Rip Van Winkle adapted for other media for the last two centuries, in cartoons, films, stage plays, music, and other media. Rip Van Winkle "Rip Van Winkle" is a short story by the American author Washington Irving first published in 1819. It follows a Dutch-American villager in colonial America named Rip Van Winkle who falls asleep in the Catskill Mountains and wakes up 20 years later, having missed the American Revolution. Irving wrote it while living in Birmingham, England, as part of the collection "The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent." The story is set in New York's Catskill Mountains, but Irving later
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