Concerning the Pied Piper of Hamelin

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
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In “Was the Pied Piper of Hamelin a child molester?” ( http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mpiedpiper.html ) Eutychus of the SDSAB concludes, “Like most legends, the Pied Piper story most likely has its origin in something more prosaic than fantastic. But the fantastic does make a much better fairy tale.”

Perhaps so. But no discussion of the Pied Piper would be complete without a mention of rather extraordinary story of The Children’s Crusade of 1212.

One of many puzzles confronting medieval theorists was why Christian troops were not more successful in reclaiming the Holy Lands, given that G-d was surely on their side. A French peasant boy of 12 years named Stephen thought he had the answer: Christ had said that unless people became children, they could not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Clearly, previous Crusaders had been insufficiently pure. One need only bring a crowd of children to the shores of Europe and the seas would split open with the young Crusaders teleported to the Holy Lands forthwith.

Stephen gathered perhaps ten or thirty thousand young followers. After enduring much hardship and a few deaths, they found their way to Marseilles and were profoundly disappointed when no miracle ensued. Many wandered away at this point. The remainder hunkered down, until two merchants generously provided seven ships to sail them free of charge to the Holy Land.

Eighteen years later, a priest appeared in France with an interesting story. He claimed to be one of the children who had set sail from Marseilles. Of the seven ships, two had been lost at sea; the remaining five had been diverted to Algeria. Their human cargo was then sold into slavery. (Some were sold in Egypt and Bagdhad, where they fetched better prices.)

A boy named Nicholas led a similar expedition from Germany. That group endured much hardship and death, but was lucky enough (I suppose) not to have successfully crossed the Mediterranean.

The author of The Sword and the Scimitar (1974) speculates that this whole sorry episode may have given rise to the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Ok, so it’s speculation. And the Hamelin variant supposedly occurred around 1284 - 72 years later. Still, one can’t help but notice the thematic parallels.

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I did mention the Crusade just in passing in my article, but thanks for the interesting sidebar, flowbark.

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There are many speculations about the PP of H, some cogent, some dubious. However, it is time we cut through this jungle of scholarship and conjecture and faced the obvious truth.

The story has endured for 800 years because so many adults secretly wish it was true. Children are a messy, noisy, nerve-wracking nuisance. They are in the way, underfoot, an insurance liability, and a tax burden. They turn into adolescents and become surly ingrates, appreciative of none of the sacrifices we’ve made for them. After quitting college, giving us the finger, and marrying a nincompoop, they run off and let us grow old poor and alone.

Ah, but it is necessary for the survival of the species for us to dole out LOVE for our children. We convince ourselves, we commit ourselves, and devote ourselves to our offspring.

It is through tales such as the Pied Piper of Hamelin that we subconsciously exorcise our buried wish: Won’t someone come around and get rid of these nasty little buggers once and for all?

I know these views will be unpopular, but popularity does not equal truth. Science teaches us to look for the simples explanation. Take a bold and unprejudiced look at the legend of the PP of H, and you too will come to the obvious conclusion.

If you thought Pied was bad, wait’ll I tell you the truth about his brother Peter.

(Please note: Mr. Exhaust writes this in the spirit of satire. He’s no Swift, but whatever he is, he’s stuck with it. He does not have, nor plan to have, any children of his own. He does like children and does not own a pipe, not a musical one at least.)

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Sure, sure… The reason all stories are popular is that we secretly desire to suffer the punishment that is handed out to the bad guys.

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May be slightly off-topic, but why is he referred to as a “Pied” Piper? In Spanish, as I first learned the legend, he’s just a piper (or, flautista, in Spanish).

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According to the Hameln legend, he word particolored clothes.

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And this somehow refers to “pied”?

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Perhaps he had a side job of Circus Clown and was frequently “pied” :smiley:

Or perhaps it’s short (or German?) for P***** off? As in mad?

I’m probably ignorant, but what does Particolored clothes have to do with the word Pied? :slight_smile:

I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m saying I don’t understand.

Crodley

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Whatever the truth, I think the overnight dismemberment of 130 children is easily debunkable by employing common sense.

If one man took 130 children at once, most would have escaped - you can only hack so many kids apart at a time.

If he took them one or two at a time, he’d never have done it in one night.

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Pied means

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I just dropped in to say what an interesting article that was, thanks Euty!

BTW, I hate to say it, but Exhaust is right. I’d love it if all the kids in town were lead away!

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We could conclude that it has survived so long because it represents the worst fear of parents, that the horror of losing one’s children and never knowing their fate resonates deeply.

Stay away from my nasty little buggers. :smiley:

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Bup’s comment is to the point, and in fact was my first reaction when I read Manchester’s piece. Assuming he spent 16 hours doing his dirty work, by my calculations he would have had 7m23s to entice and kill each child, never mind dismembering it. Naah. Personally, I incline to the belief that there may have been a fellow like him who killed six or ten children, and the legend grew with time, augmented by our deep fears of losing children.

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Bruno Bettleheim (putting aside all his faults, he had some genius inspirations) wrote a book, The Uses of Enchantment, about folk tales and why they have survived. His theory is that they express deep-rooted psychological concers – for instance, in line with sugaree’s comments that this one touches on the deep-rooted fear of parents about losing their children, but I’d also add the deep-rooted fear of children about being taken from their parents.

The story begins with the adults unable to handle the rat-problem – another deep-rooted childhood concern. Children want to believe that their parents can handle ANY problem, and it’s a shock to the system when the child learns they can’t.

Then, after the Piper removes the rats, the adults go back on their word – greed and untruthfulness – and are punished.

Seems to me that it’s right in the traditional folk-tale arena, and doesn’t need to be a “memory” story.

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Eutychus:

When I was in college, my Folklore Prof. (Alan Dundes; UC Berkeley; pretty famous but also a Freudian, so be warned!) delved into this subject at length and came up with the following:

-The mass migration of youth from Westphalia, as described by Udolph, indeed took place, necessitated by overcrowding and limited resources in the walled cities required at the time.

-This was a novel and controversial strategy in its day, and the parents staying behind felt very guilty–justifiably so–about sending away their own children, even if it had been decided that it was for the greater survival of the remaining townsfolk.

-As Bettleheim would attest, guilt is a deep-rooted psychological motivator, and a primary generator of folktales and legend. Thus, the guilt of quite possibly sending one’s own children off to their doom created the need among the burghers to collectively embrace the idea that someone ELSE was responsible. Someone ELSE took their children away. They were the good guys, of course, who loved their children, and a bad guy must have taken them away. In psychological terms, I think this is called “transference”, or “projection”; in any case, it’s the assigning to another the things one hates or fears about oneself.

-So gradually, as the decades passed, the oral history of where their children had gone–an uncomfortable subject, at best–resurfaced enthusiastically once a happier scapegoat had been created. This scapegoat was possibly suggested by a real murderous fellow who, as you and others noted, might have killed a few children at some point in the area, the story of which people of the time may have connected with their own missing children and morphed together. Equally possible is that a ratcatcher may have simply been assigned the role due to low status and the obvious symbolic connections, which folktales often rely on.

-Eventually, the real story faded out for the most part, and competing versions of the tale we know today became commonplace. One version has the children all dying–the parents’ worst fear and highest degree of guilt is represented here. Another version, as you said, has the children disappearing into a shiny, happy wonderland, which makes no “moral of the story” type sense, unless you account for the desire of the parents to believe that they sent their children to a far better place, and that they were doing them a favor, after all. Both of these tales survive, because they fulfill different, and competing, psychological needs.

That’s what I remember, anyway. It’s fascinating to consider the group pychology element in all of this, even if it’s highly disputable. BTW, this lecture and discussion took place about 8 years ago, so please forgive the hazy recollection and possible misrepresentation of Dundes’ scholarship. Perhaps he has written about it in academic journals? You’d know where to look better than I, at this point, Eutychus. Cheers.

-Shawn

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Um, I think there are 2 questions here:

  1. What makes the Pied Piper legend a good story? That would explain its interest to those who live outside of Hamelin, some 720 years later.

  2. Just out of curiosity, what did happen to the children of Hamelin around 1284? That is, what exactly did that inscription of c. 1300 refer to?

Hypothesis 1: 130 of them were slaughtered. Objection: Some of the kids would have escaped, unless they were tied up en masse (unlikely) or perhaps herded into a cave (what cave?).

Hypothesis 2: 8 or 10 were slaughtered and their numbers later exaggerated. I’m skeptical, given the relatively short time span separating 1284 and 1300.

Hypothesis 3: One Pied Piper led an expedition with some 130 youngsters, ran into bad weather, and perished. This sounds plausible to me, but I don’t speak German.

Hypothesis 4: The meaning of the inscription in question was lost by the time the tale emerged around (1500?). By that time, the tale reflected a number of folk tales. Comment: I’m glad I can insert some sort of justification for my sidebar above, but this really doesn’t answer question #2. Still, if you believe that collective guilt creates folklore (something I’m not sure of, by the way), I should note that Nicholas of Germany reportedly led some 7000 children on his Crusade, a large share of whom probably never made it back home. That sure sounds more traumatic than Hypothesis #5.

Hypothesis 5: The inscription says that the youngsters were “lost”. Thus, it could be referring to the sort of mass migration described in the original staff report.

Hypothesis 6: The inscription is a red herring and never was the main basis for the tale anyway. This is shear speculation on my part, mentioned only for completeness.

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I’m not clear on the inscription. Was it translated into English, and the original German lost?

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Hardly. The oldest version that I have found on the Web was the inscription on a relatively new house (address: Osterstraße 28), built in 1602:

Anno 1284 am dage Johannis et Pauli
war der 26. junii
Dorch einen piper mit allerlei farve bekledet
gewesen CXXX kinder verledet binnen Hamelen gebo[re]n
to calvarie bi den koppen verloren

The vocabulary of which sounds very much like contemporary Low German to me (though the syntax is archaic); it certainly looks like a 17th century rather than 13th/14th century text to me (think Shakespeare vs. Chaucer…)

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It is a warning to adults to pay their bills.

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Ah. I suspected that it might be something like that. The first that impression I got from the article was that it was translated into English, and we now aren’t sure what the post-translation words “calvarie” and “koppen” mean. That made me wonder why people would be trying to figure out what words in the translated version mean, when it is the words in the original that really matter. I see now that in fact those are not part of the translation; they are part of the original. I think that could have been made bit clearer, perhaps by putting those words in italics.