Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Rip Van Winkle

The story of Rip Van Winkle is set in the years before and after the American Revolutionary War. In a pleasant village, at the foot of New York's Catskill Mountains, lives the kindly Rip Van Winkle, a colonial British-American villager.

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After a failed business venture with his brothers, Irving filed for bankruptcy in 1818. Despondent, he turned to writing for possible financial support, though he had difficulty thinking of stories to write. He stayed in Birmingham, England with his brother-in-law Henry Van Wart. The two were reminiscing in June 1818 when Irving was suddenly inspired by their nostalgic conversation. Irving locked himself in his room and wrote non-stop all night. As he said, he felt like a man waking from a long sleep. He presented the first draft of "Rip Van Winkle" to the Van Wart family over breakfast.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

The story is set in 1790 in the countryside around the Dutch settlement of Tarry Town (historical Tarrytown, New York), in a secluded glen called Sleepy Hollow. Sleepy Hollow is renowned for its ghosts and the haunting atmosphere that pervades the imaginations of its inhabitants and visitors.

Irving, while he was an aide-de-camp to New York Gov. Daniel D. Tompkins, met an army captain named Ichabod Crane in Sackets Harbor, New York during an inspection tour of fortifications in 1814. He may have patterned the character in "The Legend" after Jesse Merwin, who taught at the local schoolhouse in Kinderhook, further north along the Hudson River, where Irving spent several months in 1809.

The story was the longest one published as part of The Sketch Book, which Irving issued using the pseudonym "Geoffrey Crayon" in 1820. Alongside "Rip Van Winkle," The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is one of Irving's most anthologized, studied, and adapted sketches. Both stories are often paired together in books and other representations, and both are included in surveys of early American literature and Romanticism. Irving's depictions of regional culture and his themes of progress versus tradition, supernatural intervention in the commonplace, and the plight of the individual outsider in a homogeneous community permeate both stories and helped to develop a unique sense of American cultural and existential selfhood during the early nineteenth century.

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The Legend of Sleepy Hollow follows a tradition of folk tales and poems involving a supernatural wild chase The headless horseman has been a motif of European folklore since at least the Middle Ages.

The Irish dullahan or dulachán ("dark man") is a headless fairy, usually riding a black horse and carrying his head under one arm (or holding it high to see at great distance). He wields a whip made from a human corpse's spine. When the dullahan stops riding, a death occurs. The dullahan calls out a name, at which point the named person immediately perishes. In another version, he is the headless driver of a black carriage. A similar figure, the gan ceann ("without a head"), can be frightened away by wearing a gold object or casting one in his path.

The German Legends of the Brothers Grimm (Deutsche Sagen) recount two German folk tales of a headless horseman being spotted with their own eyes.

One is set near Dresden in eastern Germany. In this tale, a woman from Dresden goes out early one Sunday morning to gather acorns in a forest. At a place called "Lost Waters", she hears a hunting horn. When she hears it again, she turns around she sees a headless man in a long grey coat sitting on a grey horse.