It was 735 years ago this month that the Pied Piper led the children of Hamelin, Germany, away forever. Specifically on June 26, 1284. Or did he? The earliest surviving written account was on the 100th anniversary of the event in 1384, which didn't give many details. But artworks appear earlier, and we assume that the story was passed down orally. The town lost 130 children somehow. The detail of the rats was added to the tale later.
A nutshell refresher on the story as it was finally consolidated: Hamelin is overrun with rats. A mysterious piper shows up offering a fix – for the right price. The mayor agrees. The stranger plays his pipe to draw out the rats and steer them into the Weser River to drown. The mayor reneges on payment, and the stranger leaves, only to return on June 26 to lead the town’s youth away into a cave in a mountain.
While we know the rats are merely an element of the storyteller’s craft (because rats actually can swim quite well), the sober entry in the town chronicle and stained glass commemoration of the event only 16 years after the fact, as well as the specificity of the gable inscription all argue for a real-world tragedy that calls for explanation.
So what answers have been proposed?
Folklore Thursday offers four possible explanations for what happened in Hamelin on June 26, 1284, although we will probably never know for sure. -via Strange Company
