The often humorous and ironic, but also matter-of-fact, tone in these stories, which is the familiar form of legend, is woven into a tapestry with the very real corporeal world. In Irving’s rural America, farmyards are filled with gobbling turkeys and guinea fowl, yet ghostly tales rule the imagination.

The glorious heart of this collection of stories within stories, tales within tales, is “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” This fable about a gullible schoolteacher who thinks quite highly of himself is also a lesson in the power of the imagination and of the potent influences of storytelling. And so it begins that Ichabod Crane journeys to one of the dreamy, bewitched villages in New York State’s Hudson Valley, adrowsy, enchanted region where even “good people… are given to all kinds of marvellous beliefs; subject to trances and visions…. There was a contagion in the very air that blew from that haunted region; it breathed forth an atmosphere of dreams and fancies infecting all the land.”

Ichabod Crane has both a runaway steed and a runaway imagination, but even his hunger for the marvelous is more than matched when he comes to this rural village where people have an enormous appetite for stories, particularly for those concerning the miraculous—whether they be “the twilight superstitions” that surround natural phenomena such as shooting stars and meteors, or stories of haunted bridges and haunted houses, and of a haunted horseman who long ago lost his head but not his fury.

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” begins in the very real geography of upstate New York, a rich landscape of farms and fields that look down upon “the mighty Hudson,” an area peppered with towns whose names we can still find on the map. Irving is a master at depicting rustic life, and it is with a firm foothold in the natural world that the element of the supernatural is rooted. Nature itself, in Irving’s hands, has stupendous effects: “… to inhale the witching influences of the air and begin to grow imaginative—to dream dreams, and see apparitions,” such are the results of living in a “spellbound” region so marvelous, anything seems conceivable within its confines.

The inhabitants of Sleepy Hollow find their way to the dim and dusky world of the fantastic on very real roads, over very real bridges. Yet there is magic in the very air, especially for those who look beneath the surface of everyday life, beneath the brambles and alders, and for those who listen to what music echoes beyond the songs of crickets and bullfrogs. The mesmerizing effect this world of beast and bloom have upon the hapless Ichabod Crane is evident from the start:

Then, as he wended his way, by swamp and stream and awful woodland, to the farm house where he happened to be quartered, every sound of nature, at that witching hour, fluttered his excited imagination: the moan of the whip-poor-will from the hill side; the boding cry of the tree toad, that harbinger of storm; the dreary hooting of the screech owl; or the sudden rustling in the thicket, of birds frightened from their roost. The fire flies, too, which sparkled most vividly in the darkest places, now and then startled him, as one of uncommon brightness would stream across his path; and if, by chance, a huge blockhead of a beetle came winging his blundering flight against him, the poor varlet was ready to give up the ghost, with the idea that he was struck with a witch’s token.

In Irving’s Sleepy Hollow, the real and imagined collide, conspire, and become interchangeable. It is a land of contradiction that has an undercurrent of hellfire and mischief at its core. Perhaps it is human nature, however, rather than the doings of goblins and ghouls, that is most dangerous: For love can transform men into demons, and gluttony and greed can bring down even the most good-natured and foolish of men. What begins as a rivalry between Ichabod Crane and the local hero and practical joker, Brom Bones, as they vie for the hand of the lovely and wealthy Katrina Van Tassel, ends as a contest of the imagination. It is a brilliant, funny, and brutal battle, one which takes place in the characters’ minds as well as in the dark, unexplored woods.

The books Irving’s schoolmaster carries with him on his journey—“Cotton Mather’s History of Witchcraft, a New England Almanack, and a book of dreams and fortune telling”—stand together as a guidepost for all American literature to follow, from Hawthorne to Updike to Stephen King, plaiting images of our beloved landscape to our darkest dreams, and joining the reaches of our imaginations to the rugged roads we travel, the fields we walk upon, and the possibilities we find at every stony turn, especially when the hour reaches midnight in the village of Sleepy Hollow.

ALICE HOFFMAN is the author of fourteen novels, including Practical Magic, Turtle Moon, Local Girls, Here on Earth, The River King, and Blue Diary. She lives in Massachusetts.

PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION

The following papers, with two exceptions, were written in England, and formed but part of an intended series for which I had made notes and memorandums. Before I could mature a plan, however, circumstances compelled me to send them piecemeal to the United States, where they were published from time to time in portions or numbers. It was not my intention to publish them in England, being conscious that much of their contents could be interesting only to American readers, and in truth, being deterred by the severity with which American productions had been treated by the British press.

By the time the contents of the first volume had appeared in this occasional manner, they began to find their way across the Atlantic, and to be inserted, with many kind encomiums, in the London Literary Gazette. It was said, also, that a London bookseller intended to publish them in a collective form. I determined, therefore, to bring them forward myself, that they might at least have the benefit of my superintendence and revision. I accordingly took the printed numbers which I had received from the United States, to Mr. John Murray, the eminent publisher, from whom I had already received friendly attentions, and left them with him for examination, informing him that should he be inclined to bring them before the public, I had materials enough on hand for a second volume. Several days having elapsed without any communication from Mr. Murray, I addressed a note to him, in which I construed his silence into a tacit rejection of my work, and begged that the numbers I had left with him might be returned to me. The following was his reply.

MY DEAR SIR,

I entreat you to believe that I feel truly obliged by your kind intentions towards me, and that I entertain the most unfeigned respect for your most tasteful talents. My house is completely filled with workpeople at this time, and I have only an office to transact business in; and yesterday I was wholly occupied, or I should have done myself the pleasure of seeing you.

If it would not suit me to engage in the publication of your present work, it is only because I do not see that scope in the nature of it which would enable me to make those satisfactory accounts between us, without which I really feel no satisfaction in engaging—but I will do all I can to promote their circulation, and shall be most ready to attend to any future plan of yours.

With much regard, I remain, dear sir,
Your faithful servant,                        
JOHN MURRAY.                                 

This was disheartening, and might have deterred me from any further prosecution of the matter, had the question of republication in Great Britain rested entirely with me; but I apprehended the appearance of a spurious edition. I now thought of Mr. Archibald Constable as publisher, having been treated by him with much hospitality during a visit to Edinburgh; but first I determined to submit my work to Sir Walter (then Mr.) Scott,1 being encouraged to do so by the cordial reception I had experienced from him at Abbotsford a few years previously, and by the favourable opinion he had expressed to others of my earlier writings. I accordingly sent him the printed numbers of the Sketch Book in a parcel by coach, and at the same time wrote to him, hinting that since I had had the pleasure of partaking of his hospitality, a reverse had taken place in my affairs which made the successful exercise of my pen all important to me; I begged him, therefore, to look over the literary articles I had forwarded to him, and, if he thought they would bear European republication, to ascertain whether Mr. Constable would be inclined to be the publisher.

The parcel containing my work went by coach to Scott’s address in Edinburgh; the letter went by mail to his residence in the country. By the very first post I received a reply, before he had seen my work. “I was down at Kelso,” said he, “when your letter reached Abbotsford.