Rip van Winkle

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Rip van Winkle is a short story by Washington Irving published in 1819, as well as the name of the story's fictional protagonist. It was part of a collection of stories entitled The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The story, written while Irving was staying with his sister Sarah and her husband Henry van Wart in Birmingham, England, is set in the days before and after the American Revolutionary War. A villager of Dutch descent escapes his nagging wife by wandering up Kaaterskill Clove near his home town of Palenville, New York in the Catskill Mountains. After various adventures (in one version of the tale, he encounters the spirits of Henry Hudson and his crew playing ninepins at the top of Kaaterskill Falls), he settles down under a shady tree and falls asleep. He wakes up 20 years later and returns to his village. He finds out that his wife is dead and his close friends have died in a war or gone somewhere else. He immediately gets into trouble when he hails George III, not knowing that in the meantime the American Revolution has taken place and he is not supposed to be a loyal subject of any Hanoverian any longer.

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The story is a close adaptation of "Peter Klaus the Goatherd" by J.C.C. Nachtigal, which is a shorter story set in a German village.

It is also close to Karl Katz, a German fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. This story is almost identical. One difference is when he sees dwarfs playing a game of ninepins in a mountain meadow. He joins the game. The dwarfs give him a magic drink that makes him fall asleep for twenty years. It is inferred that the dwarfs are teaching him a lesson about laziness.

After this story, "Rip van Winkle" can be a reference to a person who sleeps a long time, or to a person who is inexplicably unaware of current events.

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Adaptations

Image:Ripvanwinkle.jpg The story has been adapted for other media for the last two centuries, from stage plays to cartoons to films. Actor Joseph Jefferson was most associated with the character on the 19th century stage and made a series of films starring the character starting in 1896, the earliest of which is in the US National Film Registry. Jefferson's son Thomas followed in his father's footsteps and also played the character in a number of early 20th century films.

The story contains a "Note 1" at the end, but this was not included in the original first edition.

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