"Rip Van Winkle" (Dutch pronunciation:[ˈrɪpfɑŋˈʋɪŋkəl]) is a short story by the American author Washington Irving, first published in 1819. It follows a Dutch-American villager in colonial America named Rip Van Winkle who meets mysterious Dutchmen, imbibes their strong liquor and falls deeply asleep in the Catskill Mountains. He awakes 20 years later to a very changed world, having missed the American Revolution.
Inspired by a conversation on nostalgia with his American expatriate brother-in-law, Irving wrote the story while temporarily living in Birmingham, England. It was published in his collection, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. While the story is set in New York's Catskill Mountains near where Irving later took up residence, he admitted, "When I wrote the story, I had never been on the Catskills."[1]
The Mountain Top Historical Society in Haines Falls, New York, has hosted a community reading of the story every year since 2019. The Mountain Top Historical Society is located at the top of Kaaterskill Clove in New York's Catskill Mountains, where the story is set.[2]
Plot
c. 1875 illustration of Rip Van Winkle by Thomas Nast
Rip Van Winkle, a Dutch-American man with a habit of avoiding useful work, lives in a village at the foot of the Catskill Mountains in the years before the American Revolution. One day, he goes squirrel hunting in the mountains with his dog, Wolf, to escape his wife's nagging. As evening falls, he hears a voice calling his name and finds a man dressed in old-fashioned Dutch clothing and carrying a keg. Rip helps the man carry his burden to a cleft in the rocks from which thunderous noises are emanating; the source proves to be a group of bearded men wearing similar outfits playing nine-pin bowling. Not asking who these men are or how they know his name, Rip joins them in drinking flagons of alcohol from the keg he has helped carry and soon becomes so intoxicated that he falls asleep.
Rip awakens on a sunny morning, at the spot where he first saw the keg-carrier, and finds that many drastic changes have occurred; his beard is a foot long and has turned gray, his musket is badly deteriorated, and Wolf is nowhere to be found. Returning to his village, he discovers it to be larger than he remembers and filled with people in unfamiliar clothing, none of whom recognize him. When asked how he voted in the election that has just been held, he declares himself a loyal subject of George III, unaware that the American Revolutionary War has taken place in his absence. He learns that many of his old friends either were killed in the war or have left the village and is disturbed to find a young man who shares his name, mannerisms, and younger appearance. A young woman states that her father is Rip Van Winkle, who has been missing for 20 years, and an old woman recognizes him as Rip. The young woman and the young Rip are his children, and the former has named her infant son after him as well.
Rip discovers that his wife has been dead for some time but is not saddened by the news. He learns via a village elder that the men he met in the mountains are rumored to be ghosts of the crew of the Dutch East India Company ship Halve Maen. His daughter takes him into her home, and he soon resumes his usual idleness (unconcerned by the major political changes during his slumber) and begins telling his story to every stranger who visits the village. The tale is solemnly taken to heart (despite some assuming him to be insane) by the settlers, particularly by the children who say that, whenever thunder is heard, the men in the mountains must be playing ninepins.
Rip Van Winkle – A henpecked husband with an aversion to "profitable labour" and a meek, easygoing resident of the village who wanders off to the mountains and meets strange men playing ninepins
Dame Van Winkle – Rip Van Winkle's cantankerous and nagging wife
Rip Van Winkle Jr. – Rip Van Winkle's ne'er-do-well son
Judith Gardenier – Rip Van Winkle's married daughter; she takes her father in after he returns from his sleep.
Derrick Van Bummel – The local schoolmaster who went on to serve in the American Revolution as a flag officer and later a member of Congress
Nicolaus Vedder – Landlord of the local inn where menfolk congregate
Dominie Van Schaick – The local parson
Jonathan Doolittle – Owner of the Union Hotel, the establishment that replaced the village inn
Wolf – Van Winkle's faithful dog
Man carrying a keg up the mountain – The ghost of one of Henry Hudson's crew members
Ninepin bowlers – The ghosts of Henry Hudson's crewmen from his ship, the Half-Moon; they share their liquor with Rip Van Winkle and play a game of ninepins.
Brom Dutcher – Van Winkle's neighbor who went off to war while Van Winkle was sleeping
Old woman – Woman who identifies Van Winkle when he returns to the village after his sleep
Peter Vanderdonck – The oldest resident of the village, who confirms Van Winkle's identity and cites evidence indicating Van Winkle's strange tale is true
Mr. Gardenier – Judith Gardenier's husband, a farmer
Baby Rip – Judith Gardenier's infant son and Van Winkle's grandson
Composition and publication history
The first installment of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819) included "Rip Van Winkle".
After a failed business venture with his brothers, Irving filed for bankruptcy in 1818.[3] Despondent, he turned to writing for possible financial support, although he had difficulty thinking of stories to write. He stayed in Birmingham, England, where his brother-in-law Henry van Wart had opened a trading firm.[4] The two were reminiscing in June 1818 when Irving was suddenly inspired by their nostalgic conversation.[5] Irving locked himself in his room and wrote nonstop all night. As he said, he felt like a man waking from a long sleep. He presented the first draft of "Rip Van Winkle" to the van Wart family over breakfast.[6]
"Rip Van Winkle" was one of the first stories Irving proposed for his new book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Irving asked his brother Ebenezer to assist with publication in the United States. As Irving wrote, "I shall feel very anxious to hear of the success of this first re-appearance on the literary stage – Should it be successful, I trust I shall be able henceforth to keep up an occasional fire."[7][8] A British edition was published shortly afterward, by John Miller, who went out of business immediately thereafter. With help from his friend Walter Scott, Irving was able to convince John Murray to take over British publication of the Sketch Book.[9]
Following the success of "Rip Van Winkle" in print and onstage, later celebrated editions were illustrated by Arthur Rackham (Heinemann, 1905) and N.C. Wyeth (McKay, 1921).
One story in Judaism concerns Honi HaMe'agel, a miracle-working sage of the 1st century BC, who was a historical character but to whom various myths were attached. While traveling one day, Honi saw a man planting a carob tree and asked him about it. The man explained that the tree would take 70 years to bear fruit and that he was planting it not for himself but for the generations to follow him. Later that day, Honi sat down to rest but fell asleep for 70 years; when he awoke, he saw a man picking fruit from a fully mature carob tree. Asked whether he had planted it, the man replied that he had not but that his grandfather had planted it for him.[10][11]
In Christian tradition, there is a similar, well-known story of "The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus", which recounts a group of early Christians who hid in a cave circa 250 AD to escape the persecution of Christians during the reign of the Roman emperor Decius. They fell into a miraculous sleep and woke some 200 years later during the reign of Theodosius II to discover that the city and the whole Empire had become Christian.[12] This Christian story is recounted by Islam and appears in a famous Sura of the Quran, Sura Al-Kahf.[13] The version recalls a group of young monotheists escaping from persecution within a cave and emerging hundreds of years later.[14]
Another similar story in the Islamic tradition is of Uzair (usually identified with the Biblical Ezra), whose grief at the Destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians was so great that God took his soul and brought him back to life after Jerusalem was reconstructed. He rode on his revived donkey and entered his native place. But the people did not recognize him, nor did his household, except the maid, who was now an old blind woman. He prayed to God to cure her blindness, and she could see again. He meets his son, who recognizes him by a mole between his shoulders and is older than he was.[15][16] (see Uzair#Islamic tradition and literature).
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".
In the tenth chapter of his book Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, the third-century AD Greek historian Diogenes Laërtius relates the story of the legendary sage Epimenides of Knossos, who was said to have been a shepherd on the island of Crete.[17][18] One day, Epimenides followed after a sheep that had wandered off and after becoming tired, went into a cave under Mount Ida and fell asleep. When he awoke, he continued searching for the sheep but could not find it, so he returned to his father's farm, only to discover that it was under new ownership. He went home, only to discover that the people there did not know him. Finally, he encountered his younger brother, who had become an old man, and learned that he had been asleep in the cave for fifty-seven years.[17][18] According to the different sources that Diogenes relates, Epimenides lived to be 154, 157, or 299 years old.[19] Multiple sources have identified the story of Epimenides as the earliest known variant of the "Rip Van Winkle" fairy tale.[17][18][20][12][21]
The story of "Rip Van Winkle" itself is widely thought to have been based on Johann Karl Christoph Nachtigal's German folktale "Peter Klaus",[5][12] 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, falls asleep. When he wakes up, twenty years have passed.[5][22]
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".[12] The Hindu story of Muchukunda from the Bhagavatam also displays many similarities to the story of "Rip Van Winkle".[23][24]
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.
Boys' Life's Dink & Duff comic strip has Dink, an African-American Cub Scout, lapse into a coma and awaken in 2068. A boy addresses him as "Rip van Dinkle" and explains that during the past 80 years, the United States has been replaced by an authoritarian monarchy. Dink eventually awakens back in 1988.
Wishbone shows the dog imagining himself as the title character, complete with the men playing ninepins and his mistaking the George Washington Inn for his old hangout, the King George Inn.[37][38]
American psych-rock band Shannon and the Clams released a song called "Rip Van Winkle" on their third album, Dreams from the Rat House.
American alternative rock band Ween mentions Rip Van Winkle in numerous songs on their 1991 album The Pod, most notably the song "Sketches of Winkle".
Literature:
In Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, the name "Rip Van Winkle" is attributed to a fellow prisoner as a riddle in order to understand that the man has been imprisoned for 20 years.
Video games:
The 1990 video game Super Mario World features an enemy known as "Rip Van Fish", which constantly sleeps unless disturbed.
Disney’s 2003 MMO Toontown Online features buildings with names based on puns and pop-culture references; one of these buildings, in the Donald’s Dreamland area of the game, is named "Rip Van Winkle’s Wrinkle Cream". The same building is also featured in the 2014 fan-made revival of the game, Toontown Rewritten.
In the 2018 video game Red Dead Redemption II, outlaw John Marston jokingly claims that his name is Rip Van Winkle when questioned by Pinkerton Agent Milton, seemingly in an effort to mislead and mock him.
Television:
In the 1961 The Twilight Zone episode "The Rip Van Winkle Caper", four gold thieves place themselves in suspended animation for 100 years in order to escape the law. Upon revival, they find one of them already dead. Two others die later, and the last man dies of thirst, offering his gold to a citizen in exchange for water. But he doesn't realize that, in the intervening years, gold became possible to manufacture and became practically worthless.
In the 1963 The Twilight Zone episode "In His Image", Rip Van Winkle is mentioned after a man realizes his hometown has greatly changed in supposedly one week.
In the 1992 Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Relics", 147-year-old Captain Montgomery Scott is revived after 75 years in a transport buffer.
In the 1994 film Star Trek Generations, 138-year-old Admiral James T. Kirk comes back to life after being "suspended" in a Nexus for 78 years.
On the BBC television show Doctor Who, the tenth episode of the ninth series (titled "Sleep No More") involves a machine called Morpheus that can condense a full night's worth of sleep into mere minutes. People who refuse to use Morpheus are colloquially called "Rips", referencing Rip van Winkle.
Seven Sleepers, the Christian and Islamic story of a group of youths who hid inside a cave at Ephesus to escape Roman persecutions and emerged some 300 years later.
^ abcdThorn, John. "Saint Rip". nyfolklore.org. Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore. Archived from the original on 18 October 2017. Retrieved 21 June 2017.
^Ibn Kathir, Stories of the Prophets, translated by Shaikh muhammed Mustafa Gemeiah, Office of the Grand Imam, Sheikh al-Azhar, El-Nour Publishing, Egypt, 1997, Ch.21, pp.322-4
^Van Winkle Campbell, Sally (1999). But Always Fine Bourbon: Pappy Van Winkle and the Story of Old Fitzerald. Louisville, KY: Limestone Lane Press. ISBN9780967420806.
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