Notes on Washington Irving's magic-infused 1819 The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

I finally read Washington Irving's magic-infused 1819 The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. And I never realized that Brom Bones, Ichabod Crane's rival for Katrina van Tassel's affections, could have rigged the whole thing. Brom intimates at the conclusion that he knows more about Crane's passing than he is letting on. He is of burly, athletic stock and could posed as the giant Headless Horseman. Crane's vanishing conveniently clears the way for Brom to court and ultimately wed Katrina.

There are some other interesting facts, as well as differences between the 1819 novel and the 1949 animated Walt Disney adaptation.

Unlike in the Disney animated adaption, a pumpkin, not a jack-o'-lantern, was the featured weapon in the climax of the book. There is no incendiary scene on the haunted bridge in the novel.

Arthur Rackham, illustrator of the recognized classical 1928 edition, crammed each drawing with fairies, spirits, witches, etc., but did not depict the climactic scene, nor the galloping Hessian, the Headless Horseman.

The greatest surprise of the book is that the actual encounter between Ichabod Crane and Brom Bones lasts only a scant two pages after all the exposition and set-up and atmospheric establishment.

The Sleepy Hollow narrator is not omniscient, does not always know Crane's motivations - as in why Crane bolted from Katrina's castle that evening. Still, this unreliable narrator presides, presumably closes the postscript as well.

Ichabod figures as a curious suitor - living nearly as a pauper and hungry social climber and admirer (one might argue fetishist) of all things colonial Dutch. Crane was arguably just as in love or more in love with the trappings and comforts of Katrina's estate and wealth than with her.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is drenched in magic, charmingly so, which I am not sure if the Disney adaption succeeded at conveying. It's an ethereal, atmospheric locale where locals adore spinning yarns about apparitions.
Irving successfully fuses Indigenous folklore, German folklore to brew heady American mythology to match European myth, with unseen-before Halloween elements. (As Richard Bowes prefaces for his story "Knickerbocker Holiday" in Ellen Datlow's and Nick Mamatas' anthology, Haunted Legends.