I've just finished reading 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' by Washington Irving on Kindle, an appropriate story for this time of year and the sort of weather we've been having this week!
'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' is a short story set in New England in the 1800s. Sleepy Hollow is an idyllic rural area where the Dutch settlers enjoy nothing more than a night swapping 'true' ghost stories on the porch after a good meal. Into their company comes Ichabod Crane, the school master employed by the community to teach the local boys. The geeky dreamer takes a shine to heiress Katrina Van Tassell, much to the annoyance of her beau, the mischievous Abraham Van Brunt. After an evening of spooky tales and rejection by the flirtatious beauty, Crane begins the lonely journey home, only to end up riding into legend.
I've wanted to read this story for an awfully long time. Ever since I can remember, it's come up in all sorts of programmes and movies I've watched, from Scooby Doo to the 1999 Johnny Depp/Tim Burton film. After seeing how it permeated American culture, I wanted to know what had inspired them so in the original.
To be honest, I think the key word here is culture. Just as it's hard to say why British stories such as the Loch Ness Monster or Beast of Bodmin Moor have caught the public imagination, I'm a bit perplexed as to why this story has seemed to me to be everywhere!
'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' is an OK story, with some excellently observed descriptions of the American countryside, but it's the latter that make it worth a read rather than the former. Perhaps the reason it's had such longevity is its simplicity - it makes it endlessly adaptable and possible to build a number of plots around the basic relationships of the key players.
'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' is a good, quick read for a classic dark, chilly winter's night, but don't expect to have nightmares or even find yourself spooked by something glimpsed from the corner of your eye. Unless of course you spend a lot of time walking through forests in the dark.
Right then, what next?
