David Murdock column: On 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' (and the beauty of folk tales)

Longtime readers will know how much I enjoy the 19th-century American writer Washington Irving — I’ve mentioned him, at length or in passing, on numerous occasions over the years.

Two of his “short stories” — “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” — are among the finest short fiction ever produced in America, in my opinion. A note in passing — many scholars think that they’re not really “short stories,” per se, so perhaps it’s more accurate to say “short fiction.” No matter what they are or what we call them, they’re really good. And still scary, after all these years.

I don’t think that we really appreciate them for what they are. Our “version” of both stories, the one that’s up there in our heads, isn’t really what they are. My students are often surprised that “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” to use the better example, doesn’t quite paint the characters and story in the same way we think of them today.

There is a simple reason for that discrepancy, I think. Both have their origins in folk tales, which usually have a “group authorship.” That means that the original tales on which both stories are based were not created by an individual writer working in solitude. Instead, groups of people over time create, hear, and then tell the stories to each other.

Every time a story is passed along, details are changed by the teller, and each new hearer then adds or subtracts details before he or she tells it. It’s quite a dynamic process. Sometimes, a version of a story might change dramatically over the course of its lifetime.

That’s the thing about folk tales that really fascinates me — they’re born, they live and grow, then they grow old, and then die. That process may take decades or even centuries, in some cases. The life of a folk tale is often anonymous. Unless it’s written down at some point, a folk tale is lost to succeeding generations.

That’s where Irving comes in. He wrote down a version of a tale of a “headless ghost” he’d heard at some point. As far as I know, his version is unique in its details. He created the tale, in that sense.

However, headless ghosts wander in and out of folk tales. After all, they’re quite dramatic. Usually, there is the idea that a ghost comes back in order to take care of some unfinished business, something that the person left undone in life. And headless ghosts have an obvious mission: to find their heads!

Writing down a folk tale has an interesting effect — the details of that writer’s version are recorded as being the “correct” version. If the story were left to be told and re-told by anonymous storytellers, there would be no one “correct” version.

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I know y’all have heard someone say, when they’re told a story, “That’s not how I heard it,” and then proceed to tell their version. Since there is no written record of the tale, no version is necessarily correct.

In “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” however, Irving has told such a powerful tale that it has re-entered the folk tale realm, in a way, with the help of movies and TV. It’s such a great story that many filmmakers have used it … and most tell at least slightly different versions. This changing of the details of a spooky story isn’t all that uncommon — the countless movie versions of "Dracula” and “Frankenstein” are quite different than the books by Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley, for example.

But, Irving’s short masterpiece is different … in a different way. Yes, we do tell the story in a different way than Irving wrote it, but Irving created such vivid characters that it seems natural to tell it like we do. After all, there is literally nothing supernatural in the plot — there is no real Headless Horseman in the story. The people of Sleepy Hollow just believe that there is. The interactions between Ichabod Crane, Brom Bones and Katrina Van Tassel are so real that they easily translate into more modern retellings.

It’s the character of Ichabod Crane that seems to change the most — over time, he has gone from being a social climber to a classic nerd to a police investigator as various filmmakers have told the tale. And, through the skills of the actors who have portrayed him — notably Jeff Goldblum and Johnny Depp — Ichabod has been transformed from a true believer in the supernatural into a modern skeptic. To me, Irving doesn’t seem to be too sympathetic to Ichabod, but people today who know the story primarily from film often see him as tragically heroic.

It’s just amazing! Irving has accomplished quite a feat. He wrote a story with such a great plot and characters that they can easily move back into the modern equivalent of folk tales, movies and television.

No, we don’t tell these stories in front of a fireplace anymore. We have traded the amateur storyteller and the light of a fire for professional storytellers and the glow of a screen. We have traded the magic of words and atmosphere for the magic of images and spectacle.

But we still like our scary stories. Happy Halloween to y’all.

David Murdock is an English instructor at Gadsden State Community College. He can be contacted at murdockcolumn@yahoo.com. The opinions reflected are his own.         

This article originally appeared on The Gadsden Times: David Murdock looks at Washington Irving's short fiction