The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Washington Irving was twenty years dead to the literary establishment of Europe before he ever published a word — American writing, in 1819, was not yet a thing London took seriously, and Irving knew it. He solved the problem by hiding. The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. went out under a persona: an itinerant, slightly melancholy American bachelor touring England, filing dispatches. It worked. The book — issued in seven instalments through 1819 and 1820, then gathered whole — made Irving the first American writer read seriously on both sides of the Atlantic, and did it by being, for the most part, about somewhere else entirely.

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is the exception, and it is not really about England at all, though Irving wrote it there, homesick, in a rented room in Birmingham. It reaches back across the ocean to a village on the east bank of the Hudson that Irving had known since he was a teenager, when a school friend, James Kirke Paulding, first brought him up from Manhattan to see it. He gave the story his own invented historian for a byline — Diedrich Knickerbocker, a fictional Dutch antiquarian Irving had already used once before, to narrate a comic history of New York — and let Knickerbocker’s papers, “found” after his death, carry the tale.

What Irving built into the story is stranger than the frame around it. The Headless Horseman is not wholly American: the tale draws on the Wild Huntsman of German folklore, a spectral rider Irving would have encountered secondhand through his friendship with Walter Scott, an enthusiast of the German tales the Brothers Grimm were then collecting. But the horseman also has a body — a real one. Tradition in the Tarrytown area held that a Hessian soldier had been decapitated by a cannonball at the Battle of White Plains in 1776 and buried, headless, in the graveyard of the Old Dutch Church — the same church Ichabod Crane rides past on the night the story turns. Irving fused a European ghost with an American grave and set the collision in a landscape he had walked himself.

Irving never resolves whether the horseman was real. The story offers a rational explanation — that the “ghost” was Brom Bones, Ichabod’s rival for Katrina Van Tassel’s hand, in a disguise and a thrown pumpkin — right alongside the supernatural one, and declines to choose between them, leaving that choice to the reader to determine. What had been North Tarrytown for over three centuries renamed itself Sleepy Hollow in 1996, a place naming itself after its own fiction.

This edition gives the complete text as Irving wrote it, together with his own framing note on Knickerbocker’s papers and the story’s postscript, typeset by Bibliomancer.