Happy new year to you all! Here’s a belated Christmas present – a translation of Andrew of Crete’s Encomium on St Nicholas of Myra, (BHG 1362 / CPG 8187), otherwise known as Santa Claus! It would have appeared for Christmas, except for email communication difficulties (and believe me, we had a few!). It was kindly translated for us all by Dr Jaakko Olkinuora of the University of Eastern Finland.[1]
As I’ve remarked before, considering all the talk about Santa throughout the world every year, it is remarkable that the legends of Nicholas of Myra – the basis for it all – do not exist in English. Last year we managed to get a couple online, so this is another addition.
- Andrew_of_Crete_Oration18_Encomium_on_Nicholas_of_Myra_2015 (PDF)
- Andrew_of_Crete_Oration18_Encomium_on_Nicholas_of_Myra_2015 (Word .doc)
I’ve also placed copies of these files at Archive.org.
As usual I make these files and their contents public domain – make whatever use of them you like, personal, educational or commercial.
- [1]Dr O. asked me to revise it for English style, so any errors are probably down to me. I also added a lot of the notes from our email discussions.↩
Thank you, this is splendid!
You’re welcome – thank you.
Hi Roger,
Andrew of Crete has always interested me as he has a large corpus of homilies, few of which have been translated into English. A few of his Marian homilies have been translated by SVS Press but that’s about it.
Luckily, his Great Canon is available in a good English translation.
The fact that this homily is on one of my favourite saints is a bonus. Great work.
I’m glad that it’s useful – thank you!
Thank you.
I have not done any research on Nicholas as of yet.
Is this the primary, oldest, most authentic source that we have for his life? Or are there other reliable ones too? (I know several individuals do not have any good sources sometimes for over 100 years after their deaths, and those seem to get pretty legendary instead of factual.)
Thank you,
Andrew
Hard to tell. There are no good sources. Click on the Santa Claus tag on the post to get various posts on the Nicholas literature.