The Legend of Sleepy Hollow 1.0


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"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is a short story by Washington Irving contained in his collection The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., written while he was living in Birmingham, England, and first published in 1820. With Irving's companion piece "Rip Van Winkle", "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is among the earliest examples of American fiction still read today.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was based on a German folktale, set in the Dutch culture of Pre-Revolutionary War in New York State. The original folktale was recorded by Karl Mus‰us. An excerpt of Mus‰us:

The headless horseman was often seen here. An old man who did not believe in ghosts told of meeting the headless horseman coming from his trip into the Hollow. The horseman made him climb up behind. They rode over bushes, hills, and swamps. When they reached the bridge, the horseman suddenly turned into a skeleton. He threw the old man into the brook and sprang away over the treetops with a clap of thunder.

The dÈnouement of the fictional tale is set at the bridge over the Pocantico River in the area of the Old Dutch Church and Burying Ground in Sleepy Hollow. The characters of Ichabod Crane and Katrina Van Tassel may have been based on local residents known to the author. The character of Katrina is thought to have been based upon Eleanor Van Tassel Brush, in which case her name is derived from that of Eleanor's aunt Catriena Ecker Van Teassel.

Although Irving knew an army colonel named Ichabod Crane from Staten Island, New York (who was also once the Commanding Officer of Lieutenant Stonewall Jackson), the character in "The Legend" may have been patterned after Jesse Merwin, who taught at the local schoolhouse in Kinderhook, further north along the Hudson River, where Irving spent several months in 1809.[2]

"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" follows a tradition of folk tales and poems involving a supernatural wild chase, including Robert Burns's Tam O' Shanter (1790), and B¸rger's Der wilde J‰ger, translated as The Wild Huntsman (1796).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Leg..._Sleepy_Hollow
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow



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