The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Summary

In "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," a mysterious Headless Horseman haunts Sleepy Hollow.
An outsider named Ichabod Crane moves to Tarry Town in Sleepy Hollow, where he devises
a plan to marry the daughter of the richest man in town. He's eventually driven out of Sleepy
Hollow by the Headless Horseman.

An itinerant teacher named Ichabod Crane moves to Sleepy Hollow. He's a Yankee
and is unfamiliar with the ways and superstitions of his new home.

Ichabod starts flirting with Katrina Van Tassel, the daughter of the richest man in
town. It appears that he's only doing this for the money.

After a party given by Katrina's father, the Headless Horseman drives Ichabod out of
town.

Summary
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow represents Irvings second comic masterpiece, a ghostly tale
about things that go bump in the night. The specter in question here is the mysterious
Headless Horseman, said to be a Hessian trooper who lost his head in a nearby battle. Each
night he roams the countryside in search of it. The unlikely hero in this tale is Ichabod Crane,
an itinerant schoolmaster, whose name suits him perfectly: He was 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 his whole frame most loosely hung together.
Irving opens his tale with a marvelous and evocative description of the lush, charming
Hudson Valley region of Sleepy Hollow near Tarry Town, the delightful and dreamy
atmosphere pervading the place, and the tale of the Hessian troopers ghost that supposedly
roams near the churchyard. He then introduces the reader to Ichabod, a poor Connecticut
Yankee who is very interested in marrying the wealthy, lovely, and flirtatious Katrina Van
Tassel, daughter of the richest man in the area.
Ichabods plan is to ingratiate himself into her life, winning her hand in marriage. He
arranges to teach her psalmody and is therefore permitted to visit Katrina on a regular basis at
her familys prosperous farm. His interest in Katrina, however, is less than honorable.
Ichabod wants to acquire her hereditary wealth and sell it off. His chief rival is a brawny local
named Brom Bones, who loves Katrina for herself. The two men despise each other; Irving
adroitly contrasts Yankee opportunism with Dutch diligence. Ichabod attends a party given by
Katrinas father one night and later, on his way home, meets the terrifying Headless
Horseman (Brom Bones in disguise), who drives the superstitious victim out of Sleepy
Hollow forever.
Unlike Rip Van Winkle, which appears among the first pieces in The Sketch Book, Irving
placed The Legend of Sleepy Hollow last and followed it in a brief piece summarizing his
final thoughts on the book. It, too, is set in the Hudson Valley, but Irvings point in this tale is

markedly different. In Rip Van Winkle the old order gives way to the new, but the reverse is
true here.
The hypocritical Yankee Ichabod is defeated by the stalwart Dutch Brom, who represents the
old order. The contrast between both men could not be greater. Ichabod is a skinny, shrewd,
calculating, sterile (and comic) individual, devoid of human affections, who relies on wit in
his attempt to defeat his erstwhile rival. He is also a very gullible individual who believes in
the supernatural, thus providing his opponent with the weapon that will destroy him. Brom,
on the other hand, is a swaggering, athletic type inclined to mischievous pranks, but he does
have deep romantic feelings for the beauteous Katrina. Brom is desperate to win her love, but
he realizes that he cannot physically challenge his rival to a fight; hence, he devises a
stratagem to prey on the schoolmasters fear and drive him away from Sleepy Hollow.
Although The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is as familiar a tale as Rip Van Winkle to
generations of schoolchildren, it has not had much success on the stage because of the
difficulty of staging the thrilling chase scene at the end between Ichabod and the Headless
Horseman. It has, however, been turned into at least three motion pictures. In 1922 the great
cowboy humorist Will Rogers starred in a silent-screen version retitled The Headless
Horseman. For the second, in 1949, Walt Disney created a full-length animated feature with
Bing Crosby as narrator. In 1999 Tim Burtons version, Sleepy Hollow, made Ichabod Crane
into a constable sent to investigate a number of murders attributed to the Headless Horseman.
The tale was also made into a television film in 1980.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is an endearing and charming tale full of good humor, yet it
has serious social implications. It questions whether change and progress are better than
stability and order. The old virtues of the settlers are more important than those of the
destroyers. Irving sides with Katrina, who has rejected Ichabods advances, and Brom Bones,
who defeats his rival by playing on the heros irrational fears. Irving implies that the practical
man always will defeat the dreamer. With the creation of Rip Van Winkle and The Legend
of Sleepy Hollow, even if Irving had written nothing else, he would be elevated to literary
greatness, because he fashioned two great American myths that perfectly symbolized
American ideals and aspirations

Critical Evaluation

Washington Irving, the first professional writer in the United States, was by inclination an
amused observer of people and customs. By birth, he was in a position to be that observer;
the son of a New York merchant in good financial standing, he was the youngest of eleven
children, several of whom helped Irving take prolonged trips to Europe for his health and
fancy. He was responsible for the evolution and popularity of two genres in American
literature: the regional, legendary tale and the historical novel. The Legend of Sleepy

Hollow belongs to the first genre. The two best-known of Irvings stories are Rip Van
Winkle (1819) and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, both of which appeared originally in
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-1820), a collection of tales and familiar
essays. Both stories were adapted by Irving from German folklore to a lower New York State
setting and peopled with Dutch American farmers.
On one level, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow reveals Irvings love for and use of folklore.
As he had in Rip Van Winkle, Irving employed the fictional folklorist Diedrich
Knickerbocker as an external narrator looking back on old tales. Ichabod Crane is an outsider,
a Yankee schoolmaster among the canny Dutch farmers. As such, Crane becomes the butt of
local humor and the natural victim for Brom Boness practical jokes. Most of the humorous
sallies of the Sleepy Hollow boys are in the vein of good-natured ribbing, but Broms
practical jokes are somewhat more serious because of the rather unequal rivalry between
Brom and Ichabod for the hand of Katrina Van Tassel.
Several dichotomies are established in the story between Ichabod and the local men. On the
one hand, Ichabod is of Connecticut stock, a New Englander, and an educated man, in
contrast with the locally bred Sleepy Hollow men. He scorns the rougher male pursuits of the
local men of Dutch heritage and instead spends his time working his way into the hearts of
the women. He is a representative of the larger America that lurks outside the confines of
Sleepy Hollow, a walking figure of the need of the growing United States to acquire and
assimilate every element of the continent in its reach for Manifest Destiny. As is often the
case in folklore, the local parties are validated and the interloper is vanquished.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow operates on more than one level, however. As in Rip Van
Winkle, the primary tone in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is irony. Rip Van Winkle
may be a story about a man who drinks from a flagon and sleeps for twenty years in the
mountains, but it may also be a story about a man fleeing an insulting wife and shirking his
responsibilities as a husband and father. Similarly, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow may be a
story about an enterprising young man who is vanquished by a spectral figure on a dark
autumn night. However, to a careful reader, the story is more than that. Throughout the text,
almost all of the observations made by the narrator about Crane and his encounters with
Katrina Van Tassel, Brom Bones, and the purported horseman, are ironic and tongue-incheek.
Although Crane presumably tries not to hurt his weaker students, he has no compunction
about doubling the punishment to others, in defiance of pedagogical objectivity. Ichabod
fancies himself an amazing vocal talent, yet the text makes it clear that his singing is horrible,
just as his dancing is such a sight that the servants gather to ogle him. Although he tries to
make himself useful to farmers, it is always to the ones with full larders and pretty daughters
who receive his aid. His love of superstition may also reveal the kind of schoolmaster he is;
this observation is particularly borne out by his admiration for the Puritan writer Cotton
Mather, whose 1693 book The Wonders of the Invisible World served as an apology for the
abuses of the Salem witch trials of 1692.

Ichabod is a ravenous eater in the story. His appetite is both literal and figurative. Beyond his
physical need to consume, his hunger demonstrates avariciousness and greed. Even his
interest in Katrina has very little to do with any kind of romantic attraction to her and much
more to do with her fathers possessions andmore to the pointthe food her father can
provide. His feelings for Katrina are especially piqued after he has seen her fathers great
wealth; indeed, the story makes very clear that the extent of Cranes amorous feelings for
Katrina extend only so far as her fathers wealth. He seems to regard her as a food to be
consumed, considering her a tempting morsel, plump as a partridge, and ripe and
melting and rosy cheeked as one of her fathers peaches. This conflation of food with sexual
and romantic imagery continues when Ichabod attends a feast at the Van Tassel household
and observes pigeons snugly put to bed and ducks pairing cosily in dishes, like snug
married couples.
When considering his courtship of her, Ichabods thoughts are not of Katrina or what her
feelings for him might be; rather, he considers her fathers lands and plans how he might
dispose of them and use the cash gained from the sale. What is more, Katrina is overtly more
interested in Brom Bones than in Crane. Although the narrator refers to her as a coquette, the
text never once indicates that she gives Crane reasons to suspect she might entertain romantic
notions toward him. When he seeks to ply his troth, she rejects him soundly enough that he
leaves more like a man skulking after having raided a hen-roost than like a triumphant knight.
The supernatural elements of the story are further questioned when a traveling farmer finds
out that Crane has left Sleepy Hollow, studied for the bar, and become a politician and justice.
On a figurative level, Cranes gluttony and greed may again reference the growth of
American Manifest Destiny; old folkways and beliefs must fall beneath the encroaching new
American way of life. Cranes defeat and subsequent flight from Sleepy Hollow are, in a
sense, a victory for the old Dutch American world. Katrina has married another Dutch man,
who settles down with her without leaving the valley and without disrupting the farm or the
ancient way of life of the old Dutch denizens of New York.
Early in the story, the reader encounters the legend of the headless horseman, a ghost with
which the residents of Sleepy Hollow are familiar. Beheaded by a cannonball during the
Revolutionary War, he searches nightly for his head. This anecdote--humorous in itself-provides the key to the trick by which the schoolmaster is driven from the town.
The schoolmaster, Ichabod Crane, is also the local singing master and, in that role, meets and
falls in love with Katrina Van Tassel, the only child of a well-to-do Dutch farmer. In fact,
Irvings complete catalog of the wealth of Baltus Van Tassel implies that Cranes desire to
marry Katrina is partly monetary.
Crane has a rival, however, Brom Bones, whose ingenuity finally drives the superstitious
schoolmaster away from Sleepy Hollow. Impersonating the headless horseman, Bones rides
after Crane one night and finally throws a pumpkin, which Crane believes to be the
horsemans head. The schoolmaster abruptly departs, leaving Bones to marry Katrina.

Irving uses this plot as a vehicle for commenting on the primacy of the imagination. Not only
does the central story contain many references to legend and folklore, but also there is a
frame around the tale that complements these references. As the story opens, the reader meets
a nameless narrator whose description of Sleepy Hollow implies that it is a realm of the
imagination, a retreat where dream and reality meet. A postscript explains how the story came
to be known by a Mr. Knickerbocker, the name of a fictional character in other works by
Irving. By such devices the reader is constantly reminded that in this story--as, perhaps, in
life--imaginative fiction exists side by side with everyday reality.

Critical Overview

Most early readers of The Sketch Book praised the volume for its humor and its graceful
descriptive writing, but did not single out The Legend of Sleepy Hollow for special
attention. Francis Jeffrey, in an 1820 review in Edinburgh Review, did note that the legend,
along with ''Rip Van Winkle, was among only five or six pieces in the collection of thirtyfive that relates ''to subjects at all connected with America.... The rest relate entirely to
England. But other than pointing out its existence, he had nothing to say about the story.
Jeffrey was clearly delighted with the collection, and astonished that Irving was able to
produce it: ''It is the work of an American, entirely bred and trained in that country ... Now,
the most remarkable thing in a work so circumstanced certainly is, that it should be written
throughout with the greatest care and accuracy, and worked up to great purity and beauty of
diction.
More recently, critics have attempted to delineate just what is American about Irving's fiction.
Terence Martin, writing for American Literature in 1959, focuses his attention on the
newness of the United States as a nation during Irving's career, and the American tendency at
the time to equate ''the imaginative and the childish. Irving's struggling to control his
appetite and to use imagination properly can be seen as mirroring the struggles of the new
society to behave maturely. He concludes, ''for Irving there is no place, or a very limited
place, for the hero of the imagination in the culture of early...

Essays and Criticism

Sleepy Hollow as an Earthly Paradise

Irving's narrator opens The Legend of Sleepy Hollow'' with a brief description of Sleepy
Hollow itself, one of the quietest places in the whole world, a place of uniform
tranquillity. Before moving on to introduce his characters he concludes, ''If ever I should
wish for a retreat, whither I might steal from the world and its distractions, and dream quietly
away the remnant of a troubled life, I know of none more promising than this little valley. In
this opening, Irving establishes Sleepy Hollow as both of-this-world and not-of-this-world, an
enchanted region'' of unparalleled beauty and fertility. Tapping a literary tradition that
stretches back literally thousands of years, he sets his story in a comic American version of
what is often called an Earthly Paradise.
A. Bartlett Giamatti explains in his book The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic that
the desire for a state of perfect repose and life eternal has always haunted mankind, and
poets have forever been the spokesmen for the dream. Poetsand, more recently, prose
writershave created idylls, eclogues, odes, epithalamia, epics, satires, romances, and
occasional verses all [abounding] with descriptions of such an ideal life in an ideal
landscape. These works of literature have tended to depict their landscapes using a
traditional set of images and ideas, and Irving uses and adapts many of them in creating his
own ''enchanted region.''
Stories set in an earthly paradise often take place in a Golden Age, a distant time and way of
existence without strife and care. In the eighth century BC the Greek poet Hesiod outlined the
five ages of man in his Works and Days; the five were the golden age, the silver age, the
bronze age, the age of heroes, and the iron age in which we live now. The golden age was the
first, the most simple and noble, and the yearning to return to the golden age has figured in
ancient and more recent literature. As Giamatti writes, the image ''never failed, or fails yet, to
evoke that time when the world was fresh with dew and man was happy. Even today,
Americans look to the past (''those were the days'') as a happier time, and tell themselves that
''things were simpler then. In creating his earthly paradise, Irving comically sets his story in
a new nation's version of ancient history, in a remote period of American history, that is to
say, some thirty years since.
The attractive thing about the golden age landscape is that it does not change. The narrator
pines, ''Though many years have elapsed since I trod the drowsy shades of Sleepy Hollow, yet
I question whether I should not find the same trees and the same families vegetating in its
sheltered bosom. Sleepy Hollow is the kind of place where the population, manners, and
customs remain fixed; while the great torrent of migration and improvement, which is making
such incessant changes in other parts of this restless country, sweeps by them unobserved.

But it is the landscape, not the society, that makes an earthly paradise. One of the most
common ways of depicting paradise is as a garden, for example, the Bible's Garden of Eden.
Giamatti finds that ''in a garden, meadow or field poets have always felt Nature most nearly
approximates the ideals of harmony, beauty and peace which men constantly seek in some
form or other. Another common depiction is the beautiful but somewhat wilder landscape
used in pastoral poetry as a setting for love to bloom. Albert J. von Frank sees elements of
both the garden and the pastoral in ''The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. In a 1987 article in
Studies in American Fiction, he writes, Like other ideal settings, the larger Dutch
community, Sleepy Hollow, and the Van Tassel farm are enclosed gardens, here
concentrically frames, inviting, seductive, and as dangerous to itinerants as the island of the
Sirens or the land of the Lotos-Eaters. The societies sheltered by these nested gardens are
themselves closed and static ... yet magically productive.

Girls can Take Care of Themselves: Gender and Storytelling in Washington

Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"

Discussions of Washington Irving often concern gender and the artistic imagination, but these
topics are usually mutually exclusive when associated with the two most enduring stories
from the Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-20): Rip Van Winkle and The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow.'' Many readings of the former focus on gender, while discussions
of the latter most often explore its conception of the artist's role in American society. The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow does indeed address this second theme, but also complicates it by
making art an issue of gender. Ichabod Crane is not only a representative of bustling,
practical New England who threatens imaginatively fertile rural America with his prosaic
acquisitiveness; he is also an intrusive male who threatens the stability of a decidedly female
place. For Irving, the issue of art is sexually charged; in Sleepy Hollow, this tension finally
becomes a conflict between male and female storytelling. A close look at the stories that
circulate through the Dutch community shows that Ichabod's expulsion follows directly from
women's cultivation of local folklore. Female-centered Sleepy Hollow, by means of tales
revolving around the emasculated, headless ''dominant spirit'' of the region, figuratively
neuters threatening masculine interlopers like Ichabod to ensure the continuance of the old
Dutch domesticity, the Dutch wives' hearths, and their old wives' tales.
Although Irving often places the feminine in a pejorative lightthe "feminine" in Ichabod is
his unmanly, superstitious, trembling, and gullible side he himself seems, in this tale,
begrudgingly to acquiesce to the female sphere of Sleepy Hollow. And this sphere has none
of the abrasiveness so blatant in ''Rip Van Winkle.'' We have no shrewish wife, whose death in
a fit of passion allows for Rip's carefree dotage upon his return to the village. Rather, we

are left with a sense of relief at Ichabod's removal, at this snake's relegation to the mythology
of the Hollow. Thus the tale presents a stark contrast to ''Rip Van Winkle.'' In that story,
women attempt and fail to confront men openly; in Sleepy Hollow, female behavior is much
more subversive, and effective.
In The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Irving's conservatism subverts itself, since conservation
of the existing power structure means the continuance of a female (though certainly not
feminist) hierarchy. Irving's tale is one of preservation, then, of maintenance of the feminine,
and the landscape is the predominant female. Sleepy Hollow lies ''in the bosom of a cove
lining the Hudson, the valley is embosomed in the great state of New York, and the
vegetating families of Sleepy Hollow are rooted in its sheltered bosom. Clearly the repose
and security of the place rest in the maternal landscapean assumption so pervasive that
even our male narrator attests to it. For as he observes, in this tale of a Dutch Eden even the
adamic act of naming falls to women. The good housewives of the adjacent country, from
the inveterate propensity of their husbands to linger about the village tavern on market days,''
have named the nearby "rural port'' ''Tarry Town''; the name and the power of naming thus
operate as a gently sardonic means of reproaching unruly husbands and of preserving female
dominance over the valley.
The narrator is not simply an idle observer, however. He comes to the Hollow to hunt:
I recollect that when a stripling, my first exploit in squirrel shooting was in a grove of tall
walnut trees that shades one side of the valley. I had wandered into it at noon time, when all
nature is peculiarly quiet, and was startled by the roar of my own gun, as it broke the sabbath
stillness around, and was prolonged and reverberated by the angry echoes. If ever I should
wish for a retreat, whither I might steal from the world and its distractions, and dream quietly
away the remnant of a troubled life, I know none more promising than this little valley.
The tale thus begins with a paradigm of masculine experience in the maternal bosom of
Sleepy Hollow: an acquisitive, intrusive male both perpetuates female influence over the
region and also acquiesces to constraints on male behavior. As the narrator remarks, the
Hollow is his choice for ''retreat and security. But although the return to Sleepy Hollow is
therefore a return to the womb, unfortunately, he is no longer welcome there.
For as he praises the soporific atmosphere of the Dutch valley, the narrator also admits it has
repulsed him. It is clear that Mother Nature here produces a bower not to be disturbed by the
masculine aggression of hunting, regardless of its tameness in the case of this "stripling."
Hunting is not permitted, and trespassers will be startled into submission. Our gun-toting
narrator is surprised not only by the roar of his own gun, his own masculine explosion into
the place, but also by the sense that his behavior is inappropriate. This womb-like grove is for
nurturing dream, not bloodsport; to be treated with respect due the sabbath, not rent asunder
by blunderbuss ejaculations. Indeed, the angry echoes'' from the landscape suggest a
rebellious reaction to such flagrant poaching. Indolent as the epigraph may make the place

seem, Sleepy Hollow does not take kindly to intruders; hence the narrator is properly awed
into acquiescence.
The youthful exploit of this opening scene is echoed by the actions of Ichabod and the
Headless Horseman. For like the narrator, both Ichabod and the dominant spirit of Sleepy
Hollowthe apparition of a figure on horseback without a head'' are masculine,
mercenary interlopers in this feminine place. The bony schoolmaster's desire to liquidate
heiress Katrina Van Tassel's wealth, invest it ''in immense tracts of wild land,'' and take
Katrina from the Hollow mirrors both the narrator's childhood intrusion and the former
Hessian trooper's attempt to win Sleepy Hollow for Royalist forces ''in some nameless battle
during the revolutionary war. They embody the essence of masculine imperialism: war,
fortune hunting, and even squirrel hunting are all expressions of the same will to conquer.
Gun, Hessian sword, or birch in hand, the narrator, the Horseman, and Ichabod all bear
authority; and all three seek the spoilspolitical, material or sexualof invading Sleepy
Hollow.
Irving's bawdy imagery strongly suggests that all male intrusions in this female place are
ultimately sexual. Ichabod, for example, is described in insistently phallic terms:
He had, however, a happy mixture of pliability and perseverance in his nature; he was in form
and spirit like a supple jackyielding, but tough; though he bent, he never broke; and though
he bowed beneath the slightest pressure, yet, the moment it was away jerk!he was as
erect, and carried his head as high as ever.
The pedagogue's pliability and perseverance Ichabod is elsewhere accredited with
possessing the dilating powers of an Anaconda suggest that he will not be as easily
scared or awed as the narrator. It will take more than just the roar of his gun to frighten this
persistent "jack."
Storytelling is also a part of male imperialism. Of the numerous tales that circulate through
Sleepy Hollow, those told by men concern their own fictionalized exploits. ''The sager folks''
at Van Tassel's farm sit gossiping over former times, and drawling out long stories about the
war"; "just sufficient time had elapsed to enable each storyteller to dress up his tale with a
little becoming fiction, and in the indistinctness of his recollection, to make himself the hero
of every exploit.'' These stories are designed to increase the teller's status in the minds of his
listeners by linking him to the heroic, historic, and masculine past.
True to this male practice of self-aggrandizing storytelling, Ichabod regales his female
companions with scientific speculations upon comets and shooting stars, and with the
alarming fact that the world did absolutely turn round, and that they were half the time
topsyturvy! Though fantastic in themselves, these stories are to Ichabod the height of
learning and scholarly achievement. Even his tales of the supernatural show him as a perfect
master of Cotton Mather's History of New England Witchcraft. Ichabod's familiarity with the
subject attests to his book learning and his reliance on the great masters of American thought,

not to his understanding of folklore. Boastfully displaying his knowledge of worldly matters,
this ''travelling gazette'' brings word of the ' 'restless...

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Washington Irving

The following entry presents criticism of Irving's short story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
(1819).
Considered the first professional man of letters in the United States and the first American
author to win recognition abroad, Irving is noted for his contribution to the short story genre.
In his most acclaimed achievement, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (181920),
he created charming sketches, tales, and travel reminiscences. Widely read in its time, the
book is remembered for the short stories Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy
Hollow. In the latter of these taleswhich details the run-in of a Connecticut schoolmaster,
Ichabod Crane, with a headless horsemanIrving wove elements of myth, legend, folklore,
and drama into a narrative that achieved almost immediate classic status. Critics generally
agree that The Legend of Sleepy Hollow provided a model for the modern short story and
introduced imagery and archetypes that enriched national literature. While Irving's other
historical writings are valued for their graceful prose style and historical interest, critics
generally agree that The Legend of Sleepy Hollow isalong with Rip Van Winklehis
most lasting artistic achievement.
Plot and Major Characters
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow opens with a description of the Dutch New York community
of Sleepy Hollow, located in a rural valley near the Hudson River. Irving introduces the tall,
lanky schoolmaster Ichabod Crane as a figure of mild derision, a hard-nosed itinerant Yankee
from Connecticut who takes himself too seriously and possesses an enormous appetite despite
his slight build. Proud of his erudition, at least in comparison to the rustics he encounters in
Sleepy Hollow, Crane is described as an odd mixture of small shrewdness and simple
credulity. He quickly discovers Katrina Van Tassel, the lovely daughter of a well-to-do
Dutch farmer, Baltus Van Tassel, and resolves to win her heart. His principal rival, Brom Van
Brunt, nicknamed Brom Bones, is a burly outdoorsman, strong and somewhat arrogant but
with a well-developed sense of humor. Realizing that he cannot best Bones in feats of
physical prowess, Crane sets out to woo Katrina by making regular visits to the Van Tassel
farmhouse as a singing-master. Over time the competition between Crane and Bones
intensifies.
At an autumn party at the Van Tassel home, Crane endeavors to impress Katrina with his
singing and dancing. As he seems to gain the upper hand over Bones the conversation turns to
local ghost talesprincipally that of the Headless Horseman, an apparition of a decapitated

Hessian soldier that haunts the area. Bones entertains the crowd by telling of his own
adventure with the Horseman; later Crane recites extracts from the works of his favorite
author, Cotton Mather. As the party winds down, Crane speaks with Katrina, but his advances
are rebuked. Crestfallen, he departs on his horse. Shortly thereafter, while traveling through
the darkness, Crane encounters the ghostly Hessian soldier who chases the schoolmaster until
the frightened man is thrown from his steed. The following morning, the horse is found
without its saddle or rider near the smashed remains of a pumpkin. Crane is never seen again
in Sleepy Hollow, though a rumor spreads that he has become a lawyer and a judge in another
town. The tale is retold of his harrowing confrontation with the Headless Horseman, which
produces a spirited laugh from Brom Bones whenever the pumpkin is mentioned. Irving
closes the tale with a postscript describing the original narrator of the story, one tall, drylooking old gentleman who draws some conclusions from the extravagant yarn, but finally
claims, I don't believe one-half of it myself.
Major Themes
Thematic analyses of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow generally focus on the character of
Ichabod Crane and the satirical implications of his rivalry with Brom Bones. Many critics
maintain that Crane represents the outcast artist-intellectual in American society; although he
has been considered, conversely, as a caricature of the acquisitive, scheming Yankee Puritan,
a type that Irving Iampooned regularly in his early satirical writings. Additionally, the work is
seen as a regional contrast between Yankee Connecticut and Dutch New York, the latter
personified in the figure of the backwoodsman Brom Bones. Other commentators have
suggested that Crane represents a morally corrupt capitalist figure. Also, the tension between
imagination and creativity versus materialism and productivity in nineteenth-century America
is considered a significant theme in the story.
Critical Reception
Although much of Irving's fiction is today regarded as little more than petty and derivative,
many critics agree that Irving did much to establish the American short story in 1819 with
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Commentators concur, moreover, that Irving set the artistic
standard and model for subsequent generations of American short story writers with the tale.
Among the technical innovations ascribed to The Legend of Sleepy Hollow include the
integration of folklore, myth, and fable into narrative fiction; setting and landscape as a
reflection of theme and mood; and the expression of the supernatural and use of Gothic
elements.