The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving (1819-1820)

I decided to go back to the story of Sleepy Hollow twice over the past few years. The first time to fully read a story that I had only heard of like a distant echo from somewhere buried in childhood's past. The second time to be able to tell it, speak it out loud, for friends and family, and for my own, kept, memory.

I was surprised, more the second time, to find out the story took place in a Dutch town in America over two centuries ago. American folklore isn't too easily found if you're not looking, so I was glad about this: a story that could help me comprehend historical time (against a collage of other kinds of horror stories in popular culture).

Going Dutch, I've known, as a saying, means to share. Ironically, if read between the lines (as Washington Irving intended for his readers in this story, I think), Sleepy Hollow is about the difficulties of sharing with newcomers or outsiders, especially with a headless horseman afoot.

Ichabod Crane, the main character, seeks to nurture and to be nurtured as a person of faith. He is also liberal enough to fathom that there are realms outside of that faith worth looking into (i.e. Crane's small collection of books includes Cotton Mather's History of New England Witchcraft).

While Sleepy Hollow is receptive to him for a long while, to his dedication to children and women, education and art, labor and storytelling in town as the learned school teacher and neighbor, there are moments, time and time again, where is left cutoff from the rest and goes on his own in relaxation, bewilderment, or reveling in his own fancies. While he shares the town's continuous, constant, determined labor power, he a teacher alongside hardworking farmers, he may not have, as Washington Irving hints, have shared that labor power in the dark recesses of life:

"But if there was pleasure in all this, while snugly cuddling in the chimney corner of a chamber that was all of a ruddy glow from the crackling wood fire, and where, of course, no spectre dared to show its face, it was dearly purchased by the terrors of his subsequent walk homewards. What fearful shapes and shadows beset his path, amidst the dim and ghastly glare of a snowy night!" (p. 299)

Ichabod Crane lets these ominous visions pass by him as if they are distantly fearful ships in the night.

And yet, Ichabod Crane develops an appetite for eating with the members of this society - he begins to crave pigeon pies, creamed ham, etc. - at the table. Are these shared meals made to nurture Ichabod Crane's longing and desire for the comforts and now, luxuries of a newfound home and its richer furnishings? He, while satiating his appetite for a moment at a town party, hopes so.

It seems that these are the parts of the story - the dualism of darkness and light and the craving for nourishment (there are a few more detailed accounts within the story) that complicate simplified versions of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow more than a raw comparison of Ichabod Crane's seemingly Dickensian romanticism against the anti-hero Brom Bones' brute courage and familial pride. Crane and Bones are set for antagonism when Ichabod falls for a beautiful lady in town, the daughter of the town's richest farmer. However, it is local folklore, particularly the tale of the headless horseman (a Hessian apparition who rises from his grave at night a find another victim to behead with his sword) that finalizes the complications of the rules of communal sharing within this old Dutch town in old America.

Are there qualities that the darkness and the food contain beyond their reclaimed authority and promise of nourishment, perhaps from the people's knowledge, that Ichabod must come to terms with through a confrontation with the headless horseman?

When Ichabod is inevitably attacked by said ghost apparition in the middle of the same night he shared a delicious meal, Ichabod disappears from the town's vicinity. Where does he go? If Ichabod Crane is able to defend his spirit, he is capable of earning his keep and his labor... and his own head. What else could possibly have been the outcome of Ichabod Crane's encounter with the headless horseman? Besides death, that is.