7. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle
When American writer Washington Irving was a boy in the early nineteenth century he made several trips up the Hudson River to the Catskills region of New York, originally settled by the Dutch during the days of the New Amsterdam colony, as fur trading posts. These journeys exposed him to the local lore regarding two characters featured prominently in American folklore, Rip Van Winkle, and the legendary Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow. Irving wrote both stories, and others based on the Dutch tales, embellishing them for his American audience, but they were already part of local lore before he committed them to the printed page. They have remained so ever since.
The legend of the lost crew of Henry Hudson’s Half Moon playing at nine-pins in the mountains was a popular Dutch folk tale in the region, to which Irving added the character of Rip Van Winkle and his twenty-year nap, set against the backdrop of early American history. A headless horsemen had been a character of folklore in many cultures, including on the European continent and in Great Britain and Ireland before Irving adopted the concept for his tale of the former Hessian soldier encountered by the terrified Ichabod Crane. Both the tale of Rip Van Winkle and that of the Headless Horseman are exploited by the tourist industry in upstate New York, and remain popular subjects on television and film into the twenty-first century.