Suspended animation in fiction which is indistinguishable from death. In American fiction, the first story to deal with suspended animation is the tale of Rip Van Winkle, a short story by American author Washington Irving published in 1819 as well as the name of the story's fictional protagonist. In the story, a British subject in the American colonies wanders into the Catskill Mountains in the years before the American Revolutionary War, and finds a group of fairies, whose moonshine he drinks. He then falls asleep for 20 years, and returns to his village in what is now the United States, finding his home town
German folklore in the role of folklore in ethnic nationalism - a folklore of Germany as a nation rather than of disunited German-speaking peoples - inspired the Brothers Grimm, Goethe and others. For instance, folklore elements, such as the Rhine Maidens and the Grimms' "The Story of a Boy Who Went Forth to Learn Fear", formed part of the source material for Richard Wagner's opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. Some of the works of Washington Irving - notably Rip van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow - are based on German folktales. Within Germany, the nationalistic aspect was further emphasised