Up Close | The Life-Size Papier-Mâché Statue of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer at Dartmouth College
Dartmouth’s surprising history lesson on the most famous reindeer of all.
By Jim Collins|Oct 21 2025|
Rudolph creator Robert May put up this papier-mâché statue as a yuletide lawn decoration at his home for more than 25 years. Today, the statue and other related artifacts can be found at May’s alma mater, Dartmouth.
Photo Credit: Robert Gill/DartmouthHigh above the central reading room of Dartmouth College’s Rauner Library in Hanover, New Hampshire, a little Christmas spirit is in the air year-round. There, inside the fourth story of the glass tower enclosing the library’s rare-book collection, a life-size papier-mâché statue of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer appears—like a jumper in an amusement park carousel—ready for takeoff.
The statue was a gift to Dartmouth from the family of Robert May, a graduate from the college’s class of 1926. A bit of magic surrounds May’s own story. In 1939, Chicago’s Montgomery Ward department store asked May, one of its advertising copywriters, to create a promotion to replace its annual Christmastime giveaway of seasonal coloring books. Despite losing his wife to cancer that same year, leaving him to raise their young daughter, May persevered in creating his tale of a young reindeer who comes to Santa’s rescue on a foggy Christmas Eve thanks to his brightly shining nose—the same oddity that had caused him to be ostracized by the other reindeer.
Photo Credit : Rauner Special Collections Library/Dartmouth
Photo Credit : Rauner Special Collections Library/Dartmouth
Shoppers flocked to Montgomery Ward stores to get a free copy of the illustrated 32-page booklet. By 1947, the year that Montgomery Ward released the story’s copyright back to May, more than 5 million copies of the booklet were in circulation. Two years after that, May worked with his brother-in-law, songwriter Johnny Marks, on a simplified Christmas song version of “Rudolph.” Gene Autry’s recording of it became a smash hit. In 1964, a stop-motion animated film version narrated by Burl Ives cemented the quirky reindeer’s place in Americana.
Along with the statue (which stood for years in the yard of May’s suburban Chicago home), Rauner Library houses early drafts, mock-ups, and original printings of the 1939 softcover, along with all manner of Rudolph promotions, toys, and merchandise in its Robert L. May collection—a reindeer for everyone who could use a little lift this season.
This feature was originally published as “Flier Ed.” in the November/December 2025 issue of Yankee.
