It turns out that Knickerbocker’s story is also a frame for the tale of another storyteller, who appears in the postscript. This historical frame is also complicated and nuanced-while Knickerbocker is referred to as a “historian,” there are parts of the story he doesn’t know. Such a device, called framing, helps to lend a sense of age and legitimacy to the tale (and would have been especially attractive to Irving, as a historian and essayist himself). “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is supposed to have been found among Knickerbocker’s papers, so Irving’s story is no more than a transcription of this “true” story. Irving even claims historical veracity for this tale by creating the fictional character of Diedrich Knickerbocker. Early American New York was, indeed, inhabited by many people of Dutch origin, but the references also served to create an artificial historical heritage. In fact, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is full of references to Dutch names, places, and social groups. Irving’s use of older Dutch and German sources was one way to get around this problem. They could neither rely on this history as material for fiction nor rely on its aesthetic legacy in fitting their own stories into a larger meaning. A classic example of Irving’s irony and humor with its description of 30 years ago as a “remote period,” this quotation nonetheless underlines a real problem for early American storytellers, who lacked a long, distinguished American history from which to draw.
At the beginning of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” we learn from Diedrich Knickerbocker, the fictional historian narrating the tale, that it took place “in a remote period of American history, that is to say, some thirty years since”-meaning in 1790, thirty years before the story was published in 1820.
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