The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Irving’s short story, taken from the Sketch book, opens with four lines from the Scottish poet James Thomson’s “castle of indolence” in which a “most

(1820)

Irving’s short story, taken from The Sketch Book, opens with four lines from the Scottish poet James Thomson’s “Castle of Indolence” in which a “most enchanting wizard” captures men who are curious or desirous of the life of ease presented by a minstrel who sings tales of the castle accompanied by his lute. The promises of a life given over to pleasure, repose, and the absence of work, however, are purchased at a dear price. The inhabitants of the castle lose their will and thus the means of escape:

For whomsoe’er the villain takes in hand,

Their joints unknit, their sinews melt apace;

As lithe they grow as any willow-wand,

And of their vanish’d force remains no trace

In his description of his unlikely protagonist, Ichabod Crane, Irving clearly draws upon the language Thomson uses in describing the victims of the wizard: “He had... a happy mixture of pliability and perseverance in this nature; he was in form a spirit like a supple jack—yielding, but tough; though he bent, he never broke; and though he bowed beneath the slightest pressure, yet, the moment it was away—jerk! —he was as erect, and carried his head as high as ever.” Readers familiar with Thomson’s poem would be likely to recognize that Crane resembles the inhabitants of the “Castle of Indolence, ” and that their lack of will, alluded to in their extremely supple spines, will be their undoing.

Irving provides two frames for the telling of the encounter between the itinerate schoolmaster, Ichabod Crane, and the famous headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow. One of these frames involves the figure of Diedrich Knickerbocker, the inept fictional historian who narrates Irving’s satirical History of New York and who also knits together his widely popular The Sketch Book. As a tale “found among the papers of the Late Diedrich Knickerbocker, ” the story of Crane and the headless Hessian soldier gains prominence. It is less the fictional tale meant to entertain and more the documented oral tradition of an antiquated Dutch community whose “population, manners, and customs, remain fi xed, while the great torrent of migration and improvement... in other parts of this restless country, sweeps by them unobserved.” The second frame appears in the story’s postscript, in which Diedrich vows to have given “the preceding tale... almost in the precise words in which [he] heard it related at a corporation meeting.” The tale thus has multiple storytellers: Irving himself, his fictional historian Knickerbocker, and the unnamed storyteller who appears at the end of the tale to discount nearly half of the story’s truth.

The multiplicity of narrators keeps the fictional aspect of the tale ever present in the reader’s mind, as does Ichabod Crane’s reverence for Cotton Mather’s History of New England Witchcraft as well as Irving’s references to Thomson’s poem and to a German folktale as the basis for the story of the headless horseman. Irving purposefully mistakes the title of Mather’s tale of witchcraft and the witch trials, which was Wonders of the Invisible World, because his readers would be familiar with Mather’s famous book and would thus recognize the less-than-accurate account provided by his fictional historian, Knickerbocker. Although Mather’s recounting of the Salem witch trials does not include any mention of a headless horseman, it does imbue the story with a foreboding tone in which diabolic elements prey upon helpless inhabitants who have barely carved a space out of the howling wilderness for themselves. Indeed, most of the devilish acts retold by Mather occur in the wild, the same landscape that promotes the excitations of Crane’s bewildered and befuddled mind.

The presence of multiple narrators and narratives also contributes to the tale’s timelessness, which is a characterization not only of Tarry Town, but also of the culture of Dutch settlers residing there. The very dress of the women who gather for the party hosted by Old Baltus Van Tassel is a “mixture of ancient and modern fashions.” A sloop out on the Hudson appears “suspended in the air, ” as though its very movements are arrested and it exists in a kind of drawn-out time. In creating a place prone to repose and sleepiness, and in conjuring multiple storytellers, Irving allows the very distant past and the present to coexist, and even to interact. One example of the past and the present’s coalescing are the reverberations of Crane’s voice as he sings out psalms in order to calm his anxieties while traveling alone at night. After his disappearance from the town, a young boy “has often fancied [Crane’s] voice at a distance, chanting a melancholy psalm tune among the tranquil solitudes of Sleepy Hollow.” The echoes or vestiges of Crane’s voice also appear in the tales of old country wives “about the neighborhood round the winter evening fi re” of how “Ichabod was spirited away by supernatural means.”

The image of a voice lingering long after the speaker has ceased talking appears in Thomson’s poem as the voice of the minstrel who seems to lure unsuspecting victims to the castle with his tales of rest and pleasure:

He ceas’d. But still their trembling ears retain’d

The deep vibrations of his witching song;

That, by a kind of magic power, constrain’d

To enter in, pell-mell, the listening throng.

Likened by Thomson to a “syren song, ” that of women who lured sailors to their deaths by bewitching them with their beautiful voices as their ships drifted heedlessly toward a rocky shore, the minstrel’s voice tempts the listeners who still hear the song in their ears. The narrator of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” assures the reader that “there are peculiar quavers still to be heard in that church, which may even be heard half a mile off, quite to the opposite side of the mill pond, of a still Sunday morning, which are said to be legitimately descended from the nose of Ichabod Crane.” Similarly, the oral tradition of this Dutch community who trade tales of the Revolutionary War and then promptly switch to more haunting tales of goblins, specters, and the headless horseman creates an alluring atmosphere that draws its listeners into a kind of stupor. Crane is especially prone to the effects of these tales as he encounters countless terrors on his walks homeward such as a snow-covered shrub that he mistakes for a ghost and his own feet crunching through frosty crust, which he imagines to be “some uncouth being trampling close behind him.”

In the figure of Ichabod Crane Irving has created an unlikely protagonist with whom readers cannot identify, given Crane’s excessive nervousness. His physical attributes do not speak highly of him, for he is described as “a scarecrow eloped from a cornfield” or “the genius of famine descending upon the earth.” Further, his positions as the village’s schoolmaster and singing master both appear unwarranted, revealing more about the ignorance of the inhabitants than about Crane’s own ineptness. In reference to his knowledge or intelligence, “our man of letters” is rumored to have “read several books quite through.” His second occupation as the village’s song master gives him unparalleled access to his love, Katrina Van Tassel, but his talent for singing seems to reside mostly in his own opinion of himself, in his broken pitch pipe, and in his ability to make up in volume what he lacks in talent.

Thus, it is in the naive narrator, who reveals more about himself than he appears to understand, that the kernel of Irving’s tale rests. Crane’s selfimportance and his somewhat cruel dispatching of his duties as the village schoolmaster (he bore in mind the golden maxim “Spare the rod and spoil the child” and his scholars certainly were not spoiled) make him a likable version of England who restled to maintain its despotic control over the colonies who fought for their independence in the Revolutionary War. Irving’s multiple references to this particular war, when the Hessian is said to have ost his head, aids in this reading of Ichabod. The language of empire and royal symbols abounds in Irving’s descriptions of Ichabod Crane in the classroom and atop his neighbor’s horse. The school is referred to as “his little empire, ” and on the day that he receives an invitation to Van Tassel’s party, he “sat enthroned on the lofty school stool from when he usually watched all the concerns of his little literary realm. In his hand he swayed a ferule, that scepter of despotic power.” Tellingly, Brom Bones, the rival to Ichabod’s suit with Katrina, is the very image of physical power, but he is never described as given over to the cruelties associated with Crane. Indeed, Brom Bones enjoys “to play off boorish practical jokes” and “had more mischief than ill will in his composition.”

Given their diametrically opposed personalities and physical features, it is perhaps not so surprising to imagine in the two suitors vying for Katrina’s hand in marriage, and access to her father’s sizable and fertile estate, a replaying of the Revolutionary War, which is also echoed again and again in the retelling of war stories and the tale of the Hessian soldier who rides out of his grave every night in search of his missing head. Crane’s power is cruelly carried out against those who are smaller and less able to defend themselves, his pupils. Brom Bones, on the other hand, who is “broad shouldered” and known for his “feats of strength and hardihood, ” does not engage in a violent confrontation with Crane, which he would surely win. In his “not unpleasant countenance” and “air of fun and arrogance, ” readers might see the personifi cation of the United States of America. He is naturally strong, good-natured, and not prone to the kind of cruelty or despotism that marks England, represented by Crane. Rather, Brom Bones is the local hero, whom “neighbors looked upon with a mixture of awe, admiration, and good will.”

By casting Katrina as the love interest and point of contention and competition between the two characters of Crane and Bones, Irving recasts the Revolutionary War in terms of a love triangle. Katrina becomes less a fully developed character and more a symbol of the fecund land of North America over which both nations fight. As Crane, perpetually hungry and searching out his next meal, sees all aspects of the landscape as future dinners, Irving assumes his voice in the description of the young heroine. Crane describes her in terms of food: “plump as a partridge; ripe and melting and rosy cheeked as one of her father’s peaches.” As he rides to their house to attend the party, the last evening on which he will see Katrina, Irving lampoons Crane’s propensity to view the world in terms of his next meal by likening Katrina’s hand to pancakes: “Soft anticipations stole over his mind of dainty slap jacks, well buttered, and garnished with honey or treacle, by the delicate little dimpled hand of Katrina Van Tassel.” Crane’s avarice, channeled into a constant hunger and search for food, cannot abide, and his favor with Katrina is quickly and ironically dispatched with a well-aimed pumpkin thrown by Brom Bones. As the fi gure of Crane’s fears, Brom Bones becomes the headless horseman and drives the superstitious rival out of the village. As America, mighty but just, marries Katrina, the romantic recasting of the Revolutionary War concludes, along with Irving’s tale of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”