In yet another episode from The Alhambra, Irving returns to several of his favorite themes: fate, love, honor, memory, and the terrible human cost of violence. Like so many of the tales collected in The Sketch Book, this story meditates on the power of the human heart to contend against mortality, and the corresponding power of mortality to interrupt, distort, or extinguish the deepest desires of the heart. Yet “The Legend of Don Munio Sancho de Hinojosa” is unusually somber in mood. More...

One of Irving’s least well-known ghost stories is perhaps also one of his most interesting and personal. Like “Guests from Gibbet Island,” it is a rare foray into the classic ghost story. Most of his ghost stories end up like “Rip Van Winkle” or “The Bold Dragoon” – in that they purport to tell supernatural histories, but are laced with satire, cheek, and burlesque overtones making them ambiguous, while tales like “Sleepy Hollow” and “The Spectre Bridegroom” are overt farces, and others like...

Walpurgis Night—observed on the eve of May 1—sits in that peculiar category of European traditions that feel at once familiar and slightly unsettled, as if they have drifted across centuries without ever fully settling into a single meaning. On the surface, it is tied to the feast of Saint Walpurga, an early medieval abbess whose memory was honored across parts of Christian Europe. Yet alongside this ecclesiastical layer runs a much older and more diffuse set of seasonal customs: bonfires,...