Wunorse is in his middle years, around 600 years old and is solidly proportioned, akin to his Viking ancestry. His blonde hair is long past his shoulders, and he wears it in thick horse-styled braids, often with tiny jingle bells woven into them. He is a true inventor and craftsman, and behind one ear he keeps a pencil stub for doodling, sketching and figuring, no matter where he is. It was Wunorse who long ago created Santa's magic sleigh.
Wunorse's mind wanders because he's always involved in thoughts the rest of us just can't understand. His beard is yellow, thick and curling. It would be longer, but he tends to get too close to the candles he uses for light on his work table. He is often glimpsed stubbing out his smoking beard in a large ashtray he keeps nearby.
Because of long years at the drafting table drawing up design charts, he wears triple lens flip-up-flip-down tri-focal spectacles, the weight of which pinches his nose so he talks with a nasal, whiney quality. Don't expect to finish a whole conversation with Wunorse, because he'll usually hit on an equation or summation and wander away flipping down his tri-fokes as he heads for the drawing board.
Wunorse is also one of Santa's staunchest defenders. And if any trouble breaks out, he is quick to appear as Santa's honorary Nordic guardian in a horned helmet, round shield and short sword, which he can never get out of the scabbard. Wunorse's favorite expression when in his Nordic garb is "Uffda!"...which is a Scandinavian word one uses after dropping one's chewing gum in the chicken yard. "Uffda!" translates to English as "Ya, you betcha, py yimmeny!"
Ol' Wunorse's inventive skills come naturally as he is one of the last of the ancient Norse elves. In days of the old, his people were great boat builders, using their unique powers to bend wood into sleek shapes for hulls. But when the last of the Sea Raiders ceased sailing out of the Fjords, Wunorse and the other elves were left without a trade. Most of them moved from the ice-bound countries to warmer climates spread out across Europe.
But Wunorse and his tiny village stubbornly stayed on and turned to the trade of training horses and building wagons and sleighs. Of course, Wunorse excelled at his trade, but something in him called out for excitement and pageantry. One day, as a young elf of a mere 374 years, he saw a traveling circus and knew that was for him.
He up and joined the show. When the circus ringmaster asked him what he specialized in, Wunorse told him, "Horses!" Naturally, in his mind's eye he saw himself standing in the center ring with beautiful ponies prancing around him, all bedecked in glitter and feather plumes. All he needed was a ringmaster's whip. What he got was a shovel. Wunorse followed the horses in the big parade. Ah, but show-biz got into his blood, and on his shoes, on his pants, on his coat,...no, this wasn't what he hand in mind at all.
One day his elfin powers sensed another calling. It was the call of Shinny! Wunorse dropped his shovel and took off following the magic call, which took him all the way to the North Pole. There, still broad shouldered and stout in his middle years, his blonde hair hanging in horse braids and his beard in curls, Wunorse found a different kind of show business excitement. The pageantry of Christmas!
Shinny and Santa Claus asked him to devise a vehicle that would be able to take presents to all the good little boys and girls around the world...in one night! Well, almost dizzy from the very idea, Wunorse rolled up his short little shirt sleeves and started working on a dozen concepts.
First he built a boat on sleigh runners, but the sail wouldn't carry it forward if the wind died down. Then he tried all kind of wagons which got bogged down in deep snowdrifts. Then sleighs which sank like stones when they came to bodies of water. Wunorse even tried to invent a steam engine sleigh train, but everyone figured it would have taken a half million years and all the elfin magic on Earth to lay enough tracks to reach around the world. He even tried magic boots with huge coil springs which Santa would use to jump from house to house like a giant bullfrog. But, alas, his ideas were going nowhere. Neither was Santa!
Modern science and elfin engineering weren't cutting it. Then one dark, cold night, as he passed the stable where Shinny lived with his reindeer, he heard the most disagreeable noises coming from inside. Shinny was yelling, reindeer were bleating, and pots and pans were being thrown all over the place!
Wunorse saw that the reindeer were eating from Shinny's pot of cabbage and cheese soup. Shinny kept trying to chase them away, but they kept coming back for more. Wunorse strode in and offered a solution. Back in the old country, to keep the horses from eating the elf food, Wunorse had taken to sprinkling a little magic dust on the wheat grain. It tasted so funny, the horses stopped nibbling the elves bread.
So, he figured what's good for horses is good for reindeer. He reached in his pocket and came out with a pinch of magic dust, and sprinkled it over Shinny's soup pot. With that, he turned and left, still trying to figure out how he was going to get Santa Claus around the world with a zillion presents in one night.
Suddenly Wunorse heard Shinny shouting for him to look out! He wheeled around to see the doors burst open and eight tiny reindeer leaped into the air, sparkling with magic twinkles. Shinny ran out behind them holding his empty soup pot, hollering at them, "Now Dancer, now Prancer, now Donner and Blitzen--" Wunorse stood in amazement watching the reindeer playfully prancing around and around like high flying circus ponies, leaping and tumbling on the icy breezes. He, of course, knew what had happened. The reindeer had a different reaction to the magic dust. It gave them the power to fly!!! And in the wink of an eye, Wunorse had the answer!
He rushed home and designed the most beautiful sleigh anyone had ever seen. Within a few days he'd hitched the reindeer to it and had them zooming across the sky like the circus ponies of his dreams. In the wake of their hooves were trails of magic stardust, lighting the dark winter skies. And as Santa Claus stepped into the sleigh and took the reins, Wunorse proudly became one of the most famous of all the elves as creator of Santa's famous flying sleigh.
