School is out, and the master is lying on his back in the clover beside the brook, reading about witches. He keeps reading until the dusk turns the printed page to fog. Then he has to walk home past swamp and stream and woodland, and every noise on the way becomes evidence: the whip-poor-will, the tree toad, the owl. When a large beetle blunders into him in the dark, he is ready to believe he has been struck by a witch’s token, and he does the only thing he knows will help. He sings psalms, loudly and through his nose, and the families sitting on their doorsteps hear the hymn come floating down from the hill. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving has a headless rider in it, but this is the scene that explains it. Long before the ghost arrives, Ichabod Crane has been building it out of his own reading.
Who Is Telling the Legend of Sleepy Hollow?
The story never forgets that it is being told, and much of the pleasure of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving lies in the telling. It comes framed as a document found among the papers of a dead amateur historian, and the narrator spends the opening pages refusing to stand behind his own facts. He mentions how Tarry Town got its name and immediately adds that he will not vouch for it. Later he admits that he has no idea how women’s hearts are won, and at the one private conversation the plot depends on, he simply declines to report what was said. The effect is of a man at a fireside who enjoys the tale too much to spoil it with certainty.
That hedging is the key to the whole book. Sleepy Hollow is a place where every household has a haunted spot and every grandfather has a story, and Irving shows the machinery of legend at work. At the harvest party the old men smoke on the porch and refight the Revolution. One nearly sank a British frigate, except that his gun burst on the sixth shot. Another parried a musket ball with a small sword and will show anyone the bent hilt. Enough time has passed, the narrator notes drily, for each of them to make himself the hero. By the time the ghost stories start, nobody in that crowd is a reliable witness, least of all the schoolmaster.
Irving’s own sketch of Ichabod catches the paradox exactly: “an odd mixture of small shrewdness and simple credulity.” He is shrewd about food, money and which farmhouses have pretty daughters. He is credulous about everything after dark. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving is best read as the meeting of those two halves.
Brom Bones Has the Better Jokes
Every comedy needs a counterweight, and Brom Bones, born Abraham Van Brunt, is the liveliest presence in the valley. He is broad, curly-haired and fond of horses nobody else can ride, and he wears a fur cap topped with a fox’s tail that makes the neighbours brace for trouble whenever it appears at a gathering. His gang tears past farmhouses at midnight whooping like cavalry, and the old women wake, listen and name him without needing to look.
What makes him more than a bully is his sense of humour. Since Ichabod refuses to fight him, Brom wages a campaign of pranks instead. He stops up the chimney to smoke out the singing school. He breaks into the schoolhouse and turns it upside down so thoroughly that the master suspects a witches’ meeting. Best of all, he trains a dog to whine in the most absurd way and presents it as a rival singing teacher. At the party he tops everyone’s ghost story with his own: he once raced the Galloping Hessian for a bowl of punch and would have won if the spectre had not vanished in a flash of fire at the church bridge.
The trouble is that the rivalry stays at that pitch. Brom gets a vivid outline and almost no interior, and the long middle stretch of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving asks a reader to enjoy portraiture for its own sake. The first plot event worth the name arrives late, and anyone coming to the story for chills will notice how long Irving takes over his landscapes before he lets anything happen.
A Feast, Then a Fright
When it does happen, the payoff is earned. The invitation to the Van Tassel farm sends the schoolroom into chaos, and the party itself is a comic masterpiece of excess, a tea table heaped with doughnuts, olykoeks and crullers, ginger cakes and honey cakes, pies of every kind, with the narrator protesting that he has no time to describe it properly and is in a hurry to get on with the story.
Then comes the ride. The stranger on the black horse does not attack. He simply keeps pace, speeding up when Ichabod speeds up and slowing when he slows, and the silence does the work. Ichabod tries to sing and finds his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. Mid-gallop the girth gives way, and even in his terror his first thought is that the saddle belongs to his landlord and it is the good Sunday one. Fear and comedy travel together in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving, and the chase is a short, brilliant demonstration that they can.
Racial caricature, schoolroom cruelty and mild supernatural menace all figure along the way, the first of them in language that has aged very badly.
Where the Legend of Sleepy Hollow Came From
Washington Irving, born in New York in 1783, who died in 1859, was named after George Washington, who blessed him as a six-year-old shortly before becoming president. As a young satirist he gave New York the nickname Gotham, and in 1809 he launched his comic history of the city with a hoax, placing newspaper notices about a missing Dutch historian called Diedrich Knickerbocker. The name stuck to New Yorkers, and eventually to a basketball team.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving first appeared in 1820 in The Sketch Book, the collection that also gave the world Rip Van Winkle and made Irving one of the first American writers taken seriously in Britain. Walter Scott steered him to the London publisher John Murray, and Irving dedicated the English edition to Scott. The headless rider has deep European roots, from German folk tales retold by Johann Musäus to Robert Burns’s Tam o’ Shanter, and a local one too, since Hessian horsemen raided Westchester’s lawless Neutral Ground during the war.
The screen has kept him riding, from a 1922 silent film starring Will Rogers to Tim Burton’s 1999 version. Irving lies in a Tarrytown cemetery that took the name Sleepy Hollow in 1865, at his own request, a short walk from the Old Dutch Church and the gravestones whose names fill the story.
What It Leaves Behind
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving is not the horror story its reputation suggests, and readers who come for dread will find a leisurely comic sketch with a few pages of panic at the end. The slow opening and the dated portraits are real costs. What remains is the voice: a teller who loves his valley, distrusts his sources and knows exactly when to stop talking.
Readers who want the small-town legend in modern dress should try The Haunting of Paynes Hollow by Kelley Armstrong, where a ghost story is something a whole community has agreed to keep telling. Stay Buried by Jennifer McMahon asks what a village will repeat for a century rather than confess, and Burns’s Tam o’ Shanter shows the drunken midnight ride Irving’s goblin may have galloped out of.
On a still Sunday morning, the narrator insists, a few of Ichabod’s nasal quavers can still be heard in that church from across the millpond. Nobody can prove it, which is exactly how a legend survives in this valley.