man replied: Seventy years. ha-M'agel then further asked the man: Are you certain
that you will live another seventy years? The man replied: No. But I am planting this
not for myself, but for the other generations to come after me and the generations to
follow those. Honi then shrugged as he walked away from the man. Later that day,
he sat down to take a rest. But he slept for seventy years, and rocks had formed a
tent-like structure around him. When he woke, he saw
a man picking a tree with
carobs all over it. He asked: Are you the man that planted this tree? The man replied:
No. But my father told me that his father planted this tree for me. The story of "Rip
Van Winkle" itself is widely thought to have been based on Johann Karl Christoph
Nachtigal's German folktale "Peter Klaus", which is a shorter story set in a German
village. It tells of a goatherd named Peter Klaus who goes looking for a lost goat. He
finds some men drinking in the woods and, after drinking some of their wine, he
falls asleep. When he wakes back up, twenty years have passed.
12
In many ways, the story is a classic European fairy tale of a man who is actually
rewarded for helping the fairies move their barrel. They advance him to a time in
life where he is free of his nagging wife. He is now old enough for it to be respectable
for him to take it easy and play with children, working when he wants to instead of
when he has to, supported by his loving, grown children.
[citation needed]
The theme of
independence is also explored; the young Van Winkle lives in British America and
is a subject of the King; the old Van Winkle awakes in a country independent of the
Crown. On a personal level, the awakened Van Winkle has gained another form of
"independence": being widowered from his shrewish wife.
[citation needed]
In Orkney, there is a similar folktale linked to
the burial mound of Salt Knowe,
adjacent to the Ring of Brodgar. A drunken fiddler on his way home hears music
from the mound. He finds a way in and finds the trowes (trolls) having a party. He
stays and plays for two hours, then makes his way home to Stenness, where he
discovers 50 years have passed. The Orkney Rangers
[clarification needed]
believe this may
be one source for Washington Irving's tale because his father was an Orcadian from
the island of Shapinsay and would almost certainly have known the story.
[citation needed]
In Ireland, the story of Niamh and Oisin has a similar theme. Oisin falls in love with
the beautiful Niamh and leaves with her
on her snow white horse, bound for Tir Na
nOg – the land of the ever-young. Missing his family and friends, he asks to pay
them a visit. Niamh lends him her horse, warning him never to dismount, and he
travels back to Ireland. But 300 years have passed; his family and fellow warriors
are all dead. When Oisin encounters some men trying to move a boulder, he reaches
down to help them, the girth of the horse's saddle snaps, and he falls to the ground.
Before the watching eyes of the men, he becomes a very, very old man.
13
Author Joe Gioia suggests the
basic plot strongly resembles, and may have
originated with, an upstate New York Seneca legend of a young squirrel hunter who
12
Ainslie, Susan. (1994).
Mixed Ability Teaching: Meeting Learners.needs. Netword 3: Teaching Language to
13
Baker, Joanna. (2000).
The English language teacher’s handbook: how to teach large classes with few resources
.
New York:
Continuum; London: Cassel.
encounters the mystic "Little People", and after a night with them returns to his
village to find it overgrown by forest and everyone gone: that single night had lasted
a year.
14
The story also bears some similarities to stories from East Asia, including the third
century AD Chinese tale of "Ranka", as retold by Lionel
Giles in A Gallery of
Chinese Immortals, and the eighth-century Japanese tale "Urashima Tarō".
[13]
The
Hindu story of Muchukunda from the Bhagavatam also displays many similarities
to the story of "Rip Van Winkle".
15
The theme is taken up in numerous modern works of science fiction. In H. G.
Wells's The Sleeper Awakes, a man who sleeps for 203
years wakes up in a
completely transformed London where he has become the richest man in the world.
In the original Buck Rogers book, the protagonist falls asleep under the influence of
a gas in a mine, sleeps for four centuries and wakes to find America under the rule
of Mongol invaders – whereupon he places himself at the head of the freedom
fighters. In Roger Zelazny's science-fantasy series The Chronicles of Amber,
protagonist Corwyn experiences drinking and revelry in an underground lair with
otherworldly people who try to entice him into slumber; he knows this is a centuries-
of-sleep trap and resists; the passage is similar in theme to both "Rip Van Winkle"
and especially the Orkney story.
16
Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, under which a person
traveling at near light
speed would experience only the passage of a few years but would return to find
centuries had passed on Earth, provides a broad new scope to express essentially the
same literary theme – for example, in the opening chapter of Ursula K. Le
Guin's Rocannon's World. In Robert Heinlein's Time for the Stars, Earth sends out
a fleet of relativistic ships to explore the galaxy, their crews hailed as stalwart
pioneers – but after a century, which they experience as only a few years, faster-
than-light ships are developed and
the earlier ones are recalled, their crews
discovering that they had become unwanted anachronisms on a changed Earth. The
protagonist notices a newspaper headline disparagingly announcing the arrival of
himself and his shipmates as "yet another crew of Rip Van Winkles".
The Queen song "'39" is similarly a tale of relativistic space travelers returning to
their home planet to find a century has elapsed.
14
Kenney, Alice P. Stubborn for Liberty: The Dutch in New York. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press,
1975.
15
Baker, Joanna. (2000).
The English language teacher’s handbook: how to teach large classes with few resources
.
New York: Continuum; London: Cassel.
16
Kammen, Michael. Colonial New York: A History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975.