What was rip van winkle famous for

Rip settles down to watch his grandchild grow, and his son tends to the farm while Rip Senior enjoys his retirement. He eventually reacquaints himself with his remaining friends in the village, who take up their regular meets outside the pub, and Rip Van Winkle becomes revered as a village elder and patriarch who remembers what the village was like before the American Revolutionary War.

It has supernatural elements, the idea of an enchanted wood, and focuses on simple village life, such as we find in many classic European fairy stories. Nor was the central idea of the story — a man falling asleep for many years and waking up to find the word around him substantially changed — entirely new. Why did Irving recycle this old plot device for his story about the American Revolution?

And how should we interpret the story? One interpretation is that Irving, through this light-hearted tale, is actually trying to downplay the American Revolution. Rip Van Winkle manages to sleep right through it, which is quite a feat when you think about what a noise there must have been. When he gets back to his village, although several of his friends have died — one presumably in the war itself — the others have survived, and he soon goes back to sitting and gossiping with them outside of the pub where they used to chatter together.

The name of the pub may have changed — to represent the shift from one George to another, from King George to George Washington — but life for these simple villagers is largely the same as it was before. The humour of the story — chiefly in Rip Van Winkle being a henpecked husband — also supports this analysis of the story. If Dame Van Winkle is like Old Mother England, lording it over Rip representing the American colonies , then her death is a blessed release for Rip, but nothing more momentous than that.

He is relieved rather than anything more dramatic. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University.

Image: via Wikimedia Commons. One was about the Emperor Charles the Great and his army, who disappeared into a cleft in a mountain where they were condemned to stay until doomsday. It was said that when claps of thunder were heard in the mountain it was the emperor making an appearance. Irving had been reading a description of Kaaterskill Clove written by Samuel Mitchill and he thought of transplanting the story in this new-world location, substituting Henry Hudson and his men for the emperor and his army.

The second story was about Peter Klaus, a goatherd who followed his goats into a cleft in a mountain where he discovered some otherworldly bowlers. The bowlers gave him a drink of wine that caused him to sleep for 20 years. All that was left was to give Rip a suitable colonial Dutch village. He described the town as being founded by Dutch settlers during the early rule of Peter Stuyvesant with the oldest houses being made of yellow brick brought from Holland.

Sleepy Hollow was settled in and does have yellow brick houses. Saugerties was settled in during the rule of the English governor Edmund Andros and the oldest Dutch houses are made of fieldstone not brick. Saugerties occupies the ridge just above the river, which, because of an optical illusion, would appear to be at the foot of the mountains from this vantage point. It seems that just as Irving had amalgamated German legends with this new landscape he fused Sleepy Hollow and Saugerties into one village.

Palenville is at the foot of the mountain from which the Kaaterskill flows as the town is described in the story but it did not exist in the late s when the story took place, and it cannot be seen from the river as the town is described. Even in the early s, all that stood there were two mills and the cabins of the workers who manned them.

Catskill is a colonial town founded in about nine and half miles from the base of the mountain, which places it within walking distance for Rip. But Irving is not known to have visited Catskill before he wrote the account. Saugerties is actually older than Catskill and a half-mile closer to the clove, making it the closest colonial town, and as we have seen, it is likely that Irving did visit Saugerties before he wrote the story.

Still, one mystery remained. Where did the name Rip Van Winkle come from? Is it possible that it based on the name of an actual family in the Catskill region as many have claimed? Irving was particularly fond of the Van Winkle boy, who was nicknamed Rip because of his wide grin. As Irving spent more time in New Jersey than in the Catskills this account does seem plausible.

It struck me as ironic, however, because I grew up in Totowa. To most Americans, Rip Van Winkle is a unique, humorous character, famous for his nap. The theme of the hero being lured into fairyland and returning to find that years have passed is a popular one. About Dame, he learns that she has recently passed away. Meanwhile an old inhabitant of the village, Peter Vanderdonk comes, attests Van Winkle and tells that there were rumors about the ghosts of Hendrick Hudson, the guardian of this land.

It was said that he visited the town with his companion once in twenty years to guard the area. From now on, he starts living with his daughter who is married to a generous farmer. He lives happily with them and his idleness is also socially admissible at this age. He rejoins the inn and is loved again by the village people for his logical argumentativeness.

Eventually, he comes to be known that the Revolutionary War is fought in between the time of his sleep. But he only wishes to overthrow the reign of his wife and he successfully made it.

Finally, Knickerbocker concludes the story with an ardent note that the people of Catskills firmly believe the story of Hudson and assures the reader of the credentiality of Van Wink. He is the storyteller of the collection of stories. He is an eager wayfarer and interested in the history, culture and tradition of Dutch people. He is the protagonist of the story who is a descendant of the gallant Dutch line.

He is a kind, generous person who is always ever ready to help, neighboring men. He lives in a village inhabited at the foot of the Catskills mountains in the United States. His nature is tranquil and submissive that he obeys his wife and speaks nothing before her even though she often scolds him. Everyone in the village loves him even the dogs do not bark at him.

But he is infamous for showing sluggishness towards households. She is the wife of Rip Van Winkle. She is a bad-tempered woman who spends time scolding her husband for doing nothing and earning zero profit from the farmhouse to run their expenditures.

He is a dapper and skilled knowledgeable little man. He does not easily get impressed by words of wisdom. That is why he rises as a great figure in the American Revolutionary War and finally gets a seat in Congress. He is also the leader of the club where people gather and talk about politics, philosophy. He does not speak anything and only makes opinions while smoking pipes.

His ferocity or change in mood can be detected by the speed of smoking. He spends his life quite happily there with her. Rip Van Winkle, Jr. He grows sluggish and lazy just like his father. When Rip returns, people indicate a man known as Van Winkle. It is his son but he feels amazement and anger for growing this way. Hudson was the founder of the land at which the village is settled.

He sailed at River Hudson to reach this place. It was famous among the folklore that his guardian soul visited once in every twenty years to guard this place. Peter Vanderdonk is the oldest resident of the village. He is from the line of a great historian who composed one of the earliest documents about the historical significance of this place.

Philip of Pokanoket. Philip of Pokanoket also known as King Philp was an Indian soldier. He was infamous throughout American states at the time of the first colonizing by New England.

Later he became the king. Irving, the short story writer, throughout the story, deals with the subject of freedom and tyranny. Rip Van Winkle needs freedom to be kind, to be simple and to live the life he desires for himself. The villagers love him because of his freedom and good nature. He feels happy to help others and spend time with them. He is determined to be free and live the way he wants.

He remains unchanged and tries to seek this freedom. His freedom is constrained by different forms of tyranny. His wife, Dame Van Winkle, is the tyrant who snubs his freedom. She insults him all the time and nags him dawn to dusk. She wants him to work on the farm for the betterment of his family. Dame Van Winkle stands for domestic tyranny. Her constant nagging brings despair to her but she stops it now. He escapes from all forms of domestic and societal tyranny by spending time in an inn.

He gossips there with his friends and goes hunting. Irving comments that responsibility is a form of tyranny because it forces us to do what one dislikes. Dame Van Winkle has the right to ask her husband to fulfill the needs of wife and children. The actions of the protagonists lead the author to develop the theme of constancy and change.

A lot of changes occur around him but he never changes. He remains simple, gentle and idle throughout the story. Even when he wakes up after twenty years, he finds everything has changed around him but he stays constant as he was before his long sleep. He is a romantic figure, who is pure and enjoys his freedom no matter what is happening around him.

The village in which Rip Van Winkle lives with his family stands for the change, time brings to everything. Everything changes with the course of time. Paradoxically, change is everything that is only constant.

Life itself is dynamic. The essence of life lies in change. In the old village, Rip used to visit an inn, where he spent time with his friends, has now become a bustling hotel.

Changes do not occur only in the physical form of the village but also in the minds of the people. Mentally, they are changed and altered.

The sluggish sleepy village of the past is now completely changed right after two decades. Now it is more crowded and people are more critical about politics. In the old village, it cannot be imagined that the people will attack anyone for his political leanings. Rip was divided equally by children and adults.

Elections have brought a massive change in the peaceful village. The people of the village are no more subjects now. They are citizens.

Some of the change agents include politics, independence, education and national sovereignty. The narrator of the story is Diedrich Knickerbocker who promises that the story is based on historical facts. Irving wrote fictional works and history as well. In this short story, he attempts to explore the existence of truth in between history and fiction.

The narrator assures that the tale is true and the author takes it to add humor and interest to the story.

Rip feels pleased to work as a volunteer when others need him. He does not work willingly on his own farm. He does not want to work for benefit, profit or money. He helps people around him voluntarily. If he works on his own farm it will bring profit to his own family but he does not do this.

The reader knows that people work on their farms and earn their livelihood. Even after two decades, when he visits his village, his attitude stays that unusual. Rip is the representative of the simple life of the past. The author permits the protagonist to spend the life he wants. So that he spends his time idly, in gossiping and hunting. Irving frees him to live.