This week, Myths and Legends, it's the story of the famous napper, Rip Van Winkle,

or we'll learn all about the benefits of leaving your family to go drink and bowl with strangers in the woods.

If you want to know how to literally make friends, the creature this week can help you out with that.

To make this inch tall, lifelong pal, all you need is a bottle, and the blood of a murdered man.

This is Myths and Legends, Episode 159. Bad Dad.

This is a podcast where I tell stories from mythology and folklore. Some are incredibly

popular stories you think you know, but with surprising origins. And other stories that might

be new to you, but are definitely worth listening. Today's story isn't technically folklore.

It's the story of Rip Van Winkle by American author Washington Irving, published in 1819.

There's a reason it's on this podcast though, because it's basically a fairy tale that's

believed to be inspired by some fairly common stories from folklore. That, and I think Rip has

had it too good for too long. You'll see what I mean. Irving follows some of the same tropes and

outlines, to the point that this feels like a story from folklore. For those of you that somehow

don't know the central premise behind Rip Van Winkle, I won't ruin it. And we'll talk about the

folklore tradition after the main story today.

Rip's family had been in the Catskill Mountains, and upstate New York, since before New York

was even New York, when it was the Dutch colony of New Netherlands, with its capital, New Amsterdam.

As we've talked about before on this podcast, naming things is difficult. The Swedish crown had a

colonial presence in North America for about 10 minutes, until the ancestors of Rip Van Winkle's

family stormed Fort Christina and put it into that. Yes, Rip Van Winkle's ancestors were brave,

enterprising, and active people who made positive contributions to their society.

Rip Van Winkle was nothing like his ancestors. That's not to say Rip was a bad guy. He wasn't a

...