmas,” derived from the poem’s incipit) was published anonymously in the Sentinel, a newspaper for Troy, New York. The poem, which seems to have drawn heavy inspiration both from Washington Irving’s description of Saint Nicholas in his History of New York and from the poem “Old Santeclaus with Much Delight,” quickly spread in its popularity and has become by far the best-known description of Santa Claus ever written.Even today, nearly two full centuries after it was initially published, “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” is still commonly read to children all over the United States at Christmastime. It is estimated to be one of the most instantly recognizable works of poetry ever written in the United States.Although originally published anonymously, the poem is usually thought to have been written by Clement Clarke Moore (lived 1779 – 1863), a poet and professor at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in New York City. Moore’s authorship of the poem has been challenged, but he remains the man most commonly named as the poem’s author.“A Visit from Saint Nicholas” canonized many aspects of the mythos of Santa Claus. Nearly every depiction of Santa Claus produced in the United States since 1823 has been based on the detailed description of Santa Claus given in “A Visit from Saint Nicholas,’ which reads as follows:“He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;A bundle of Toys he had flung on his back,And he looked like a pedler just opening his pack.His eyes—how they twinkled! his dimples how merry!His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bowAnd the beard of his chin was as white as the snow;The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath;He had a broad face and a little round belly,That shook when he laughed, like a bowlful of jelly.He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself;A wink of his eye and a twist of his head,Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread;”You may remember hearing this description when your parents read you this poem as a child, but you probably never realized that this poem is the work that actually defined how Santa is supposed to look. Prior to the publication of “A Visit from Saint Nicholas,” Saint Nicholas had been depicted in various ways. As I noted above, in the first two illustrations to “Old Santeclaus with Much Delight,” his beard is brown rather than white. “A Visit from Saint Nicholas,” however, canonized the idea that “Saint Nick” was short, plump, and jolly, dressed in a fur coat, with a white beard.The poem also canonized the idea that Santa flies around in a sleigh pulled by eight reindeer. In the original poem, the reindeer are named as follows: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Dunder, and Blixem. In later versions, the names Dunder and Blixem, which come from Dutch meaning “Thunder” and “Lightning” respectively, are changed to Donner and Blitzen. The poem also canonized the idea that Santa Claus comes down the chimney.ABOVE: The illustration to the second verse of the 1821 poem “Old Santeclaus with Much Delight,” which depicts Santa’s beard as brown rather than white. “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” canonized Santa’s beard as white.Santa’s elvesSanta Claus himself is described as “a right jolly old elf” in the poem “A Visit from Saint Nicholas.” This reference to Santa himself as a elf is likely what established the association of elves with Santa. Ultimately, though, it was in the middle of the nineteenth century that the idea of “Santa’s elves” seems to have first emerged. In 1850, the American writer Louisa May Alcott (lived 1832 – 1888) wrote a book titled Christmas Elves. She never published it, though, so it did not influence the development of the idea of “Santa’s elves.”On 26 December 1857, the influential American political magazine Harper’s Weekly published a poem titled “The Wonders of Santa Claus.” The second stanza of the first chapter reads as follows, describing Santa’s house:“In his house upon the top of a hill,And almost out of sight,He keeps a great many elves at work,All working with all their might,To make a million of pretty things,Cakes, sugar-plums, and toys,To fill the stockings, hung up you knowBy the little girls and boys.”The idea of Santa’s elves seems to have been further popularized by a cover illustration on the 1873 Christmas Issue of the influential women’s magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book. The illustration shows Santa Claus seated in the midst of a workshop, surrounded by tiny elves manufacturing toys.ABOVE: Cover illustration from Godey’s Lady’s Book of Santa surrounded by elves manufacturing toys for ChristmasThe growth of the modern Santa Claus mythologyThe mythology of Santa Claus continued to develop over the course of the nineteenth century. One of the most influential individuals in shaping the figure of Santa Claus during the late nineteenth century was the German-American political cartoonist Thomas Nast (lived 1840 – 1902), who drew many cartoons and illustrations of Santa Claus over the course of his career. Most of Nast’s cartoons were published in the influential magazine Harper’s Weekly.Although Nast’s depictions of Santa Claus were certainly heavily influenced by popular perceptions of Santa Claus and by the description of Saint Nicholas in “A Visit from Saint Nicholas,” he nonetheless gave his illustrations his own unique touch that made them instantly iconic. Nast is credited with having practically created the modern image of the fat, jolly, old Santa Claus.Thomas Nast is also responsible for inventing the idea of Santa living at the North Pole. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the North Pole was seen as a mysterious, unreachable place because there had been multiple well-publicized expeditions to reach the Pole, but none of them had succeeded. Meanwhile, it was widely known at this point that Santa flew around in a sleigh pulled by reindeer and, since reindeer live only in the far north, it was recognized that this meant Santa needed to live somewhere in the far north as well.On 29 December 1866, Harper’s Weekly published an illustration by Thomas Nast depicting Santa living at the North Pole. The idea of Santa living at the North Pole just seemed to fit. Thus, the idea stuck around and eventually became canonical. In 1926, the first undisputed expedition to actually reach the North Pole, led by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen (lived 1872 – 1928), flew over the North Pole in a dirigible. Since then, the North Pole has ceased to be seen as mysterious. Nonetheless, the legend about Santa living at the North Pole continues.ABOVE: Cartoon illustration of Santa Claus produced in 1881 by the German-born American cartoonist Thomas Nast. Although Nast drew many illustrations of Santa, this one is probably the most iconic.In 1902, the American children’s author L. Frank Baum (lived 1856 – 1919), who is more famous as the author of the classic children’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published his novel for children The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, which presents a highly developed mythology of Santa Claus.In the book, Santa Claus is raised by a wood nymph in the Forest of Burzee. He becomes renowned for his kindness and generosity and, in his old age, when he is on the brink of death, all the immortals have a meeting in which they decide to grant him immortality so that he can continue bringing joy to the hearts of children all around the world forever.Much of the mythology presented in the book differs significantly from the modern Santa Claus legend. For instance, in Baum’s version, Santa’s reindeer have different names and Santa doesn’t live at the North Pole. Baum’s version is also much more heavily influenced by traditional European fairy tales than most modern versions of the Santa Claus legend are.Nonetheless, Baum’s book was very popular and it shaped many children’s views of Santa Claus. Baum’s novel may have also contributed to the idea of Santa leaving presents under the Christmas tree rather than in stockings. For most of the book, Santa leaves presents in stockings by the fireplace, but when he finds people who live in tents and do not have fireplaces, he puts the presents on the branches of trees just outside the tents, thus providing an etiology for Christmas trees.ABOVE: Front cover of the first edition of the popular children’s novel The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, written by the American children’s writer L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of OzSanta’s red coatIn the nineteenth century, Santa’s fur coat was not normally regarded as being any particular color. “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” never describes the color of Saint Nicholas’s fur coat. Meanwhile, Thomas Nast’s iconic illustrations of Santa were in black-and-white. In color illustrations from the nineteenth century, Santa was sometimes portrayed wearing a red coat, sometimes a coat of some other color. For instance, the original cover of L. Frank Baum’s Life and Adventures of Santa Claus shows him wearing a green coat.Santa first began to be commonly portrayed wearing red in the early twentieth century. Contrary to what you may have heard, the Coca-Cola Company did not invent Santa Claus, nor were they the first ones to portray Santa wearing red. In fact, there are depictions of Santa wearing red from as early as 1821. Depictions of Santa wearing red became very common around the turn of the twentieth century—several decades before Coca-Cola produced their iconic advertisements featuring Santa Claus in the 1930s.Nonetheless, Coca-Cola’s advertisements featuring Santa wearing a red fur coat were no doubt influential in cementing the conception of red as the canonical color for Santa’s coat. Ever since the 1930s, Santa has virtually always been portrayed in the United States wearing red.ABOVE: Illustration from the American satirical magazine Puck from 1905. Contrary to popular belief, Coca-Cola did not, in fact, invent Santa’s red coat. Santa actually became commonly portrayed wearing red sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, several decades before Coca-Cola’s iconic advertisements were produced.ABOVE: One of many images of Santa Claus wearing a red coat produced in the 1930s by Swedish-American artist Haddon Sundblom as advertisements for Coca-ColaRudolph joins Santa’s teamThe character of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was created in 1939 by Robert L. May (lived 1905 – 1976), an advertising copywriter for the department store Montgomery Ward. Montgomery Ward was doing a free giveaway of children’s books for Christmas. In past years, they had bought up children’s books to give away, but it was too expensive to buy so many books and they realized it would be cheaper if they just made their own book.The store told May to create a book that they could give away. May remembered how much his daughter loved reindeer, so he decided to make the book a story about a reindeer. He convinced a fellow Montgomery Ward employee named Denver Gillen to illustrate the book. May’s book ended up being extremely popular. Montgomery Ward distributed 2.4 million copies of it over the course of the 1939 holiday season alone.In 1949, May’s brother-in-law, the American songwriter Johnny Marks (lived 1909 – 1985), adapted May’s original children’s book into a song, which has now become a Christmas classic. The lyrics of Marks’s song are directly taken from May’s book, but with an added introduction listing the names of the eight reindeer from “A Visit from Saint Nicholas”:“You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen,Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen,But do you recallThe most famous reindeer of all?”The American singer Gene Autry (lived 1907 – 1998) recorded the song. His recording hit #1 on the charts the week of Christmas.In 1964, Videocraft International, Ltd. produced a fifty-five-minute-long stop motion animation television special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, based on Johnny Marks’s song adaptation of Robert L. May’s book. The special has been broadcast every single year since 1964. Partly as a result of the song and partly as a result of the television special based on it, Rudolph has become a canonical figure in the Santa Claus mythos.Ironically, both Robert L. May and Johnny Marks were Jewish. (Does this mean “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” is actually a Hanukkah song?)ABOVE: Image of the characters Rudolph and Hermey from the 1964 stop motion animation television special Rudolph the Red-Nosed ReindeerSanta goes international and starts bringing more presentsThe twentieth century brought with it several more major changes to Santa’s mythology. One change is that, largely as a direct result of American global hegemony for much of the twentieth century, the American version of Santa began to become an international figure. Ever since the end of World War II, the American Santa has been becoming ever more popular in countries that have traditionally had other December gift-bringers or no gift-bringers at all. The British Father Christmas has become increasingly identical to the American Santa, as has the German Sankt Nikolaus or Weihnachtsmann.Meanwhile, over the course of the twentieth century, as the result of growing capitalism and drive for consumption, Santa also started bringing more and more presents, especially to children from wealthy families. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Santa was most often only said to leave presents in stockings, but, over the course of the twentieth century, the idea grew popular of Santa leaving presents not only in stockings as in the earlier tradition, but also underneath the Christmas tree. This expansion of where Santa is allowed to leave presents has led to parents buying even more presents for their children in the name of Santa Claus.Santa quits smokingFor almost the entirety of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Santa was nearly always portrayed smoking a pipe, since this is how he is described in the poem “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” from 1823. The pipe was seen as an integral part of his iconography. In the late twentieth century, however, as the public grew increasingly aware of how astonishingly dangerous smoking really is, Santa gradually became shown smoking a pipe less often. People realized that, by portraying Santa smoking, they were encouraging children to smoke.Now, in 2019, Santa is rarely ever depicted smoking. This is a major departure from how he was usually portrayed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nonetheless, it is actually a return to an older iconography; prior to the early nineteenth century, Santa does not seem to have usually been seen as a smoker. Certainly, Saint Nikolaos of Myra was never portrayed smoking.Appendix: Santa Claus and OdinIt has become extremely common for people to claim that Santa Claus has been influenced by the god Odin, from Germanic mythology. There is, however, almost no good evidence for this. People often point to Odin’s title Langbarðr, meaning “Longbeard,” as the source for Santa Claus’s long, white beard. A long beard does not make Odin Santa, though. Lots and lots of figures in mythology have long beards, including Saint Nicholas, who has historically often been portrayed—dating back to Byzantine depictions at least as old as the twelfth century—with a long white beard.ABOVE: Twelfth-century AD Byzantine fresco from the ancient Saint Nikolaos Church in Myra depicting Saint Nikolaos saving the innocent soldiers condemned to death. That guy with the halo and the long white beard is Saint Nikolaos.Many people also point to Odin’s horse Sleipnir as the source for Santa’s flying reindeer. This is completely implausible. For one thing, in Norse mythology, Sleipnir was an eight-legged horse, not a reindeer. Furthermore, Odin was imagined riding on Sleipnir’s back, not riding in a sleigh pulled by him.In the Gesta Danorum, a source written in Latin by the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus (lived c. 1160 – c. 1220), a horse that is believed by many to be Sleipnir is described as flying. Therefore, it seems the only thing Sleipnir even has in common with Santa’s reindeer is that they both fly, which is hardly a significant parallel, since many steeds in mythology are capable of flight. There is no more reason to think that Santa’s sleigh and reindeer are derived from Sleipnir than there is to think that Santa’s sleigh and reindeer are derived from Pegasos, the winged horse in Greek mythology.It is also important to point out that Santa only seems to have started being portrayed riding in a flying sleigh pulled by reindeer in around the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries, mainly in North America. Unless a shockingly large number of people in the United States who were part of the same generation as Andrew Jackson were secretly Germanic Neopagans, I don’t think it very likely that a fairly obscure eight-legged horse from Norse mythology would be a major source of inspiration for figures in their folklore, especially figures that have nothing in common with Sleipnir except flight.It is often claimed on the internet that Odin was believed by the Norse to bring presents for children at Yule, but no site that I have seen has ever even tried to cite any kind of historical evidence to support this claim and, as far as I can tell, there is simply none. The idea of Odin bringing presents for children at Yule seems to have originated as a backformation based on the pre-existing assumption that Santa Claus has been influenced by Odin. Since Santa Claus is said to bring presents to children at Christmas today and people already assumed Santa has been influenced by Odin, they seem to have concluded that Odin must have brought presents in midwinter as well, despite having no evidence.Some people claim that Father Christmas is directly descended from Odin. There are two problems with this, the first of them being that Father Christmas and Odin really are not very much alike. They both have long white beards and that’s basically it. The other problem is that Father Christmas is first attested in a solidly Protestant context in the sixteenth century; there is no good reason to think that he goes back to pre-Christian times. It is far more likely that Father Christmas is just a Protestant take on Saint Nicholas who was used as the personification of Christmas.Most of the time, if you encounter someone claiming that a modern holiday tradition is of pagan origin, that holiday tradition probably is not really pagan. For instance, as I discuss in this article I wrote last year, there is no evidence that Christmas trees have any connection to any pre-Christian religion. In fact, Christmas trees actually only emerged in western Europe in around the sixteenth century. They only became popular in the English-speaking world around the early nineteenth century. They just aren’t old enough to actually be pagan.ABOVE: Detail of a depiction of a figure riding an eight-legged horse, probably Odin riding Sleipnir, from the Tjängvide image stone, an eighth-century AD stone from SwedenConclusionWe have just completed quite an exciting voyage. Our exploration of the history of Santa has taken us from a passage in a sixth-century AD Byzantine treatise on architecture to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and beyond. The figure of Saint Nikolaos of Myra goes all the way back to ancient times. Nonetheless, the figure of Santa Claus as we know him in the United States today is largely the product of the past two hundred years.ABOVE: Modern icon of Saint Nikolaos of Myra painted by the Czech painter Jaroslav Čermák (lived 1830 – 1878)(NOTE: I have also published a version of this article on my website titled “The Long, Strange, Fascinating History of Santa Claus.” Here is a link to the version of the article on my website.)

Some of the strangest fact about top 3 movies are listed as follows:The Godfather1. COPPOLA WAS AT RISK OF BEING FIRED DURING PRODUCTION.Coppola (who got the job because of his previous movie, The Rain People) wasn’t the first director Paramount Pictures had in mind for The Godfather (Elia Kazan, Arthur Penn, Richard Brooks, and Costa-Gavras all turned the job down), and after filming began, executives didn’t like the brooding, talky drama that Coppola was shooting.The studio wanted a more salacious gangster movie, so it constantly threatened to fire Coppola (even going so far as to have stand-in directors waiting on set). Coppola was reportedly getting the ax until he shot the scene where Michael kills Solozzo and McCluskey, which the executives saw and loved.2. COPPOLA FOUGHT TO KEEP THE FAMOUS LOGO.The studio originally wanted to scrap the now-iconic “puppet strings” logo (which was first created by graphic designer S. Neil Fujita for the novel’s release) with Puzo’s name above the title for the movie release, but Coppola insisted on keeping it because Puzo co-wrote the script with him.3. HE ALSO FOUGHT TO KEEP THE STORY AS A PERIOD DRAMA.As a cost-cutting measure, Paramount asked Coppola to modernize the script so the action took place in 1972 and to shoot the movie in Kansas City as a stand-in for the more expensive New York City. Coppola convinced them to keep the story in a post-World War II New York setting to maintain the integrity of the film.4. FAMILY DINNERS HELPED EVERYONE GET IN CHARACTER.Coppola held improvisational rehearsal sessions that simply consisted of the main cast sitting down in character for a family meal. The actors couldn’t break character, which Coppola saw as a way for the cast to organically establish the family roles seen in the final film.5. PARAMOUNT DIDN’T WANT MARLON BRANDO FOR THE ROLE.When Coppola initially mentioned Brando as a possibility for Vito Corleone, the head of Paramount, Charles Bluhdorn, told Coppola the actor would “never appear in a Paramount picture.”The studio pushed the director to cast Laurence Olivier as Vito, before eventually agreeing to pursue Brando under three stringent conditions: 1) Brando had to do a screen test; 2) if cast, Brando would have to do the movie for free; and 3) Brando would have to personally put up a bond to make up for potential losses caused by his infamously bad on-set behavior.Coppola surreptitiously lured the famously cagey Brando into what he called a “makeup test,” which in reality was the screen test the studio demanded. When Coppola showed the studio the test they liked it so much they dropped the second and third stipulations and agreed to let Brando be in the movie.6. PACINO WASN’T THE FIRST CHOICE TO PLAY MICHAEL, EITHER.The studio wanted Robert Redford or Ryan O’Neal to play Michael Corleone, but Coppola always wanted Al Pacino. Other actors, like Martin Sheen and James Caan (who would go on to play Sonny), screen tested as Michael.7. A FAMILIAR FACE AUDITIONED FOR SONNY.A young Robert DeNiro screen tested as Sonny, but Coppola thought his personality was tooviolent for the role. DeNiro would later appear in and win a Best Supporting Actor Oscar forThe Godfather Part II as the young Vito Corleone.8. COPPOLA LET THE WEDDING PLAY OUT AND SHOT IT GUERILLA-STYLE.To add a sense of reality to the scene (and because he only had two days to shoot it), Coppola had the cast freely act out and improvise in the background of the wedding scene. He then shot specific vignettes amongst the action.9. HE ALSO TOOK ADVANTAGE OF MISTAKES.Lenny Montana, who played Luca Brasi, was a professional wrestler before becoming an actor. He was so nervous delivering his lines to a legend like Brando during the scene in the Godfather’s study that he didn’t give one good take during an entire day’s shoot. Because he didn’t have time to reshoot the scene, Coppola added a new scene of Luca Brasi rehearsing his lines before seeing the Godfather to make Montana’s bad takes seem like Brasi was simply nervous to talk to the Godfather.10. THE CORLEONE COMPOUND WAS A REAL LOCATION ON STATEN ISLAND.The residence was recently put up for sale on the housing market for just under $3 million. That’s a price we can probably refuse.11. THE GODFATHER’S CAT WAS A STRAY.During his daily walks to the set, Coppola would often see a stray cat, and on the day of shooting the scenes in Vito’s study, Coppola took the cat and told Brando to improvise with it. The cat loved Brando so much that it sat in his lap during takes for the whole day.12. PACINO WAS THE ARCHETYPICAL METHOD ACTOR.He really had his jaw wired shut for the first part of the shoot after his character is punched in the face.13. THE INFAMOUS HORSE’S HEAD WAS REAL.The horse head in the movie producer’s bed wasn’t a prop. The production got a real horse’s head from a local dog food company.14. THE “TAKE THE CANNOLI” LINE WAS IMPROVISED.The line in the script only had actor Richard Castellano as Clemenza say “Leave the gun” after the hit on the mobster who ratted on the Corleones. He was inspired to make the sweet addition after Coppola inserted a line in which the character’s wife asks him to buy cannoli for dessert.15. THERE WAS ORIGINALLY SUPPOSED TO BE AN INTERMISSION.The 175-minute movie is long by Hollywood standards, and an intermission was going to be included just after the Solozzo/McCluskey shooting scene—but the idea was scrapped because the filmmakers thought it would ruin the momentum and take the audience out of the movie.The Shawshank Redemption1. Andy and Red’s first conversation lasted all day. Andy and Red’s first conversation in the prison yard where Red is playing baseball might only last a few minutes on film, but the scene took nine hours to shoot. Morgan Freeman threw the baseball for the entire nine hours until the shot was finished. He came into work the following day with his arm in a sling.2.Tim Robbins had to adjust his acting for Brooks’ pet crow. The crow that Brooks keeps as a pet wasn’t the best at squawking on command, which meant that Tim Robbins had to carefully time his lines around the crow. When Andy walks into the library and asks “Hey Jake, where’s Brooks?” you notice Tim Robbins carefully watching the crow to look for an impending squawk before beginning his line.3.The movie didn’t make much of a splash in theaters. The movie is a fan favorite and considered by many to be one of the best movies of all time, but it didn’t exactly break any records at the box office. During the film’s opening weekend it only pulled in $2.4 million, barely enough to give it the ninth slot at the box office that weekend. Morgan Freeman cites the film’s title as the culprit for its poor theatrical reception.4.. It was only during Oscar season that the public started to notice the movie. The movie received seven Oscar nominations, but didn’t win any. It was during Oscar season that the film was re-released into theaters and grossed an additional $10 million before exploding on home video in 1995, pulling in $80 million. Then in 1997 Ted Turner bought the cable broadcasting rights to the film and the rest is history.5.Stephen King didn’t make much from the movie. Stephen King sold the film rights for his short story for only $5,000 in the late 1980s and never even cashed the check. Years after the movie came out, King had the check framed and reportedly mailed it to the film’s director, Frank Darabont, with a note inscribed: “In case you ever need bail money. Love, Steve.”6.Morgan Freeman’s son is the man in Red’s mug shot. Red’s mug shot of him as a much younger looking man is actually Freeman’s son, Alfonso Freeman. Alfonso can also be heard as one of the cons shouting “Fresh fish, fresh fish today!”7.Morgan Freeman wasn’t the first choice for Red. In King’s version, Red is an aging Irishman with graying red hair, hence the name. Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford, Paul Newman and Robert Redford were all considered for the part before it was given to Morgan Freeman at the recommendation of director Frank Darabont. Considering that there weren’t many black men living in Maine at the time of the movie’s setting, the location was then moved to a fictional prison in Ohio.8.Mansfield, Ohio offers up a Shawshank reality tour. The movie’s setting has provided steady tourism to the area of north-central Ohio where the now closed Ohio State Reformatory serves as a museum. Tourism officials have capitalized on the movie’s popularity and for a few bucks visitors can tour the prison and see the Warden’s office, the tunnel Andy crawled through and the oak tree where he buried money for Red.9. Andy’s hands belong to the director. There are two scenes in the movie in which the director’s hands make a cameo appearance. One is the opening scene where Andy is loading the revolver and the other is where Andy is carving his name into his cell wall. The reason for this is that Darabont wanted these closeups to look a certain way and felt only he could get the exact portrayal of Andy’s hands that he wanted.Schindler's List1.THE STORY WAS RELAYED TO AUTHOR THOMAS KENEALLY IN A BEVERLY HILLS LEATHER GOODS SHOP.In October 1980, Australian author Keneally had stopped into a leather goods shop off of Rodeo Drive after a book tour stopover from a film festival in Sorrento, Italy, where one of his books was adapted into a movie. When the owner of the shop, Leopold Page, learned that Keneally was a writer, he began telling him “the greatest story of humanity man to man.” That story was how Page, his wife, and thousands of other Jews were saved by a Nazi factory owner named Oskar Schindler during World War II.Page gave Keneally photocopies of documents related to Schindler, including speeches, firsthand accounts, testimonies, and the actual list of names of the people he saved. It inspired Keneally to write the book Schindler’s Ark, on which the movie is based. Page (whose real name was Poldek Pfefferberg) ended up becoming a consultant on the film.2. KENEALLY WASN’T THE FIRST PERSON PAGE TOLD ABOUT HIS EXPERIENCES WITH SCHINDLER.The film rights to Page’s story were actually first purchased by MGM for $50,000 in the 1960s after Page had similarly ambushed the wife of film producer Marvin Gosch at his leather shop. Mrs. Gosch told the story to her husband, who agreed to produce a film version, even going so far as hiring Casablanca co-screenwriter Howard Koch to write the script. Koch and Gosch began interviewing Schindler Jews in and around the Los Angeles area, and even Schindler himself, before the project stalled, leaving the story unknown to the public at large.3. THERE IS MORE THAN ONE LIST.Seven lists in all were made by Oskar Schindler and his associates during the war, while four are known to still exist. Two are at the Yad Vashem in Israel, one is at the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, and one privately owned list was unsuccessfully auctioned off via eBay in 2013.The movie refers to the first two lists created in 1944, otherwise known as “The Lists of Life.” The five subsequent lists were updates to the first two versions, which included the names of more than 1000 Jews who Schindler saved by recruiting them to work in his factory.4. STEVEN SPIELBERG FIRST BECAME AWARE OF SCHINDLER IN THE EARLY 1980S.MCA/Universal President Sid Sheinberg, a father figure to Spielberg, gave the directorKeneally’s book when it was first published in 1982, to which Spielberg allegedly replied, “It’ll make a helluva story. Is it true?”Eventually the studio bought the rights to the book, and when Page met with Spielberg to discuss the story, the director promised the Holocaust survivor that he would make the film adaptation within 10 years. The project languished for over a decade because Spielberg was reluctant to take on such serious subject matter. Spielberg’s hesitation actually stopped Hollywood veteran Billy Wilder from making Schindler’s List his final film. Wilder tried to buy the rights to Keneally’s book, but Spielberg and MCA/Universal scooped them up before he could.5. SPIELBERG REFUSED TO ACCEPT A SALARY FOR MAKING THE MOVIE.Though Spielberg is already an extremely wealthy man as a result of the many big-budget movies that have made him one of Hollywood’s most successful directors, he decided that a story as important as Schindler’s List shouldn’t be made with an eye toward financial reward. The director relinquished his salary for the movie and any proceeds he would stand to make in perpetuity, calling any such personal gains “blood money.” Instead, Spielberg used the film’s profits to found the Shoah Foundation, which was established to honor and remember the survivors of the Holocaust by collecting personal recollections and audio visual interviews.6. BEFORE HE DECIDED TO MAKE THE MOVIE HE TRIED TO GET OTHER DIRECTORS TO MAKE IT.Part of Spielberg’s reluctance to make the movie was that he didn’t feel that he was prepared or mature enough to tackle a film about the Holocaust. So he tried to recruit other directors to make the film. He first approached director Roman Polanski, a Holocaust survivor whose own mother was killed in Auschwitz. Polanski declined, but would go on to make his own film about the Holocaust, The Pianist, which earned him a Best Director Oscar in 2003. Spielberg then offered the movie to director Sydney Pollack, who also passed.The job was then offered to legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese, who accepted. Scorsese was set to put the film into production when Spielberg had an epiphany on the set of the revisionist Peter Pan story Hook and realized that he was finally prepared to make Schindler’s List. To make up for the change of heart, Spielberg traded Scorsese the rights to a movie he’d been developing that Scorsese would make into his next film: the remake of Cape Fear.7. THE MOVIE WAS A GAMBLE FOR UNIVERSAL, SO THEY MADE SPIELBERG A DINO-SIZED DEAL.When Spielberg finally decided to make Schindler’s List, it had taken him so long that Sheinberg and Universal balked. The relatively low-budget $23 million three-hour black-and-white Holocaust movie was too much of a risk, so they asked Spielberg to make another project that had been brewing at the studio: Jurassic Park. Make the lucrative summer movie first, they said, and then he could go and make his passion project. Spielberg agreed, and both movies were released in 1993; Jurassic Park in June and Schindler’s List in December.8. SPIELBERG DIDN’T WANT A MOVIE STAR WITH HOLLYWOOD CLOUT TO PORTRAY SCHINDLER.Kevin Costner and Mel Gibson auditioned for the role of Oskar Schindler, and actor Warren Beatty was far enough along in the process that he even made it as far as a script reading. Butaccording to Spielberg, Beatty was dropped because, “Warren would have played it like Oskar Schindler through Warren Beatty.”For the role, Spielberg cast the then relatively unknown Irish actor Liam Neeson, whom the director had seen in a Broadway play called Anna Christie. “Liam was the closest in my experience of what Schindler was like,” Spielberg told The New York Times. “His charm, the way women love him, his strength. He actually looks a little bit like Schindler, the same height, although Schindler was a rotund man,” he said. “If I had made the movie in 1964, I would have cast GertFrobe, the late German actor. That’s what he looked like.”Besides having Neeson listen to recordings of Schindler, the director also told him to study the gestures of former Time Warner chairman Steven J. Ross, another of Spielberg’s mentors, and the man to whom he dedicated the film.9. SPIELBERG DID HIS OWN RESEARCH.In order to gain a more personal perspective on the film, the director traveled to Poland before principal photography began to interview Holocaust survivors and visit the real-life locations that he planned to portray in the movie. In Poland, he visited the former Gestapo headquarters on Pomorska Street, Schindler’s actual apartment, and Amon Goeth’s villa.Eventually the film shot on location for 92 days in Poland by recreating the Płaszów camp in a nearby abandoned rock quarry. The production was also allowed to shoot scenes outside the gates of Auschwitz.10. THE GIRL IN THE RED COAT WAS REAL.A symbol of innocence in the movie, the little girl in the red coat who appears during the liquidation of the ghetto in the movie was based on a real person. In the film, the little girl is played by actress Oliwia Dabrowska, who—at the age of three—promised Spielberg that she would not watch the film until she was 18 years old. She allegedly watched the movie when she was 11, breaking her promise, and spent years rejecting the experience. Later, she toldthe Daily Mail, “I realized I had been part of something I could be proud of. Spielberg was right: I had to grow up to watch the film.”The actual girl in the red coat was named Roma Ligocka; a survivor of the Krakow ghetto, she was known amongst the Jews living there by her red winter coat. Ligocka, now a painter who lives in Germany, later wrote a biography about surviving the Holocaust called The Girl in the Red Coat.11. THE MOVIE WASN’T SUPPOSED TO BE IN ENGLISH.For a better sense of reality, Spielberg originally wanted to shoot the movie completely in Polish and German using subtitles, but he eventually decided against it because he felt that it would take away from the urgency and importance of the images onscreen. According to Spielberg, “I wanted people to watch the images, not read the subtitles. There’s too much safety in reading. It would have been an excuse to take their eyes off the screen and watch something else.”12. THE STUDIO DIDN’T WANT THE MOVIE TO BE IN BLACK AND WHITE.The only person at MCA/Universal who agreed with Spielberg and director of cinematography Janusz Kaminski’s decision to shoot the movie in black and white was CEO Sheinberg. Everyone else lobbied against the idea, saying that it would stylize the Holocaust. Spielberg and Kaminski chose to shoot the film in a grimy, unstylish fashion and format inspired by German Expressionist and Italian Neorealist films. Also, according to Spielberg, “It’s entirely appropriate because I’ve only experienced the Holocaust through other people’s testimonies and through archival footage which is, of course, all in black and white.”13. SPIELBERG’S PASSION PROJECT PAID OFF IN OSCARS.Schindler’s List was the big winner at the 66th Academy Awards. The film won a total of sevenOscars, including Best Picture and Best Director awards for Spielberg. Neeson and Ralph Fiennes were both nominated for their performances, and the film also received nods for Costume Design, Makeup, and Sound.14. SCHINDLER’S LIST IS TECHNICALLY A STUDENT FILM.Thirty-three years after dropping out of college, Steven Spielberg finally received a B.A. in Film and Video Production from his newly minted alma mater, Cal State Long Beach, in 2002. The director re-enrolled in secret, and gained his remaining credits by writing essays and submitting projects under a pseudonym. In order to pass a film course, he submittedSchindler’s List as his student project. Spielberg describes the time gap between leaving school and earning his degree as his “longest post-production schedule.”