Rip Van Winkle

After failing to establish a career as a lawyer, Washington Irving (1783-1859) turned to writing. Distancing himself from British literature, Irving sought to create a wholly American folktale for American readers, sprinkled with American geography, mores, and folklore. His first attempt, “Rip Van Winkle,” is one of the earliest examples of the short story in Western literature. Published in 1819 in Irving’s short story collection The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (which also features Irving’s other famous story, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”), “Rip Van Winkle” found instant success for Irving in America and abroad, raising the respectability of American literature worldwide. “Rip Van Winkle” is in the public domain and is available by open source. This guide refers to the online version offered by Project Gutenberg.

The story opens with an epigraph from Sir Walter Scott’s 1816 novel The Antiquary. Its speaker swears to the Norse king of the gods, Wodin (that is, Odin) to tell only the truth. Geoffrey Crayon—the title character of the short story collection, whose last name is a reference to the “sketches” that he has collected—introduces the story of Rip Van Winkle as a tale found among the papers of the (fictional) late Diedrich Knickerbocker, a historian of Dutch culture in New York. Crayon concedes that critics question the accuracy of Knickerbocker’s books, but avers that regular people held his histories dear.

We jump straight in Knickerbocker’s account of Rip Van Winkle. The story is set in the Kaatskills (the modern Catskills), an Appalachian mountain range. Tucked in the hills is a village seemingly untouched by time, where Rip Van Winkle, his overbearing wife Dame Van Winkle, and their children live.

Rip is a descendant of a prominent Dutch family, but has little interest in politics or military glory. He is a good-natured if simple man, who flees from his wife’s harassment by running errands for village women and playing with children. The great “error” in Rip is “an insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labor.” He shirks his duties on the farm to fish or hunt or do any odd job: “in a word, Rip was ready to attend to anybody’s business but his own; but as to doing family duty, and keeping his farm in order, he found it impossible.” His farm suffers and the children run wild.

Sometimes Rip escapes the scolding of his wife by visiting the local tavern under the sign of King George the Third. There Rip and other men, like schoolmaster Derrick Van Bummel, spend lazy afternoons gossiping. The patriarch of the village and owner of the tavern, Nicholas Vedder, holds court there, smoking his pipe.

One day, driven yet again from town by his wife, Rip takes up his gun and heads into the woods of the Kaatskills to hunt squirrels with his faithful dog, Wolf. He whiles away the afternoon looking down on the Hudson River Valley and exploring a wild mountain glen, but dallies too long—he soon realizes he won’t get home before nightfall.

About to head back, he hears a man calling his name. He looks for the source of the voice, but sees nothing but a crow flying overhead. Finally, a strange man dressed in Old Dutch clothing comes plodding up past him, carrying a heavy keg on his shoulders. True to character, Rip jumps in to help him, and the two men carry the keg up a dry ravine in silence.

They reach an amphitheater where men are playing ninepins, an old form of bowling. Every time the ball hits the pins, it sounds like thunder. The men all have long colorful beards and wear strange garb; they remind Rip of figures in an old Flemish painting. Even though they’re playing a game, their expressions are severe. Following the lead of the man he arrived with, Rip serves the men liquor from the keg. He finds the sight of the drink irresistible and soon drinks some himself. A “naturally thirsty soul,” he drinks more and more until finally, he falls into a deep sleep.

Rip wakes up unusually stiff and sore. The strange men are gone, as is Wolf, and while Rip’s gun is still next to him, it’s rusted and broken. He suspects the men played a trick on him, but when he returns to the amphitheater, he finds an impenetrable wall of stone, as if it had never been there. As he plods back down the way he came, he finds a river rushing down the dry bed he had climbed just a day before.

Rattled, Rip starts the hike down. Back in the village, everyone is dressed strangely. Rip recognizes no one. The villagers seem shocked at his appearance too—they stroke their chins when they see him, and when Rip mirrors the gesture, he realizes his beard has grown a foot long. Most distressingly, he finds his house empty and run down, though Dame Van Winkle had always kept it in good order. Even Wolf, now old and mean, growls at him.

The quiet little Dutch inn, too, has been transformed. Now called “The Union Hotel,” it features the portrait of General George Washington instead of the tyrant King George. People bustle about and argue about politics—a scene nothing like the lazy afternoons Rip remembers. His friends Vedder and Van Bummel are nowhere to be found.

The tavern politicians become increasingly suspicious of Rip, wondering “which side he voted for.” When a befuddled Rip swears loyalty to the King, they accuse him of being a British spy and grill him on who he knows in the village. As Rip names his friends, he learns that they all died in the war or left the village for better opportunities. When he claims he is Rip Van Winkle, the villagers pipe up that Rip Van Winkle is over there—and Rip sees a young man who looks strikingly like him, lazing about just as he did. Rip starts to doubt his identity and even his sanity.

Rip notices a pretty woman with a child in the crowd. He strikes up a conversation with her and discovers that she is his daughter, Judith Gardenier. She tells him that his wife Dame Van Winkle died a short time ago. An old woman finally recognizes Rip as Rip Van Winkle, the man who disappeared 20 years prior; the oldest person in the village, Peter Vanderdonk, confirms it. Peter tells the crowd that every 20 years, Hendrick Hudson, who first discovered the area, returns to haunt the Kaatskills. This must be the man Rip encountered. Satisfied, the crowd breaks up to attend to “the more important concerns of the election.” 

As an old man, Rip is free to be as lazy as he likes. He lives with his daughter and her husband and becomes the village gossip and storyteller.

Irving bookends the story with an end note from Crayon acknowledging that the Rip story likely derived from a Germanic folktale about the goatherd Peter Klaus and the sleeping emperor of the Kyffhäuser mountains, Frederick Barbarossa. But the last word goes to Knickerbocker, who again insists on the truth of Rip’s story, and even claims to have met the man himself.

Some versions of “Rip Van Winkle” include a postscript from Knickerbocker’s papers detailing other mythical events in the Catskills, including the ghost of an indigenous woman who controls the weather and a Manitou, or evil spirit, who leads Indian hunters on wild goose chases.