The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow Pdf is a Classic Horror Fiction Novel By Washington Irving.
The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow Summary
Ichabod Crane, a schoolteacher, came to Tarry Town in the glen of Sleepy Hollow to ply his trade in educating young minds. He was a gullible and excitable fellow, often so terrified by locals’ stories of ghosts that he would hurry through the woods on his way home, singing to keep from hysterics. Until late one night, he finds that maybe they’re not just stories. What is that dark, menacing figure riding behind him on a horse? And what does it have in its hands? And why wasn’t schoolteacher Crane ever seen in Sleepy Hollow again?
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About Washington Irving Author Of The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow Pdf Book
Washington Irving (1783 – 1859) Author Of The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow Pdf was an American short story writer, essayist, biographer, historian and diplomat of the early 19th century. He is best known for his short stories Rip Van Winkle (1819) and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820), both of which appear in his book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. His historical works include biographies of George Washington, Oliver Goldsmith, Muhammad and several histories of 15th-century Spain dealing with subjects such as Christopher Columbus, the Moors and the Alhambra. Irving served as the U.S. ambassador to Spain from 1842 to 1846. Irving made his literary debut in 1802 with a series of observational letters to the Morning Chronicle, written under the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle. After moving to England for the family business in 1815, he achieved international fame with the publication of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in 1819-20.
The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow pdf, Paperback, Hardcover Book Information
- Publisher : Aegypan; Edition Unstated (March 1, 2004)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 108 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0809594080
- ISBN-13 : 978-0809594085
- Reading age : 5+ years, from customers
- Lexile measure : GN1460L
- Item Weight : 6 ounces
- Dimensions : 6 x 0.26 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #4,180,441 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #31,720 in Folklore (Books)
- #78,169 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- #157,649 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews: 4.5 out of 5 stars 2,923 ratings
The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow Book Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars Where The Pocantico Winds Its Wizard Stream…
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 24, 2003
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The original 1928 Arthur Rackham edition of Washington Irving’s ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ (1819) was one of the most beautifully-illustrated versions of the tale ever produced. The Books Of Wonder facsimile of that edition is certainly the finest available today, though folk artist Will Moses’ bright retelling runs a close second. Rackham’s watercolors for this American classic are very much in keeping with his earlier work, which had established him as the greatest British illustrator of his era.
Where much of Irving’s tale is painted in the warm autumn hues, Rackham choose to portray Sleep Hollow as not only a place of overwhelming haunts and visions, but as a region existing in a state of permanent, moody twilight. His Sleepy Hollow seems perpetually in crepuscular shadow: the last pure rays of the sun have just vanished from the earth, and darkness, though it has not fallen yet, is falling quickly. In the artist’s eye, Irving’s fireside tale appears to take place not in glorious mid-October, but in storm-swept late November. The illustrator’s anthropomorphic and archetypal Sleepy Hollow also magnifies elements of Irving’s romantic landscape over and above the necessities of the text.
While witches, ghosts and “visions in the air” are discussed in the story, Rackham depicts the trees, houses, and countryside of the region as teeming with every kind of fairy, goblin, dryad, and witch, as if calmly revealing to the eyes of man the always-coexistent, if invisible, supernatural life of the Hudson River Valley.
His painting of Major Andre’s Tree, for example, depicts a traditional European fairytale witch and her black cat familiar walking along the road beneath Andre’s tree as if they had every right to be there. It is mankind that is the anxious, insecure, and mortally temporary interloper into this vaster mystical world. Rackham’s trees are trees but also fairies, his fairies are fairies but also witches, his witches are human in form but also trees, and the birds resting in the trees, while birds, are sometimes partially fairies.
All of these creatures confidently, humorously, and mischievously observe mankind, which, when not perpetually scurrying home to safety, gathers together in nervous groups to share tidings, portents, and spook tales.
Irving’s remarkably poetic prose is in every way worthy of the man who bears the honor of being America’s first great writer. Interestingly, the tale is partially a study in contrasts: schoolteacher Ichabod Crane and his rival, the rabble-rousing Brom Bones, though obvious opposites, each also contain elements of the other. Ichabod, though he lives largely in his thoughts and dreams, has a very definite physical side: he plays boisterously outdoors with the town children, and, at the fatal party at the story’s end, commands the dance floor in a way that delights and astonishes the other guests. And Brom, who is a great horseman and a fearless fighter, is also known throughout the region for his cleverness in shrewdly achieving his own ends.
Ichabod is an ugly, eccentric “scarecrow” of a man, while Brom is “broad-shouldered and double-jointed,” with a “Herculean frame and great powers of limb.” Brom, unlike the ultimately solitary Ichabod, is a well-established alpha male with “three or four boon companions who regard him as their model,” and who comprise his “gang.” On the other hand, Ichabod, when not surrounded by his boy students, spends his time gossiping and sharing ghost stories around midnight fires with elderly Dutch women.
Ichabod and Brom both court the lovely Katrina Van Tassel in their own fashion, not only because she is a model of feminine beauty and charm, but because each covets her family’s wealth and bountiful farmland.
It is no accident that the “dominant” specter of Sleepy Hollow, who is “commander-in-chief of all the powers of the air,” is a headless horseman, while Ichabod is a respected teacher and storyteller, a “man of letters” and a “pedagogue.” The fearsome, massively-built Headless Horseman, who may or may not be Brom in disguise, is all torso and limbs, while Ichabod is one of the few, if not the only, inhabitant of the hollow who earns his living by his intellect–by his head. Thus they make symbolically perfect, if unequal, opponents.
With his real or illusory ties to the supernatural, the headless horseman, who is believed to ride the wind and to appear and disappear in bursts of fire, is a malevolent force of nature. If of supernatural origin, then he does indeed command “the nightmare, with her whole ninefold,” and all the other spirits of the air; but if merely human, then he still commands Brom’s raw, “Herculean” power, and is physically far more than a match for Ichabod.
Clearly, Irving was making a statement of sorts. Brom’s earthy cleverness and steely masculinity triumph in the end, while Ichabod’s misapplied intelligence, more often than not, leads him towards, and not away from, superstition, anxiety, and hysteria-ridden imagining. Brom’s quiet confidence in his prowess is genuine, but the talkative Ichabod’s confidence is only a smug self-deception out of which his boastfulness and foolish behavior are born. This edition is a happy marriage of two masters of their form, and contains the unabridged text.
Travelers may be particularly interested in the Rackham watercolor captioned “Reciting for their amusement all the epitaphs on the tombstones,” which portrays Ichabod and three Dutch maidens standing in the Old Dutch Churchyard on an overcast afternoon. The illustration is remarkable, because, 75 years after it was completed, those visiting the churchyard today, which is now a national landmark, can stand in exactly the same spot and see how incredibly accurate the artist’s representation of the burial ground was, and how little the beautiful site has changed, in mood and detail, over the years. As Irving wrote, “Time, which changes all things, is slow in its operations on a Dutchman’s dwelling.” And thereabouts.
5.0 out of 5 stars The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving: A review
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 9, 2014
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After hearing a discussion of Washington Irving’s classic on the Diane Rehm Show earlier this week, I decided to re-read it in honor of Halloween. After all, it is relatively short and wouldn’t require a commitment of an excessive amount of time, so it was something I could easily accomplish before the spooks and goblins descended on Halloween night.
It had been many long years since I first became acquainted with the story of Ichabod Crane and his encounter with the Headless Horseman. It was in elementary school, which, I suppose, is where many people meet him. (I don’t know – do they still teach Irving in elementary school? For that matter, do they still teach literature in elementary school?) I remember being fascinated by the story then, especially by the wonderful language of Irving. On re-reading it, I found that it holds up quite well. It is still a great tale.
The story itself has now been retold so often and in so many ways – through movies, television, plays, music, even opera – that it is thoroughly ingrained in the cultural memory. Even those who have never read the story know it.
Irving wrote of Ichabod Crane, the lanky and lean and excessively superstitious schoolmaster from Connecticut who had come to the Dutch settlement of Tarry Town in New York to teach. Specifically, he lived and taught in the secluded glen which had earned the name Sleepy Hollow because of the “listless repose of the place, and the peculiar character of its inhabitants…A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere.”
Dreamy the place may have been but it was also renowned for its ghosts and the many superstitions of hauntings that pervaded the imagination of the residents. And it was to this hotbed of belief in supernatural beings and events that the very jittery Ichabod had come.
Ichabod became obsessed with the idea of wooing and winning the hand of Katrina, the 18-year-old daughter of a local wealthy farmer. But he had a rival for Katrina’s affections in Abraham “Brom Bones” Van Brunt, a local hero and merry prankster.
One night Ichabod attends a party at Katrina’s family’s home and, as he leaves, he engages Katrina in conversation but she rejects him. Morose and dejected, he sets out on the trail to the home where he is presently being quartered, but, on the way, he encounters many terrors and, finally, the ultimate terror – the Headless Horseman himself.
Ichabod presses the broken down plow horse on which he is riding into a reckless ride for his life but the Headless Horseman keeps pace with him until they finally come to a bridge next to the Old Dutch Burying Ground where the Horseman supposedly would vanish according to the tales that were told. But to Ichabod’s horror, the ghostly apparition clambers up the bridge and rears his horse and hurls his severed head at the terrified pedagogue.
The next morning, Ichabod has disappeared. His horse is found near his owner’s gate. The saddle is found trampled. And near the bridge where Ichabod and the ghost were last seen lies a shattered pumpkin.
Brom Bones, who “looks exceedingly knowing whenever the story of Ichabod was related,” later married Katrina and, in a post note, we learn that Ichabod has turned up in another community where he studed law and become a lawyer.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was one of the earliest American tales to gain enduring popularity. It follows a tradition of folk tales involving supernatural wild chases, a tradition which includes such well-known classics as Robert Burns’ Tam o’ Shanter. Irving’s tale is a worthy member of that club.
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