The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Washington Irving
Initial release: 1820 (USA)
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| Tarrytown, NY ca. 1828 |
Few authors can claim to be as influential on American folklore as Washington Irving; he helped shape the mythology of an entire nation in its infancy. His most iconic tale, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, is American horror, which is ironic given its obvious roots in Irish and Scottish myth.
The basics: The year is 1790. Ichabod Crane is a lanky, nerdy sort of fuckboy from Connecticut who works as a schoolteacher in Tarrytown, New York while also trying to get into the local rich girl’s petticoats. His primary competition is Brom Bones, the local Gaston analogue. Lurking in the background is the legend of the headless horseman, supposedly the ghost of a German mercenary who lost his head to a cannonball in the Revolutionary War some fifteen-twenty years prior, and who now roams the countryside looking for his lost dome.
Crane
spends his days teaching, and when he’s not teaching, he’s gladhanding
with the locals, never staying for too long in one house. He also has to
put up with repeat bullying from Brom, who seems all too confident in
his ability to win the affections of Katrina van Tassel, the aforementioned rich girl. One autumn
night, farm families from around the area gather at the van Tassel home
for a harvest party; ghost stories are traded, including a few about the
headless horseman. Afterwards, Crane attempts to woo Katrina, but
fails. On his way home he’s set upon by the horseman! After a lengthy
chase, the horseman catches up to him and throws his own damn head at
the poor guy. The next day Crane is nowhere to be found, but the
epilogue states that he later turned up elsewhere, having become a
lawyer and a politician.
Almost the entire story is without dialogue; the only spoken line is Crane’s, demanding “who are you?” of the horseman. The story is otherwise told as if it were being related in person, rather than in the traditional prose style. Indeed, the very end of the story tells how this story came to be related to the narrator. It’s an interesting device that I don’t think would work in anything other than a short story.
One
of the things that sets this story apart is the “maybe magic, maybe
mundane” approach to the tale. It’s hinted that the horseman might
actually be Brom playing a prank on crane; but one must also consider
how long the legend’s been around. The tone of the story, ambiguous but
leaning towards mundane, feels like an attempt to reflect a new age in America, a country founded (ostensibly) on principles of
reason, in contrast with Europe, seen as an old, dark domain full of ghosts,
real, imagined and metaphorical. This, to me, is probably the salient
point of what Irving was trying to do, amidst his romanticist tendency
for description and his fixation on the regional culture of the
Dutch-descended locals.
Ultimately, whether magic or mundane, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a clear early American take on gothic horror. Gothic horror was not only still in its infancy as a genre, it was also a very European one, generally; perhaps this is why there seemed a need to translocate a European legend to America, nevermind that there’s plenty of spooky folklore in indigenous cultures. Still, translocated or not, it’s an important building block in the spookier side of early America.