#history
Pied Piper of Hamelin.
The story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin has fascinated generations of children and adults all over the world.
Jul 22, 1728 is recorded as the day the rats and the children following them were led out of the town of Hamelin, Germany, by the Pied Piper.
The Pied Piper of Hamelin, is the character of a legend from the town of Hamelin (Hameln), Lower Saxony, Germany. The legend dates back to the Middle Ages, the earliest references describing a piper, dressed in multicolored (“pied”) clothing, who was a rat-catcher hired by the town to lure rats away with his magic pipe.
When the citizens refused to pay for his service, he retaliated by using his instrument’s magical power on their children, leading them away as he had the rats.
This version of the story became part of folklore, and has appeared in the writings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the Brothers Grimm, and Robert Browning, among others.
Linguistics professor Jürgen Udolph says that 130 children did vanish on a June day in the year 1284, from the German village of Hamelin (Hameln in German).
Udolph entered all the known family names in the village at that time, and then started searching for matches elsewhere. He found that the same surnames occur with amazing frequency in the regions of Prignitz and Uckermark, both north of Berlin. He also found the same surnames in the former Pomeranian region, which is now a part of Poland.
Udolph surmises that the children were actually unemployed youths who had been sucked into the German drive to colonise its new settlements in Eastern Europe.
The Pied Piper may never have existed as such, but, says the professor:
“There were characters known as lokators who roamed northern Germany trying to recruit settlers for the East.” Some of them were brightly dressed, and all were silver-tongued.
The earliest known record of this story is from the town of Hamelin itself, depicted in a stained glass window created for the church of Hamelin, which dates to around 1300. Although the church was destroyed in 1660, several written accounts of the tale have survived.
– Joy Kallivayalil.
