The Pied Piper of Hamelin is one of my least favorite childhood stories, one so redolent of evil–with overtones of perversity– that I pretty much deep-sixed it to the memory hole of my life, absent unusual circumstances which occasionally and repugnantly bring it to mind for one reason or another.
If you’re not familiar with the story (parts of which date back to the fourteenth century), it goes like this: A young man dressed in patched and multicolored (“pied”) clothing appears in the German town of Hamelin one day, and offers to rid the town of the infestation of rats that is plaguing it.
Anxious to solve an unhealthful and expensive problem, the local burghers are eager to contract for his services, promising him a handsome reward, should he be successful in his endeavors.
The piper (for such he was) removes his instrument from his pocket, plays a merry tune on it, and leads the rats to the Weser River, where all but one of them drowns.
At which point, the worthy burghers default on their promise of payment, accuse the piper of having extorted them by bringing the rats to the town in the first place, and send him, penniless, packing.
The piper is pissed.
A few weeks later (the legend in Hamelin is specific enough to attribute the event to June 26), the piper shows up in the town again dressed all in green (red in some versions) while all the adults are in church, and he plays a tune of such sweetness on his pipe that all the local children are enchanted to follow him into a cave whose entrance closes up after them, and they are never seen again. Remaining behind are just three children, one of whom is lame, one of whom is deaf, and one of whom is blind, to tell the sad story to the bereft parents when they emerge from church.
Several variations of the story exist, especially when it comes to the theme of what happened to the children, with the most popular being that they were escorted to a paradisal setting and lived happily ever after; that they were led into the River Weser and drowned just like the rats; that they were returned to the bosom of their grieving parents after the town paid the piper several times the promised original amount; and that they formed a settlement in Transylvania. (Go figure.)
I’ve always loathed the story, whether reading it in a book of childhood fairy tales from the aptly-named Brothers Grimm, struggling through the original German of Goethe’s poem Der Rattenfänger in school, or rounding out my understanding of Robert Browning in what passes, for him, as an attempt at light verse. There’s just nothing nice about it. The adults are duplicitous and greedy. The piper is cruel and vindictive. The innocent children are two-dimensional pawns. And by the end of it, I’m even feeling sorry for the rats.
Time, perspective, and additional information have altered, or at least broadened my view a bit. It’s apparent that something cataclysmic and tragic must have happened in Hamelin, starting with records describing the window in St. Nicolai church (dating from about 1300), and about which was written in 1384, “it is 100 years since our children left.” Other theories, some with legs, some pure speculation, center on an epidemic of plague-like illness, a mass drowning, an enforced emigration (deportation) by the feudal lord of dozens of his vassals, and a landslide that killed hundreds. We’ll never really know.
But in the aftermath of Disney’s evolving and most recent Snow White debacle, I cannot help observing, as I have so often in the past, that the greatest gift passed along by these ancient stories, for which we must in large part thank Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, is that–when they’ve stood the test of time for hundreds or thousands of years–they “might not be real, but they might–actually–be true.
so true.