Irving declines to divulge this conversation except to say that the schoolmaster leaves "with the air of one who had been sacking a hen-roost rather than a fair lady's heart." Poor Ichabod mounts his decrepit horse and disconsolately begins his travel homewards.Īs he approaches a bridge that has played a role in some of the legends of the area, Ichabod hears a sound and sees a ghastly shape looming off to the side. Following the dancing, Ichabod speaks with Katrina, convinced that he now has won her affections. During the ensuing dancing, however, it is Ichabod who, with his feet clattering and limbs flying, is the talk of the other dancers, including his partner Katrina, leaving Brom Bones to sulk in a corner. Ichabod arrives on a broken-down plow horse, with his knees nearly up to the pommel of the saddle, while Brom Bones gallops in on his handsome and spirited steed Dare-devil. Though he would have welcomed the opportunity for a physical contest with Ichabod, the latter is too wise to provide such, and, frustrated, Brom Bones is left to playing practical jokes on the schoolmaster, often in front of Katrina.īoth Ichabod and Brom Bones are invited to a quilting frolic at Mynheer Van Tassel's. Often called Brom Bones because of his strength and power of limb, he is also a skilled horseman. But another also is interested in Katrina, one Brom Van Brunt, a strong, arrogant, fun-loving, double-jointed man always ready for either a fight or a frolic. Not only does Katrina fire the schoolmaster's imagination, but so too do the treasures of her father's farm: the geese, ducks, and pigs along with the fields of wheat, rye, and Indian corn. Ichabod also has an eye for the women, especially the plump and rosy-cheeked Katrina Van Tassel, a lass of 18 years whose father is a farmer of some wealth.
In this byway of nature, he says, "there abode, in a remote period of American history, that is to say, some thirty years since, a worthy wight of the name of Ichabod Crane." Ichabod is indeed a comic figure-"tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels" and "with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weathercock perched upon his spindle neck." He is also a person with a strong imaginative faculty who enjoys spending winter evenings with old Dutch wives exchanging frightening tales of ghosts and goblins, although he then fears on his walks home all the strange shapes and shadows that "beset his path amidst the dim and ghastly glare of a snowy night." He is particularly concerned that he might one night meet the legendary Headless Horseman, that Hessian soldier who lost his head to a cannonball. As he does in "Rip Van Winkle," Irving goes to some lengths to create a sense of the past in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" that the United States did not have. The people, he says, "are given to all kinds of marvelous beliefs are subject to trances and visions and frequently see strange sights, and hear music and voices in the air." So does Irving set the stage for the wondrous tale of the schoolmaster Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow. "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," in The Sketch Book, is a clear example of the tension that Irving felt between the imaginative endeavor and the American cultural tendency.Īnyone who has ever journeyed to the Catskill Mountains and the Hudson River that meanders among these high hills should have little difficulty in feeling the drowsy, dreamy influence that hangs over the land and pervades the atmosphere surrounding Sleepy Hollow, the setting that Irving describes in his story.
If Whitman and Emerson were to find their creative inspirations in an active existence in the present, Irving was to find his in his romantic affection for the legends and relics of the past. Irving, an exponent of the genteel tradition, was not comfortable in such a setting. Indeed, if there was anything that might be considered old, it had to be sloughed off in favor of the new. A new nation, the United States had no sense of the past and was, moreover, preoccupied with the pragmatic and the materialistic. Like a number of writers of his time, Washington Irving faced the question of what to write about.
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