THE PIED PIPER OF HAMELIN
The Pied Piper Of Hamelin
A Grim Tale
A Grim Tale
On June 26th Last year, the town of Hamelin in Germany
celebrated the 728th anniversary of a macabre event still familiar through
children’s fairy tales more than seven centuries later. But beyond the musical
Rats and the colorful souvenirs and tourist attractions, the town of the Pied
Piper is full of references to a real tragedy – one recorded on the walls of
the so-called Rattenfängerhaus, or House of the Piper:
“In the year of 1284,
on the day of Saints John and Paul, the 26th of June, 130 children born in
Hamelin were seduced by a piper, dressed in all kinds of colours, and lost at
the calvary near the koppen.”
The town
of Hamelin hasn’t forgotten this loss. The street where, supposedly, the
children were last seen is called Bungelosenstrasse: "street without
drums”. Even so many years after the event, no one is allowed to play music or
dance there. Oral tradition preserved and enriched the story until the Brothers
Grimm included it in their compilation of German legends, Deutsche Sagen
(1816–18).
In the Grimms’ version, medieval Hameln is hit by a plague of rats. A
seemingly hero-like figure appears, in the shape of a mysterious stranger
dressed in pied clothes carrying a musical pipe. He promises to rid the town of
the vermin, and the townsmen promise him money in exchange. The rat-catcher has
a strange, almost supernatural gift: he plays a ditty on his pipe that lures
the rats into the river Weser, where they all drown. But, blinded by their
greed, the townsmen refuse to honor their promise and pay the Piper his fee.
The Piper leaves the town, plotting his revenge. When he returns to Hamelin, he
wears the attire of a hunter. He plays a melody that hypnotizes the children,
who follow him to the mountains, never to be seen again.
Interestingly, the Grimm story makes a
note that the mayor's grown daughter was among the group of children, which
readers might infer was an act of revenge aimed directly at the mayor.
The cruelty
of the denouement strikes us doubly, because it surpasses our expectations.
What initially looks like a classic ‘Overcoming the Monster’ plot turns into a
nightmarish tale of disproportionate revenge. The Piper’s retribution oversteps
the boundaries, suggesting society’s ultimate taboo: child murder. This twist
is so shocking that many versions have been tempered, with the Piper
orchestrating the disappearance of the children only to get the money he is
owed; the children go back to Hamelin and the townsfolk learn their lesson. Far
from simplifying the story, this presents the Piper as a more interesting hero,
a complex, modern one – someone who has to challenge the establishment in order
to survive in difficult times. In addition to its dark content, this is a cautionary tale about
governance as well as taking responsibility for financial agreements. And yet
the tale’s elements of greed, revenge and infanticide send us back to the
Middle Ages, a violent period of deep contrasts.
We'd all love to dismiss
this story as mere fairy tale and pure fiction. However, scholars generally
agree that something horrible happened in the town of Hamelin to spawn the
story. Though there might not have been a piper with magical musical talents,
we can safely assume that some tragedy ensued. And, as you might expect, the
scholars are basing this on more evidence than just the Grimm brothers' story
itself. So what really happened on that fateful day in 1284, and who was the
mysterious Pied Piper?
Supposedly, the people put up a
stained glass window in their church around 1300 that depicted a group of
children and a motley-clad fellow. On the glass was an inscription that read,
"On the day of John and Paul 130 children in Hamelin went to Calvary and
were brought through all kinds of danger to the Koppen mountain and lost".
Interestingly, this inscription didn't mention anything about a piper. Accounts
of the window have been found, but the window itself seems to have been
destroyed.
In what's known as the LuneburgManuscript,
which was written more than a century after the window is thought to have been
constructed, a monk by the name of Heinrich of Herferd gives an account of what
happened. He wrote that a man who was about 30 years old came to the town
playing a flute and led the children out. By 1603, the town erected the facade of what's
known now as the Pied Piper House. On the facade, there's an inscription
similar to the one that was reputedly etched on the window -- but this one
explicitly mentions a pied piper.
But the suggestion
of rats having anything to do with the tragedy didn't come until later. If the
rats were most likely a later addition rather than an original element of the
Hamelin episode, they gave depth to the tale and resonated in the popular
imagination thanks to a play of macabre symbolic associations. Although it's
not too far-fetched that rats would be connected to the incident; rat
infestations were certainly a problem around the 13th century and rat-catcher
was a common profession. The first surviving reference to rodents appears in
the 16th-century Zimmern Chronicle followed by Weyer’s aforementioned Delusions
of the Devil, both written almost three centuries after the tragedy. The image
of a rat-infested medieval town instantly brings to mind thoughts of the
plague. Plagues and epidemics have had a continuous impact on the collective
imagination:
In medieval
representations, Death presented himself as a skeleton wearing a colourful pied
attire, a jester who always laughs last. The Pied Piper thus becomes the lord
of the rats, the Black Death (known at the time as the Great Death or simply
the Pestilence) personified, and the one responsible for taking the lives of
the 130 children of Hamelin.
Associations of
the Piper with the Black Death aren’t limited to the subtext of the tale. The
plague has also been used to contextualize the story ; Jacques Demy’s 1972
film, featuring singer Donovan as the
Piper, is a good example. However, the peak of Black Death in Europe was
between 1348 and 1350, that is, more than 64 years after the date of the
children’s disappearance if we follow the Luneburg Manuscript’s chronology. The
possibilities of an outbreak of bubonic plague in the Hamelin of 1284 are
certainly limited. Perhaps oral tradition gave the Piper the identity of a
rat-catcher after the plague had struck and Von Zimmern preserved this new variation in his 1559
Chronicle. Ever since then, the Pied Piper has become the most iconic of
rat-catchers. Throughout the medieval period, it was a well-respected and
well-paid occupation, an essential service for towns infested with vermin. But
it was a risky business – rat catchers’ proximity to rodents made them prone to
deadly diseases – and perhaps one that deserved a hero. The piper's pied
clothing might have evolved from the idea that the visitor had splotchy skin
lesions brought on by the disease. In addition, the plague would have swept
away the lives of many people – not just of one town, and not just of its
children. One theory states that the
children weren't afflicted with disease but rather struck out on an ill-fated
children's crusade. If this is true, it probably happened a few decades earlier
when groups of young people around Europe were known to participate in the
Crusades. They would leave to follow one child who claimed to have a vision
from God that ordered them to march to the Holy Land and win it back for
Christendom..
Whatever
happened or didn't happen to the children, it seems to have been traumatizing
enough for the people of Hamelin to produce this tale. Even if scholars never
uncover the truth, perhaps we'd do well to simply observe the lessons in this
cautionary advisory.... - TOPA
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