Reindeer, real and fictional

We often write a festive blog post in December and this year it’s the turn of the reindeer to have its moment in the spotlight. Before the pandemic I completed the cataloguing of a donation of over 400 books which had belonged to Dr Ethel John Lindgren-Utsi. The donation chiefly covers ethnology and anthropology of China, Russia and Scandinavia but it contains several books on reindeer including:

A 1754 dissertation (from Uppsala at the time of Linnaeus), Cervus rheno (CCB.57.51)
Report on introduction of domestic reindeer into Alaska (1898, CCB.57.45)
Two 1923 books addressing the regulation of herding rights between Sweden and Norway following the 1919 Reindeer Grazing Convention, De svenska nordlapparnas flyttningar till Norge (CCD.57.66) and Om den rätt till renbetning i Norge … (CCD.57.23)
Der Lappe und das Ren by Erwin C. Banck (1925, CCD.57.52)
Im Lande der Renntiere by Paul Lieberenz (1933, CCC.57.14)
Das Ren als Haustier by von Wolf Herre (1955, CCC.57.12)

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Lindgren-Utsi’s interest in reindeer was initially sparked during expeditions she made in Central Asia. An American of Swedish descent, she had come to Cambridge and studied Chinese, then travelled to Mongolia where she met her first husband, the Norwegian Oscar Mamen (his collection, mostly photographs, is held in Oslo) and travelled with the nomadic Tungus/Evenki people. The notes she collected on her trips formed the basis for her 1936 Cambridge PhD thesis which the UL holds: Notes on the Reindeer Tungus of Manchuria (PhD.732). In the 1930s political instability made it hard for her to return to Asia and she turned her attention to reindeer herders in Lapland. During the course of this research she met Mikel Utsi, a Swedish Sami reindeer herder, and after World War Two this unlikely couple (she was over 6′ tall and he was 5’4″) married and went on to successfully introduce a reindeer herd to the Cairngorms in 1952.

Seventy years on, the Cairngorm reindeer herd is well established and owned now by Alan Smith and his wife Tilly, maintaining continuity as they worked with the herd before Dr Lindgren-Utsi’s death in 1988. Tilly Smith has written several books including Velvet antlers, velvet noses: the story of the only free-ranging reindeer herd in Britain (9004.c.9291) and Reindeer: an Arctic life.

As the University Library is a Legal Deposit library, it receives copies of all UK publications, including children’s books. An early example of a children’s story featuring reindeer is the 1924 White Sox: the story of the reindeer in Alaska (1924.7.3209) by William T. Lopp, the former superintendent of reindeer in Alaska, in which capacity he took one of the photos featured in the 1898 report referred to earlier. The book informs children about reindeer through the story of young White Sox who with his mother has become separated from the rest of the herd at the beginning of the story.

In recent years reindeer seem to have been a particularly popular theme for children’s picture books, especially around Christmas time. Whereas the 1924 book lives on the fifteenth floor of the UL tower, these newer additions are kept at our offsite Library Storage Facility. Here are a few colourful examples just from the last ten years: