The Legend of Sleepy Hollow - Washington Irving

 The Legend of Sleepy Hollow - Washington Irving

This is one of Irving’s most famous stories. It is often included in anthologies and it has been adapted for the screen. It is well worth reading, though I wonder how far we are supposed to join in with the laughter of the boorish bully. It is, at least, a useful reminder that the easy villains of movie comedies are also heroes and role models. Irving sets up two types, the meek scholar and the bullying sportsman and lets them arrive at the only possible conclusion.

This is not an ‘adventure’. Irving presents us with a legend, something to be read. Of course, by the time that Irving was writing, the association with miracles and wonders was firmly established. Irving is myth making. He presents us with American types and American history, as legend.

Sleepy Hollow is a real place, though the reality has been overwritten by Irving’s story. Just north of the place that Irving would make his home, Tarrytown, Sleepy Hollow is firmly associated with Irving’s Headless Horseman. A hollow is, originally, a place of concealment, similar in meaning to a covert. Sleepy, when applied to a place, is perhaps closest to the meaning of dormant, or inactive, like the ‘sleeper’ beloved of spy novelists.

In Irving’s story, the sleepiness and cover of the place are, perhaps, best expressed in the old Dutch and their ‘virtues’ that come to win the day. Ichabod, alas, is too inactive to cope with the vitality that surrounds him. There is little sympathy for Ichabod in the story, far more in later adaptations. As we continue to see in contemporary politics, there are two divergent ideas of America. Ichabod and Brom represent the two ideas; and it is revealing which is the victor in this story.