People often ask what makes a book into a classic, but they hardly ever think about what makes a normal, everyday short story into a myth. It takes a very fine-tuned mingling of escapism and familiarity only achievable by the best storytellers. Washington Irving achieved that perfect mixture when he wrote “Rip Van Winkle.” He takes a location familiar to his readers, and mystifies it by transporting his readers back in time. He creates a hero with exaggerated qualities, but at the same time makes him a man every reader would want to know. He combines character and setting with a touch of the mystical, and a great American myth is created.
The framing tale is “Once Upon a Time” that carries the reader into the past. The storyteller is recounting
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Luckily, Irving did not stop there either. Van Winkle wanders into the forest one day and encounters the mystical. His name is called as if from nowhere. He meets unfamiliar people, described as very short and dressed in clothing of an antique age. As he is following the stranger further and further from home, Van Winkle reflects that “there was something strange and incomprehensible about the unknown that inspired awe and checked familiarity.” The mystical man led him to an Amphitheatre where more small men played nine-pins and drank. Not so unusual a game for that time period, but “though these folks were evidently amusing themselves, yet they maintained the gravest faces, the most mysterious silence, and were, withal, the most melancholy party of pleasure he had ever witnessed.” This would have provided a stark contrast to the village Van Winkle knew, filled with the laughter of children and the voice of his nagging wife. Van Winkle proceeds to drink of the beverage offered by the mythical creatures and falls asleep. When he wakes, everything has changed. These mythical qualities are not entirely unique to American Mythology, instead possibly borrowed by Irving from the Celtic faery mythology heard from his Scottish parents. These myths warn never to eat or drink in a magical place or suffer the