The grim truth behind the Pied Piper | Hacker News Reader

The grim truth behind the Pied Piper

bbc.com

57 pointsjedwhite23 comments

Another possible sources of such legends are fictional stories put into documents as page-fillers.

In my city there's court documents going 5 centuries back, and there was a tradition among scribes to fill the pages between separate cases with "obviously false cases" and other stories so nobody can add false details to the cases.

So there are stories about a sheep sueing a wolf and other classic jokes.

And in the actual court documents from 17th century there's a formally written letter signed "Pluton, lord of all hells" praising his protestant politicians for doing great job in the city :) At the time there was reformation and counterreformation going on.

And there were obviously legends based on that :)

That is hilarious. Are any of those documents available online?

I've searched for it, found mentions but no full text. Here's one example (in Polish): http://pther.net/PDF/Miscellanea/MIscellanea%20tom%2010.

It mentions an article by M. Trojanowska called "Wpisy epickie w księgach grodzkich lubelskich XVU-XVUI w." fully concerned with these "wpisy epickie" or "wpisy ludyczne" (epic/ludic entries)

It was published in „Biuletyn Lubelskiego Towarzystwa Naukowego”, tome 23, year 1981, no 1

Malformed link it appears!

Weird. The link is the same but this one works.

http://pther.net/PDF/Miscellanea/MIscellanea%20tom%2010.pdf

And here I was thinking middle-out compression.

Well, the rats are filtering out some frequencies when they search for predators..

Sounds like it could have been the Children's Crusade (or something along those lines)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Crusade

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_mania

Apparently, there is no consensus as to what triggered this phenomenon. Very interesting mystery.

One thing that the article hints at, but doesn't explicitly say is that "children" probably doesn't mean literal children, but may mean something more along the line of "citizen" or "young adult".

That's what the recruitment theory implies.

There are lots of great stories about "magical music" that could have a hint of truth to them. But the rat bit seemed to come later.

It seems to me there is something more shameful going on, as the original tragedy was forgotten.

The earliest written town records of Hamelin state, in 1348, "It is 100 years since our children left." The German Lüneburg manuscript, dating 1440-1450 "130 children born in Hamelin were led away by a piper [clothed] in many colours to [their] Calvary near the Koppen, [and] lost."

almost sure so. Being religiously uneducated atheists we have no associations with "Calvary near the Koppen" while it seems to have had well defined semantics back then:

https://www.coursehero.com/file/p1upht4/What-is-the-signific...

"... conflated the concepts of Koppenberg , the hill of Calvary and Golgotha as though they all meant the same, but that can never have been the case. There were always substantial differences between them, as in the Middle Ages itself the concept of Calvary referred exclusively to the head or skull surmounting the jaws of Hell, otherwise referred to as the lion’s or dragon’s mouth, that swallows sinners while little demons spare no effort to push poor wretches into this mouth with their tridents or other implements. This was the typically medieval image of the journey to Hell or the entry into the jaws of Hell up to the era of the Crusades, when a Minister General of the Franciscan order interpreted the Bible in such a way that the hill of Calvary , the skull, became synonymous with Golgotha , a concept which later included an association with any place of execution, and thus Calvary acquired a new significance ..."

Needs some pop music:

Abba - The Piper, 1980, 3min24sec

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFrGTtZKA_I

I don't know about rats, but we called animal control on an aggressive gator. And the guy who came out sat down on the side of the pond with a boombox playing a cassette tape of some weird noises. Gator swam right up to him and he then disposed of it.

I don't know that it's that far fetched to think that at least the rats part could possibly have been true.

As for the gator cassette, I asked and was told it's gator mating sounds. The bad news was that he then said that to catch the mate, the cassette won't work and he would have to use chicken.

rats have ultrasound hearing, and children have higher range of hearing than adults, though not in ultrasound. While i don't subscribe to the literary version of a piper taking children away, it may have been noticed by the people back then that animals and children hear some flutes while adults - don't. (An example of a gruesome speculative version of events would be for example that it was used to sort "good" children say from "possessed", especially if children playing in the dirt/etc. were noticed to have say higher infection rate) The story don't mention nor dogs nor cats reacting to the piper, and that is natural given that it is a rat infested medieval city - getting rid of dogs and especially of cats (done back then for superstitious religious reasons ) would be the major way of getting into rat infestation in the first place.

Baby boomers will remember a wonderful musical made off the poem shown on TV during the Thanksgiving weekend. It used a lot of Greig music.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pied_Piper_of_Hamelin_(195...

In its heyday it was as popular as the Wizard of Oz musical. Wikipedia says that because its copyright expired, no network now reshows it. However it is available on youtube.

https://youtu.be/563V_2pIuwU

Why should copyright expiry decrease popularity? They can still broadcast the show.

My nan used to be able to recite the whole poem from memory. She's 93 now, so can't remember so well any more.

tl;dr: the event refers probably to an emigration that really happened, and the pied piper might have been a recruiter to attract settlers to newly conquered lands near Berlin

The article suggests multiple other interpretations. That does seem to be the most accepted, although “probably” seems like the wrong word.

Jürgen Udolph - the researcher in Onomastics who has proposed the generally accepted theory - is well respected. The names of families and of places in that region northeast of Berlin resemble those from Hameln/Hamelin. However, he does not claim to have found the one true truth. A possible alternative is that both things happened - locators recruiting the younger generation around Hameln as well as the incident that became the story of the Pied Piper

The non grim it didn't happen would be the obvious. They all slowly moved away as mentioned.

But sex/slavery would be a grim working theory. Sold by their parents, who then wouldn't rush to dispel rumours.

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