![]() ![]() Burns’s poem is credited with keeping the folk customs it features alive through the 19th century, and with being the main advert for Halloween as Scottish and Irish immigrants brought it to the US (the three-day Catholic festival of the dead that it begins and Celtic Samhain – also on 31 October – were both foreign to New England and Virginia). Although the tale’s Halloween credentials are impeccable (a pumpkin plays an important role), a cavalryman carrying his severed head was a distinctly unusual apparition in an era when the spirits believed to be liberated on All Hallows’ Eve were fairies and the souls of the dead.įor all their knotty oddity – or maybe because of it – the two works enjoyed remarkable after-lives. ![]() ![]() Equally strange is Washington Irving’s story “ The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820), in which a superstitious New England schoolteacher, Ichabod Crane, is obsessed with rumours that a headless horseman is at large – and vanishes after encountering this soldier, who is either real or is Ichabod’s love rival, dressed up as a cruel prank. Robbie Burns’s romping dialect poem “Halloween” (1786) is anything but frightening as spells are merrily cast while lads woo lasses in the now-bare cornfields – the mood seems more that of a boozy, libidinous late-summer party after the harvest than of an Ayrshire village hunkering down on the verge of November, fearful that hostile spirits will appear and cause havoc. ![]() Halloween lit begins with two peculiar but seminal works in the debut collections of writers who would come to be hailed as founding fathers of their respective national traditions. ![]()
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