Table of content introduction

2.2The story of "Rip Van Vinkl" itself is connected with the German folk tale 
"Peter Klaus" by Johann Karl Christophe Nachtigal
 
Found among Washington Irving’s papers are fragments of what might have been 
notes for a memoir, scribbled down in spare moments during either 1843 or 1845 
(the date is hard to decipher), when he was the American minister to Spain under 
President John Tyler. In one entry he describes the genesis of his most famous story: 
When I first wrote the Legend of Rip van Winkle my thought had been for some 
time turned towards giving a colour of romance and tradition to interesting points of 
our national scenery which is so deficient generally in our country. My friends 
endeavored to dissuade me from it and I half doubted my own foresight when it was 
first published from the account of the small demand made for that number, but 
subsequent letters brought news of its success and of the lucky hit I had made. The 
idea was taken from an old tradition I picked up among the Harz Mountains.Two 
hundred years ago, on June 23, 1819, the first paperbound number of Irving’s The 
Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. was printed in four American cities by the 
coincidentally named publisher Cornelius S. Van Winkle. The entire work, a 
miscellany of stories and essays, appeared in seven parts over the course of the next 
fifteen months. The last piece in the first issue was “Rip Van Winkle,” advertised as 
a newly discovered work by the late Diedrich Knickerbocker, the elderly (and 
wholly fictitious) author of Irving’s previous book, A History of New York. Living 
in London at the time, Irving then arranged for a British edition of The Sketch 
Book to be printed at his expense, but the publisher went bankrupt. At the urging of 
Walter Scott (whose immensely popular novel Ivanhoe had appeared only months 
earlier), another printer bought the inventory for Irving’s book and brought it out 
instead. The story—indeed, The Sketch Book as a whole—became a huge success 
on both sides of the Atlantic and made Irving an international celebrity. 
The idea for “Rip van Winkle” first came to Irving in June 1818, when he was 
visiting his sister in Birmingham. He had just finalized bankruptcy proceedings after 
the business he operated with his brothers failed, and he was determined to try to 
make a go of it as a writer. He and his brother-in-law were having an after-dinner 
chat, recalling nostalgically younger days in the Hudson River valley when, family 
lore has it, Irving had a flash of inspiration, shut himself in his room, and rushed out 
a draft, which he then read to the household the next day. The basis for his story was 
a folk tale, “Peter Klaus the Goatherd,” in the collection Volkssagen (1800), one of 
the books Irving read while he was studying German. Set in the Harz Mountains of 
northern Germany (where Irving had not yet been), the old tale provided him with 
the basic plot and several details. Irving moved the action to the period before and 

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after the American Revolution and changed the location to the Catskills—where he 
had also never been, having only viewed their slopes from a distance. 
“The borrowings are obvious,” writes historian Andrew Burstein in his 2007 
biography The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving. “The 
strange silent men and their bowling game, the alcohol-induced twenty-year sleep 
in the mountains, the grown-up daughter who acknowledges her father. Irving’s 
genius lies in the hypnotic charm his simple story holds, for he makes Rip a more 
sympathetic being than Peter Klaus.” Literary scholar Walter Evans likewise 
contends that, in spite of Irving’s thorough appropriation of an old legend, the story’s 
importance to the history of literature can not be overstated. By combining two 
traditions—the essay-sketch and the tale—Irving introduced readers to the genre of 
the short story as we know it. Furthermore, the addition of Diedrich Knickerbocker 
as narrator in the story’s metafictional frame “helps make ‘Rip Van Winkle’ more 
than Western civilization's first significant short story and more than one of the best 
ever written. After generations of readers the story still seems to be one of the most 
modern.”The fragments were first published in Barbara D. Simison, “Some 
Autobiographical Notes of Washington Irving,” The Yale University Library 
Gazette (July 1963).Notes: A volume of black letter mentioned in the introduction 
to the story refers to an old book set with a heavy Gothic typeface. A Waterloo 
medal was a commemorative silver medal presented to all British soldiers who 
served against Napoleon in the battle on June 16–18, 1815. Rip Van Winkle, short 
story by Washington Irving, published in The Sketch Book in 1819–20. Though set 
in the Dutch culture of pre-Revolutionary War New York state, the story of Rip Van 
Winkle is based on a German folktale.Rip Van Winkle is an amiable farmer who 
wanders into the Catskill Mountains, where he comes upon a group of dwarfs 
playing ninepins. Rip accepts their offer of a drink of liquor and promptly falls 
asleep. When he awakens, 20 years later, he is an old man with a long white beard; 
the dwarfs are nowhere in sight. When Rip returns to town, he finds that everything 
is changed: his wife is dead, his children are grown, and George Washington’s 
portrait hangs in place of King George III’s. The old man entertains the townspeople 
with tales of the old days and of his encounter with the little men in the mountains. 
His A History of New York…by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809) was a comic 
history of the Dutch regime in New York, prefaced by a mock-pedantic account of 
the world from creation onward. Its writing was interrupted in April 1809 by the 
sudden death of Matilda Hoffman, as grief incapacitated him. In 1811 he moved to 
Washington, D.C., as a lobbyist for the Irving brothers’ hardware-importing firm, 
but his life seemed aimless for some years. He prepared an American edition 
of Thomas Campbell’s poems, edited the Analectic Magazine, and acquired a staff 
colonelcy during the War of 1812. In 1815 he went to Liverpool to look after the 

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interests of his brothers’ firm. In London he met Sir Walter Scott, who encouraged 
him to renewed effort. The result was The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, 
Gent (1819–20), a collection of stories and essays that mix satire and whimsicality 
with fact and fiction. Most of the book’s 30-odd pieces concern Irving’s impressions 
of England, but six chapters deal with American subjects. Of these, the tales “The 
Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle” have been called the first 
American short stories. They are both Americanized versions of German folktales. 
The main character of “Rip Van Winkle” is a henpecked husband who sleeps for 20 
years and awakes as an old man to find his wife dead, his daughter happily married, 
and America now an independent country. The tremendous success of The Sketch 
Book in both England and the United States assured Irving that he could live by his 
pen. In 1822 he produced Bracebridge Hall, a sequel to The Sketch Book. He 
traveled in Germany, Austria, France, Spain, the British Isles, and later in his own 
country.Queen Anne farthings, coined late in her reign, were not intended for 
circulation but eventually became used as money. The epigraph that opens the main 
story is from The Ordinary, a comedy written in the 1630s by British playwright 
William Cartwright. A red night cap was the Phrygian cap that became a symbol of 
liberty during the Revolutionary eraThe following Tale was found among the papers 
of the late Diedrich Knickerbocker, an old gentleman of New York, who was very 
curious in the Dutch history of the province, and the manners of the descendants 
from its primitive settlers. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click 
here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!1820"Rip Van Winkle" may 
be the most important short story ever written. Though the text is routinely 
misread—books seldom reprint the story as Washington Irving wrote it—and 
though the story's comic tone tends to deflect serious criticism, it remains one of the 
world's great short stories, a peer of Gogol's "The Overcoat" and Kafka's "The 
Metamorphosis." Historically, "Rip Van Winkle" sparked the success of The Sketch 
Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., which assured the reputation of Irving and for the 
first time in history made American literature worthy of international esteem. Never 
has a single short story been more responsible for establishing a rising culture's 
literary respectability. Since 1820 virtually no American has been able to write in 
ignorance of "Rip Van Winkle." Irving's story sowed literary seed reaped in future 
decades, for the pattern of Rip's tall tale swallowed whole by the overeducated, 
outsider Knickerbocker helped ground frontier humor, a literary mode that began to 
flourish in the 1830s and that reached a climax in Rip's illegitimate 
offspring, Huckleberry Finn. The local color movement that dominated American 
literature after the Civil War followed the example "Rip Van Winkle" had set in 
highlighting 
peculiarities 
of 
local 
mores,fashions, 
geography, 
and 
folklore.Since Joseph Jefferson first staged the story as an immensely popular play 

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late in the nineteenth century, "Rip Van Winkle" has metamorphosed into films, 
television programs, cartoons, child-ren's books, and songs, appearing in virtually 
every conceivable medium. Within a century the story's central motif—Rip's startled 
waking to a changed world after 20 years—has entered world folklore, and only a 
tiny number of stories can claim a similar grip on the global imagination.More 
important from a literary perspective, before "Rip Van Winkle" the short story as a 
genre did not really exist in Western literature. Tales abounded, as did countless 
other versions of brief narrative, but before 1820 short stories in the modern sense 
appeared as rarely and with as little impact as European visitors to America 
before Christopher Columbus. Irving created the modern short story by marking 
Western literature's first cross-fertilization of the tale tradition and the essay-sketch 
tradition.From the tale tradition Irving borrowed dramatic incident, the long sleep 
and astonished waking, as the formal skeleton. In the story's ultimate note the 
muddleminded Knickerbocker denies, thus encouraging us to believe, that the story 
actually originated in Teutonic folklore. (H. A. Pochman names an old German tale, 
"Peter Klaus the Goatherd.") Historically, similar strong patterns of incidents 
dominated the tale tradition and most short fiction before "Rip Van Winkle. Rip Van 
Winkle, a short story by celebrated American author Washington Irving, was first 
published in 1819 without illustrations in “The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, 
Gent.” Best known for his popular stories of Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of 
Sleepy Hollow, Irving achieved acclaim in Europe and the U.S. over the course of 
his successful writing career. Rip Van Winkle was included in “The Sketchbook of 
Geoffrey Crayon, Gent” while Irving was living in Europe. Thus, he was one of the 
earliest American authors to survive merely on his writing. Irving’s stories have 
remained an emblem of American culture as they were some of the first short stories 
that aimed to entertain rather than educate. The two best known Irving stories- Rip 
Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow have inspired artists to create 
beautiful illustrations like the one included in this print.The gothic story Rip Van 
Winkle tells of an ordinary 19th century man who lives in the Dutch Kaatskills 
(currently the Catskills of New York). He struggles with his nagging wife, Dame 
Van Winkle, and in an effort to escape her on an especially bad day, he flees to the 
woods with his dog and his gun. While in the woods, he meets a stranger who is a 
representation of the spirits of Hendrick Hudson, and is instructed to serve these 
spirits a precious drink. Tempted, he tries the drink as well and ultimately becomes 
so drunk that he falls into a deep sleep. When he wakes, he thinks that it is merely 
the next morning, but it becomes clear that 20 years have passed. He is now an old 
widow with Loyalist sentiments that show he is living in the past, prior to the 
American Revolution. The story ends with Rip Van Winkle living a peaceful life in 
the home of his daughter, finally free from his wife’s nagging.In this print, Rip Van 

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Winkle has awakened from his deep slumber dazed, confused, and looking twenty 
years older. He treks through his old village with his long gray beard and shaggy 
clothes, ultimately making it to his house, which he sees is abandoned and aged. He 
notices a black dog that looks much like Wolf, but the dog snarls at him causing him 
to become sad at the thought of even his own dog forgetting about him. In the 
background of the print, one can see the Kaatskill Mountains, where Rip’s life was 
forever changed.Sarony, Major, & Knapp was one of the largest lithographic firms 
at the end of the 19th and the early of the 20th centuries. However, before it achieved 
this success it started out small in 1843 when Napoleon Sarony and James P. Major 
joined together to start a business. Later in 1857, Joseph F. Knapp joined the 
company making it Sarony, Major, & Knapp. At the time that this was printed, 
Knapp was not a part of the business, so it was just Sarony & Major.Felix O. C. 
Darley (1822-1888), the artist behind the twelve best-known illustrations for The 
Legend of the Sleepy Hollow, is considered one of America’s best illustrators. The 
publisher was the American Art Union, (1839-1857) a subscription organization 
created to educate the public about American art and artists while providing support 
for American artists. For $5.00 members would receive admissions to the gallery 
showing, a yearly report, and an engraving of an original work, as well as any 
benefits each chapter might provide. 
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Two special editions of the story, each with a set of six of Darley’s illustrations were 
published; the special edition including this illustration was published in 1850. This 
print is bound with five others at the back of a rebound book. The cover is of the 
earlier Rip Van Winkle edition published for the American Art Union but the title 
page and text are of Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow."From the 
essay-sketch tradition, specifically the scenic sketch, Irving borrowed the subtly 
detailed descriptions of place that dominate the first two paragraphs following the 
opening headnote. In fact, the story at first almost masquerades as a travel sketch: 
"Whoever has made a voyage up the Hudson must remember." A second category 
of sketch, the character sketch, dominates the next few paragraphs. Tellers of tales 
habitually rushed from incident to incident, but Irving seems to value 
characterization for its own sake, his phrasing graceful, sophisticated, and unhurried. 
Such detailed observation of places and people had virtually no place in the tradition 
of the tale before "Rip Van Winkle." Perhaps the element from the essay-sketch 
tradition Irving adapted most fruitfully was the narrative persona. In the romantic 
period the familiar, or personal, essay peaked in popularity, the central feature being 
17
Kenney, Alice P. Stubborn for Liberty: The Dutch in New York. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 
1975. 

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an intimate sense of voice, the experience of a psychologically rich personality 
revealing deeply personal thoughts and feelings to the reader. The close analysis of 
self that familiar essayists exploited, Irving diverted toward his central character, 
Rip. More than any other, this technical shift transformed the tale into the modern 
short story.We see the technique most clearly from the point at which Rip wakes. 
Earlier the story largely focuses on the world Rip experiences; afterward the story 
highlights Rip's experience of that world. Rip's first perceptions of difference, which 
are closely described, tend to be external, relatively unimportant, and easily 
explained: a rusty old gun in place of a new, the disappearance of his dog, stiffness 
in his joints, and a stream flowing in a previously dry gully.
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Rip grows increasingly disturbed to discover social differences—a crowd of new 
faces in the village and unaccustomed fashions in clothing—and astonished to 
discover a beard on his own chin. He then observes more momentous changes. The 
village's buildings have altered, as have the names on the houses, and his own home 
has utterly decayed. Despite never deserting his comic tone, Irving subtly guides the 
story toward profound darkness when Rip discovers that his family has disappeared. 
The ultimate shock occurs when Rip tries to reclaim his name and identity; skeptical 
villagers point to an apparent double of Rip himself as he looked when he 
disappeared 20 years before. His confused despair climaxing in a moment of 
profound psychic horror, Rip fears himself lost in madness: "I'm not myself … I 
can't tell what's my name, or who I am!" Lear could sympathize.The story's 
beneficent comic tone refuses to desert Rip, however, and the pattern of graduated 
losses reverses to one of dramatic gains. Rip's now grown daughter appears, the 
apparent double turns out to be Rip's son, and in a crowning bit of luck Rip learns 
that his shrewish wife recently died when she "broke a blood-vessel in a fit of passion 
at a New England peddler." Rip ultimately claims a post of honor at the inn, 
surrounded by a few old cronies and making a career of weaving his yarn.The 
description above outlines the core story most readers recognize, but Irving's 
frame—headnote, endnote, and postscript—identify the story's putative author, 
Diedrich Knickerbocker, as a naive dunderhead who has swallowed hook, line, and 
sinker a fantastic tale that locals themselves are sensible enough to discredit. The 
core story's last line asserts that the neighborhood's henpecked husbands often yearn 
for a drink of the flagon that released Rip from his nagging wife. Read in the version 
Irving published, the story leaves little room for doubt that Rip simply ran away 
from home, returned on his shrewish wife's death 20 years later, and invented a 
preposterous story to explain his absence.If we read "Rip Van Winkle" without the 
headnote, endnote, and postscript, we seem to have an omniscient narrator's 
18
Irving, Washington. “Rip Van Winkle.” In The Legend of Sleepy Hollow & Other Stories. New York:

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endorsement of the six paragraphs that deal with the supernatural crew and magic 
draught of wine. If we read the full story, we understand that the only narrative 
authority for the supernatural events is the knuckleheaded Knickerbocker. The 
skillful metafictional play helps make "Rip Van Winkle" more than Western 
civilization's first significant short story and more than one of the best ever written. 
After generations of readers the story still seems to be one of the most modern
.
19