Washington Irving: Legends of the Hudson

Washington Irving was born in Manhattan on April 3, 1783, the year the Revolutionary War ended. He was one of eleven children in a merchant family, and he was named after George Washington. Late in life he wrote Washington’s biography.

One fact surprises most readers. Irving set “Rip Van Winkle” in the Catskill Mountains, but he later admitted, “When I wrote the story, I had never been on the Catskills.” He had seen them from a boat on the Hudson. The mountains in the story come from that view, and from his imagination.

Irving almost never spoke to readers in his own name. He invented narrators, gave them personalities, and let them tell the stories. Two matter for this unit.

• Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809). Before A History of New York came out, Irving played a prank on the city. He placed notices in the New York Evening Post asking for news of Diedrich Knickerbocker, a crusty old Dutch historian who had supposedly gone missing from his hotel. A later notice, said to be from the hotel’s owner, warned that if Knickerbocker did not come back and pay his bill, the owner would publish a manuscript he had left behind. Readers followed the story, and some city officials worried enough to offer a reward. Then the “manuscript” appeared: Irving’s book. The name stuck. “Knickerbocker” became a nickname for New Yorkers, and the basketball team the New York Knicks is short for the Knickerbockers.
• Geoffrey Crayon (1819). The Sketch Book is signed by Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., a quiet American gentleman traveling in England who sketches what he sees in words, the way an artist sketches with a crayon. Most of its pieces are about England. Only a few deal with America.

Here is the clever part. In The Sketch Book, Crayon says both American tales were “found among the papers of the late Diedrich Knickerbocker.” So the stories pass through several hands: Irving invents Crayon, who passes along papers from Knickerbocker, who heard the tales from the old Dutch people of the Hudson Valley. Every layer is a chance for a joke, and for doubt.

Ask yourself: why might a writer hide behind a made-up old historian instead of telling a ghost story in his own voice?

Summary. The story opens with a view: “WHOEVER has made a voyage up the Hudson must remember the Kaatskill mountains.” In an old Dutch village at their foot lives “a simple, good-natured fellow, of the name of Rip Van Winkle.” Everyone likes him. He will help any neighbor and play with any child, but “The great error in Rip’s composition was an insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labor.” He “would rather starve on a penny than work for a pound.” His farm falls apart and his wife, Dame Van Winkle, scolds him without end. He escapes to the bench outside the village inn, under “a rubicund portrait of his Majesty George the Third,” or to the woods with his dog, Wolf.

One autumn day, high in the mountains, he hears a voice calling, “Rip Van Winkle! Rip Van Winkle!” A “short, square-built old fellow” in old Dutch clothes needs help carrying a keg. In a hollow, a company of odd, silent men in old-fashioned dress are playing ninepins, and the rolling balls echo “like distant thunder.” It is “the most melancholy party of pleasure he had ever witnessed.” Rip serves them from the keg, then sneaks a taste. It has the flavor of “excellent Hollands,” a Dutch gin, and he goes back to the flagon so often that “he fell into a deep sleep.”

He wakes to find “an old firelock lying by him, the barrel encrusted with rust” in place of his clean gun. Wolf is gone. “That flagon last night,” he thinks, “has addled my poor head sadly!” In the village he knows no one, and no one knows him, and he finds that “his beard had grown a foot long!” His house is a ruin. The inn is now “The Union Hotel, by Jonathan Doolittle,” with “a singular assemblage of stars and stripes” on a pole. On the old sign, King George’s red coat “was changed for one of blue and buff, a sword was held in the hand instead of a sceptre,” and the name below reads “GENERAL WASHINGTON.”

A busy crowd asks him “on which side he voted?” When he declares himself “a loyal subject of the King, God bless him!” they shout, “a tory! a tory! a spy! a refugee!” His old friends are dead or gone. In despair he cries, “I’m not myself--I’m somebody else.” Then a young woman with a baby says her father was Rip Van Winkle, but “it’s twenty years since he went away from home with his gun.” She is his daughter, Judith, and her mother has died. Old Peter Vanderdonk, the village historian, explains: Hendrick Hudson, the explorer, keeps “a kind of vigil there every twenty years, with his crew of the Half-moon.” For Rip, “the whole twenty years had been to him but as one night.” He moves in with his daughter, takes back his seat at the inn door, and becomes the village’s chronicle of the old times “before the war.”

Summary. Near the village of Tarry Town, on the eastern shore of the Hudson where the river widens into the Tappan Zee, lies a little valley that is “one of the quietest places in the whole world.” “A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land.” Locals say it was “bewitched by a High German doctor” in the early days. Its most famous spirit is “the apparition of a figure on horseback without a head,” said to be “the ghost of a Hessian trooper whose head had been carried away by a cannonball in some nameless battle during the Revolutionary War.” The Hessians were German soldiers hired by the British. This one rides “in nightly quest of his head.”

The schoolmaster, Ichabod Crane, is “a native of Connecticut.” “He was tall, but exceedingly lank,” and looks like “some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.” He lives by turns in the farmers’ homes, “boarded and lodged at the houses of the farmers whose children he instructed.” He is “a perfect master of Cotton Mather’s History of New England Witchcraft, in which, by the way, he most firmly and potently believed,” and “No tale was too gross or monstrous for his capacious swallow.” He courts Katrina Van Tassel, “the daughter and only child of a substantial Dutch farmer,” while picturing her father’s land “readily turned into cash and the money invested in immense tracts of wild land.” His rival is “Abraham--or, according to the Dutch abbreviation, Brom--Van Brunt,” known as “BROM BONES,” a strong, prank-loving rider with “more mischief than ill-will in his composition.”

Ichabod rides a borrowed old plow horse named Gunpowder to an autumn party at the Van Tassel farm. After the dancing and a feast of “the doughty doughnut, the tenderer oily koek, and the crisp and crumbling cruller,” the guests swap war stories and ghost stories. In old Brouwer’s tale, the Horseman “suddenly turned into a skeleton, threw old Brouwer into the brook.” Brom tells of racing the Horseman to the church bridge, where “the Hessian bolted and vanished in a flash of fire.” Ichabod stays behind to speak with Katrina alone. “What passed at this interview I will not pretend to say, for in fact I do not know.” Whatever it was, he leaves looking crushed.

He rides home at “the very witching time of night,” past Major André’s tree, named for a British officer captured nearby in the Revolution. In the dark a huge rider falls in beside him and will not answer “Who are you?” Then Ichabod sees that the rider “was headless! but his horror was still more increased on observing that the head, which should have rested on his shoulders, was carried before him on the pommel of the saddle.” The chase races for the church bridge. “If I can but reach that bridge,” thinks Ichabod, “I am safe.” He crosses, looks back, and sees the rider “in the very act of hurling his head at him.” In the morning his horse is back at its master’s gate. By the brook “was found the hat of the unfortunate Ichabod, and close beside it a spattered pumpkin.” Ichabod is never seen in Sleepy Hollow again.

Then the story gives two endings. Years later an old farmer brings news that Ichabod is alive in another part of the country. He left out of fear and embarrassment, and he “had been admitted to the bar, turned politician, electioneered, written for the newspapers, and finally had been made a justice of the Ten Pound Court.” Brom marries Katrina, and he “was observed to look exceedingly knowing whenever the story of Ichabod was related, and always burst into a hearty laugh at the mention of the pumpkin.” But “The old country wives, however, who are the best judges of these matters, maintain to this day that Ichabod was spirited away by supernatural means.”

Irving did not invent these plots from nothing. He borrowed from European folklore, then moved the borrowed stories to the Hudson Valley. Encyclopaedia Britannica calls the two tales “Americanized versions of German folktales.”

• A sleeping emperor. In his note after “Rip Van Winkle,” Knickerbocker admits the tale might seem to come from “a little German superstition about the Emperor Frederick der Rothbart and the Kypphauser mountain.” In German legend the medieval emperor Frederick Redbeard (Barbarossa) sleeps inside the Kyffhäuser mountain until he is needed.
• A German goatherd. Scholars widely think Irving also drew on “Peter Klaus,” a German folk tale written by Johann Karl Christoph Nachtigal and published in 1800 under the name Otmar. A goatherd looking for a lost goat finds men drinking in the woods, drinks their wine, falls asleep, and wakes twenty years later.
• Headless horsemen. Headless riders turn up in German, Irish and Scandinavian legend, and in poems such as Robert Burns’s “Tam o’ Shanter” (1790) and Gottfried August Bürger’s Der Wilde Jäger (1778), later translated as The Wild Huntsman. One influential version is among Johann Karl August Musäus’s retellings of German folk tales, Volksmärchen der Deutschen (1782–86).
• A real war zone. During the Revolution, after the Battle of White Plains in October 1776, Westchester County became a no man’s land between the armies, the “Neutral Ground.” Raiders and soldiers, including German Hessians, passed through the area. A Hessian ghost made sense there. The story itself is set around 1790, when those war stories were still fresh.
• Real people, maybe. Irving may have taken the name Ichabod Crane from an army captain he met in 1814. The schoolmaster himself may have been partly modeled on Jesse Merwin, a teacher in Kinderhook, New York, where Irving spent several months in 1809. Both ideas are likely but not proved. The Van Tassel farmhouse may have been based on Philipsburg Manor, near Sleepy Hollow.

The story itself says war stories grow with time: “Just sufficient time had elapsed to enable each storyteller to dress up his tale with a little becoming fiction, and in the indistinctness of his recollection to make himself the hero of every exploit.” That line describes Irving’s own method, too.

These stories were written around 1819 and look back to the 1770s through the 1790s. Reading them well means noticing the attitudes of both times.

• Slavery in the background. “Sleepy Hollow” is set around 1790, when slavery was legal in New York. A 1799 state law for gradual abolition freed no one who was already enslaved, and the last enslaved New Yorkers were not freed until July 4, 1827. Philipsburg Manor, the estate that may have inspired the Van Tassel farm, was largely run by enslaved Africans. The story never mentions any of this.
• Racist caricature. The few Black characters in “Sleepy Hollow,” a messenger, a fiddler and onlookers at the party, are background figures described in mocking, racist terms. Those descriptions were common in white American writing of the time and are hurtful now. We have not quoted them. Ask who the story treats as a full person and who it treats as scenery.
• Native Americans as legend. Both tales mention Native Americans only as figures in ghost stories, old spells and wild tales of the past, never as living neighbors. A postscript to “Rip Van Winkle” repeats stereotyped “Indian traditions” that we do not reprint.
• Wives and women. Dame Van Winkle exists mostly as a joke about a nagging wife, and the story treats her death as good news for Rip. Katrina is described as a prize to be won along with her father’s farm, and we never learn what she thinks. Notice that the narrator says he does not know what she told Ichabod.
• Ichabod as a type. Ichabod is a comic caricature of a New England “Yankee”: skinny, greedy and gullible. Dutch New Yorkers and New Englanders had a long rivalry, and the story takes the Dutch side. It also mocks Hans Van Ripper, who burns Ichabod’s books and decides “he never knew any good come of this same reading and writing.”

• Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., Project Gutenberg eBook #2048 (gutenberg.org/ebooks/2048), including the note after “Rip Van Winkle” and the postscript to “Sleepy Hollow.”
• Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Project Gutenberg eBook #41 (gutenberg.org/ebooks/41).
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Washington Irving” (life dates, “first American man of letters,” the two tales called the first American short stories and “Americanized versions of German folktales,” and living by his pen).
• Wikipedia, “Washington Irving” (family, the 1798 stay in Tarrytown, Jonathan Oldstyle, the bar exam, Salmagundi, the Knickerbocker hoax and December 6, 1809, the move to England, Birmingham, John Murray, the return on May 21, 1832, Sunnyside, Spain and Poe), “Rip Van Winkle” (the Catskills quotation and “Peter Klaus”), “The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.” (installments, C. S. Van Winkle, June 23, 1819), “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (setting around 1790, headless-horseman sources, Musäus, the Neutral Ground, Ichabod’s possible models, the 1949 film), “Diedrich Knickerbocker,” “A History of New York,” “Peter Klaus,” “Frame story,” “Tall tale,” “Philipsburg Manor House” and “History of slavery in New York (state)” (the 1799 law and July 4, 1827).
• German Wikipedia, “Johann Karl August Musäus” (Volksmärchen der Deutschen, five volumes, 1782–1786).
• The March 15, 1820 date for “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” in the sixth installment is also given by the biographer Brian Jay Jones and by blog posts of the New-York Historical Society and the New York Public Library.
• Summaries are our own paraphrases. Every quotation from the stories was checked against the Project Gutenberg texts above.
• Art: the Catskills ninepins and church-bridge illustrations and the preview image are original artwork made for Jugami.