Since the holiday season and Cristes mæsse are fast approaching, I thought I would share my Old English translation of “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” the now famous editorial written by Francis P. Church and published in The Sun in 1897.

I was aiming for a mostly Late West Saxon dialect, so a lot of the morphological distinctions still preserved in earlier texts, such as those by Alfred and his associates, are leveled out. For example, all plural adjectives in the nominative end in -e no matter the gender of the noun, no feminine adjectives in the nominative singular end in -u anymore no matter the weight of the prosodic foot, the subjunctive endings such as -en get merged with -on and -an, etc. As such, the language is supposed to represent that of Aelfric. 

I have separated most compound nouns with a hyphen, even those that were probably losing their status as genuine compounds (e.g,. lic-hama ‘body’), and I have taken the liberty of coining some new words that I couldn’t really think of good Old English equivalents for (e.g., smic-þyrel ‘smoke-hole, chimney’, tidung-gewritu ‘news-writings, newspaper’) or repurposing existing ones to express new ideas (e.g., fadiend for ‘editor’). 

Naturally, some constructions from the original were also paraphrased to keep the translation in the spirit of Old English, and some additional changes were made, most obviously the transformation of Santa into St. Nicolas, inspired by the Latin version of the editorial, which is highly anachronistic and in many ways contradicts the approach as I have described it, but it is what it is.

While it is still somewhat of a work in progress, you can read the translation here. I hope it can at least entertain you for a short while. Merry Christmas!