The Pied Piper of Hamelin Part One

Astonishing Legends

Scott Philbrook

History, Society & Culture

4.6 • 9.8K Ratings

🗓️ 16 February 2020

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the year 1284 CE, a remarkable and colorfully dressed young man came to the town of Hamelin in Lower Saxony, Germany. There are two documentations of this wanderer’s visit, the originals of which have since been lost. According to the contemporary Hamelin chronicle and a depiction in a stained glass window in a local church, this handsome stranger began to play his flute through the streets. Enchanted by the notes, 130 children from the town followed him into the woods, never to be seen again. In the hundreds of years since the supposedly real event occurred, the most significant addition to the story would be the reason for the mass kidnapping. After successfully ridding the town of a plague of rats using his musical pipe, the payment the piper was promised was withheld by the mayor and the town leaders. Furious at his being cheated, the magical visitor took their children as his payment. This later variation of the narrative we have all come to know as “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.” Today, we may think of this story as a children’s Fairly Tale. But as the Brothers Grimm had noted themselves, and who are partly responsible for making it known to the world, this is a legend and not a Fairy Tale. The difference is that legends are considered to be based on actual events, people, and places. In relation, it’s also said that there is a kernel of truth to every legend. If that is accurate, then the real Pied Piper event may be far more mysterious and tragic than we could have imagined, either as children or adults.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Estonishing legends will let you thank Health IQ, Lightstream, Squarespace, Mint Mobile,
0:04.8	our contributors at patreon.com and you, our listeners, for making tonight's show possible.
0:10.7	Some legends are retold for hundreds of years. Others seem to find their way into foreign cultures
0:17.1	from around the world. And then there are those that do both, which brings us to our question tonight.
0:23.8	How does a local legend from the 13th century that takes place in a small German town
0:29.2	go on to become world famous and timeless? The legend of the Pied Piper has been shared
0:35.3	orally and in written works in multiple languages for over 700 years. It's a story that's so simple
0:43.1	that even though it's been adapted and rewritten in infinite ways, it can be told in its entirety
0:49.4	in just a few paragraphs. The earliest written version of the legend of the Pied Piper,
0:55.3	as told by an eyewitness to the original event, was lost sometime in the late 1300s.
1:02.0	Since that version is not available to us, we shall resort to a more well-known text,
1:07.6	or at least the English translation of one. And that's the short story called,
1:12.4	De Kindazou Hamel, or The Children of Hamel. It was written by Jakob and Bilhelm Grimm,
1:19.4	more commonly known as the Brothers Grimm, and their book, Doichhasaugun, or German legends,
1:26.0	initially published in 1816. It begins on page 330 of that first edition.
1:33.2	It's important to note that the Grimm's differentiate between fairy tales and legends,
1:38.0	by pointing out that legends, like the story of the Pied Piper, typically include names of real people,
1:44.4	places, and dates. As their work has been translated from German to English many times over,
1:50.8	we've added a few missing pronouns and prepositions here and there to make it easier to follow.
1:58.1	In the year 1884, a strange and wondrous figure arrived in Hamel. He was wearing a coat of
2:04.8	many colors and was taken to be a rat catcher, because he promised to free the town of a
2:09.6	plague of rats and mice for a fix some of money. The citizens promised to pay him this fee,
	...

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