What's the chance this event happened as recorded in popular memory? The inscription dates to 1284, but the earliest mention according to the article is 1384, 100 years later. On a symbolic day no less. The plaque, where 1284 is inscribed, is on a house dating to the 1500s.
It seems much more plausible that e.g. children emigrated as adults to another region (as mentioned in the article) and the old-timers who stayed behind lamented the 'loss of their children' so to speak; when the history was recorded in town records, it's unlikely that any of these old-timers or children were around. Hundreds of years of historical layering, where the most interesting version of the story is the one that is reinforced likely explains the mythological nature of the tale.
But what do I know? I suppose it is curious.
Combining all the elements, a foreigner-led emigration of adult / young adults en masse because of a rat/disease/sanitation problem seems just fine as an explanation.
While the mystery of the story has always been attractive the maybe more obvious moral truth within the tale is part of its enduring nature.
In short the town screws the piper for his work with the rats, in what looks to be an act of greed and arrogance by the town leaders, likley even having done this before (tales of exploited contractors are easy to find even to this day).
But the moral was in the way the piper responded, shockingly and surprisingly taking off with (per the plaque) some 130 children at midsommer no less.
It’s a little abstracted here as the article doesn’t start with the legend (of course cause it’s so famous); but I think the historical reframe to draw from this is that after not being paid for his work removing rats he “takes payment” by recruiting 130 children and taking them to settle new lands (being paid then for the provision of the children to the settlors).
I think for those interested in the histories, it somewhat solves the mystery and clarifies how the piper was paid in the end. The beauty of the narrative and the core moral of the story remain. And likely this story is still relevant for us today.
Make good on your promises especially around payment lest the other party takes payment in other ways, with possible costs that you never first considered.
One key point, could one lure rats away by playing on a flute?
I mean if you could it would be handy to automate it in large cities even today, no toxic poisons.
I’m not sure what evidence there is for that part of the story. It could be a tale as others have posted as to why the town lost so many children.
As the involvement of a magic flute is unlikely in the extreme, this devolves to kidnapping.
As to why, the article asserts the scenarios of forced migration for settling new areas, or perhaps a "childrens' crusade" to the war in the Middle East.
FWIW, my reading of the article wasn't that the migration was necessarily forced. It could just be the youth leaving for better opportunities. Even today you have elderly people complaining about the kids moving to the city.
I mean looking at the attested record, interpreting it, weighing evidence and motive and audience in this way, that's what historians do that is the practice of the discipline of history.
100 years later is actually pretty damn close all things considered! For comparison we have contemporaneous inscriptions and epigraphs attesting the existence of alexander the great but the earliest surviving accounts of his actions are from 200-300 years later. It can be the dedicated work of a scholar's lifetime to pry a handful of verifiable facts from these second- and third-hand, biased, incomplete accounts. But the lifetimes stack up and the guesses come into focus as knowledge.
> For comparison we have contemporaneous inscriptions and epigraphs attesting the existence of alexander the great but the earliest surviving accounts of his actions are from 200-300 years later.
This is true, but those surviving accounts quote or paraphrase contemporaneous accounts from his generals like Ptolemy and others that have since been lost.
Sure but now we're doing history in the comment section where I only intended to point out that this is exactly how history is done.
100 years isn't that long though. Enough to transmit an exact date to multiple people. Also, the oldest surviving record isn't necessarily the earliest record there ever was.
Go play a game of telephone with 20 people and see how well information travels. Now multiply that by 100 years.
100 years doesn't require a game of telephone with 20 people. It requires maybe 2 or 3. And for a event known to a whole town, you have multiple independent narrators which can help stabilize information.
My family has far more trivial information passed down orally that is way older than 100 years.
Mine doesn't. I know just a handful of things about my great grandparents. Things I do know about my family history didn't come from oral traditions but rather records placing my ancestors in places.
Even from what I know of my parents, I'm sure I've forgotten or misremembered a bunch of stories that they've told me about their lives. I couldn't reliably retell more than a handful of stories.
Life in the last century or so has become far less conducive to oral history with travel and entertainment. It's much easier to maintain an oral history when live storytelling & music are practically the only form of entertainment and your extended family has lived in the same place for many generations. Still it's not that uncommon even today. I don't know much about my mothers family but I grew up hearing occasional stories and genealogy about the famous ancestor on my fathers side despite the fact that he died over a century ago on another continent. And boy oh boy did we get an education when we went back to visit the old family farm...found out I was related to him at least 2 different ways, as well as half the people on that stretch of road and the hotel owner in town. It seemed like there wasn't a person in town who couldn't tell you their connection to the only really significant person/even in the towns history.
If that game of telephone includes the sentence "I'm going to kidnap your child", I'll bet it travels faster and more accurately than you think it will.
Ask an Australian aborigine to sing you one of their 20,000 year old songs.
Humans have a context problem. We all insist ours is the best culture; whereas, all culture is a lie which only persists in the retelling.
In that sense, we Westerners have a long, long way to go to catch up with the aborigines.
That calculation doesn't make sense.
Except oral histories seemed to have been very important to people and passing them down accurately has been noted throughout history
No TV, no books. Lightly populated rural communities, without a lot of visitors.
People loved stories because they were bored.
It's not boredom. Humans have always told stories and we still tell them today. How often does the 500 mile email come up on HN, or The Story of Mel? What about the SR-71 speed check? It's an innate human characteristic to love stories and most social media is lightly disguised storytelling.
It's not boredom.
Says someone who didn't listen to an old timers 70th rendition of the same old story.
There are stories, and then there are stories. I grew up pre-Internet with limited books, no way to get more, 3 fuzzy TV channels on a good day, and nothing else.
People today don't even know what boredom is. You don't know what boredom is, until you've watched the same episode of The Andy Griffith Show 15 times, and still think it is entertaining.
Now go to pre-literate times. No TV. Yes, stories are fun.
But hearing the same story over and over 1000 times is only fun if you're so bored, any external stimulus is a blessing.
Let's not assume things about age. I'm old enough to remember holding the stupid rabbit ears. Never liked the Andy Griffith show though. I've also spent plenty of nights sitting a fire with a bunch of nomads in the middle of nowhere.
It's not fundamentally different from media today. Audiobooks, Twilight Zone, Black Mirror, Disney movies, true crime media, etc. People don't choose these for lack of alternatives. They're activities people like (excepting the parents forced to watch Frozen for the thousandth time).
Strong oral storytelling cultures also have many, many stories available to them. It's not as tedious as syndicated TV was. Two examples of collections that survive to the modern day are the Jewish bible (old testament) and the Christian New Testament, each of which has dozens of stories you're likely familiar with no matter your religious background. They're not communicated solely through everyone sitting down around a campfire, and not every recitation is in the formal verbiage of the source material. Often recitation is associated with a calendar (e.g. the sermon schedules ministers follow in modern churches, or performed only at particular seasonal festivals). Different recitations are often performed in new ways to adjust things to the audience (e.g. referencing recent events) or with slight changes to keep things fresh. So on and so forth. It's a much richer world than you may be aware of.
The telephone game lacks features in the telling that are common in oral storytelling that help reinforce the content and reduces the number of errors. Repeated telling, repetition in the structure, rhyming and alliteration (which is used, or even if they're used, depends on the language), being made into a song (seems to stick better than just straight speaking), etc. If you played the telephone game with a deliberately constructed story using those elements and taught that story to the next "generation" by repetition over a period of time before they, in turn, repeated it to the next generation it would be much more reliable. It also wouldn't be the telephone game.
I'm convinced that poems are an effective error-correcting code for remembering things.
Yeah it is. It's a full generation.
The Spanish flu is a great example of that phenomena. It's hardly mentioned in history books yet we had a flu season where people were dying in the streets. Very shortly after it happened, people stopped talking about it or mentioning it.
COVID is looking like it will very much turn into the same thing.
These are massive global events that may only get small blubs 100 years later. Now imagine an event that happens in a localized area. How much of that event will get carried on or reported?
You also have to remember that in the 1200s, things like paper and ink were a lot more expensive than modern paper. That's part of the reason literacy rates were a lot lower.
> It's a full generation.
This is wrong. It is 4 generations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation
« the average period, generally considered to be about 20–30 years, during which children are born and grow up, become adults, and begin to have children. »
> a great example of that phenomena
This is wrong. "Phenomena" is plural. The singular is "phenomenon."
> It's hardly mentioned in history books
Because it is living memory for a small number of people.
"Spanish flu" is widely remembered, and just 4-5 years ago thousands of articles were published comparing the measures taken a century before against a pandemic.
> small blubs
I think you meant "blurbs", as in "short informal pieces of writing", and it's a poor choice of words anyway. "To blub" means to cry.
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/blub
These repeated errors strongly weaken your argument, and suggest that despite your confident tone you don't know as much as you think.
Your off-topic ad hominems or pedantic takedowns weaken any point you might have had, if you'd had one. This is not high school debate or reddit. We can do better here. It's best to take the most generous view of a post and address the core thesis.
I think the core argument was wrong and it was surrounded by a whole list of other errors which demonstrate flawed thinking and lack of knowledge and understanding.
I further think that pointing out errors is absolutely vital and core to intelligent discourse and discussion. It is a terrible weakness of 202x attitudes that saying "you are wrong, your reasoning is wrong, and here I will spell out how and why" is perceived as rude.
This attitude is what led to Trump, notably the 2nd term, it led to Brexit, it led to the Ukraine war, and it led to international attitudes on Israel v Palestine.
Calling out mistakes and outright lies is crucially important. It is not rude or discourteous. It is necessary.
If people don't like it... well, tough.
My friend, you didn't say they were wrong, and didn't point out why they were wrong. You got hung up on the trees and completely missed the forest. This is absolutely a critical discourse failure indicative of 202x problems in and of itself.
Putting away pedantry and word lawyering, stopping any attempt to trap a person so that their core thesis can be ignored, and actually discussing the core statement (in this case that 100 years isn't so long that we'd forget the details) is indicative of healthy engagement and good faith discussion. That's what we should encourage. As soon as you can put together some statements about the 100 year thesis, you're fine by me.
But for now I'm done reiterating my point and we should put this behind us.
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> On a symbolic day no less.
Meh, the feast day of two saints. Pretty much any day of the year. Today is the feast day for Saints Bertille, Zechariah, and Elizabeth.
People in medieval times had more time off not working than today. Feast days were actual feast days, they often didn't work during them. Feast days were not something written on a calendar that only a few people could consult and say "hmm, oh look today is the feast day of such and such... meh, what's for supper?" :-)
They had to a greater or lesser extent, fairs, games, dances - they were literally festivals. People looked forward to and prepared in advance for feast days. There are at least 2 things that I think are relevant: firstly feast days punctuated and delimited the calendar and people's lives and secondly feast days were very memorable shared whole-community events.
This doesn't necessarily make the story more believable but it can make it more memorable. Think of a story where it says "it happened at Halloween and again at Christmas" and it could just help fix that story in a specific time making it more memorable in our brains.
Sorry, you think early-modern indentured sharecropping subsidence farmers without dishwashers, laundry machines, sewing machines, or industrialized clothing production worked less than 2080 hours a year?
Subsidence farming is a brutally demanding, painful way to scrape a living. Even with modern technology, it can't be overstated the sheer amount of labor it takes to grow enough food just to feed yourself, and that's without owing an obscene portion of your product to your "landlord" (who's also your employer and your local government, and can forbid you freedom of movement and dictate your personal life).
Laundry was an immense amount of labor. Keeping the home intact took labor. Maintaining your clothes took labor.
Look up the the BBC historic farm series if you want an idea of the amount of work it takes to actually run a farm, without any of the extra problems actually living in that period would bring, such as not understanding germ theory and sanitation, unreliable access to clean water, no real medical care, no real birth control, and no defense against a bad season just breaking your back.
https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an... has a ten part series on the topic.
A good observation. Of course medieval people worked harder and died earlier and they had more days off working. The focus of my comment was on time and not energy and specifically about festivals on which people took time not to work and to take part in the festival. Or at the very least took time to notice more than not noticing or said "meh" to :-)
"Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today's" https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
"Historians Explain: Medieval Peasants Took More Leisure Time Than Today’s ‘Wage Slave’ Workers" https://tlio.org.uk/medieval-workers-short-days-long-holiday...
However, Snopes gives the theory a mixed rating: Medieval Peasants Only Worked 150 Days Due to 'Frequent, Mandatory' Holidays? https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/medieval-peasant-only-work... worth a read if you are interested, dear reader, it's thorough.
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Interestingly it seems like some socialists and Anarchists also point to the theory and use it to show that Capitalism has vastly increased work on people. Can certainly see the green anarchism application with a non-exploited rural country with people with more personal and communal freedoms. I have not come across a capitalist historian refutation where the Capitalists and urbanisation lead to less exploitation, but I'd be happy to read one. Ideas promoting labour-saving technology could be adopted by any ideology.
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Discussed at the time (of the article):
The grim truth behind the Pied Piper - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24450760 - Sept 2020 (23 comments)
So what? Like if something was posted years before should it never be posted ever again? We are talking 5 years here, and the information hasn’t become deprecated or outdated
Not at all! As the other commenters have pointed out, no criticism is implied. Reposts are fine after a year or so. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
It's just that readers are often curious to look at past discussions. Sometimes I point that out: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
That makes sense, sorry for my negative interpretation
I really appreciate respectful interactions like this on HN. It's easy to misinterpret things in text!
I do not believe that is dang's point. He often posts comments like these under recurring posts, I assume in hope that the past discussions could also be of interest to the readers.
I see! my bad
People might be interested to see what was said last time.
Its very normal on HN to point to earlier discussions on the same article or subject and is normally intended as help rather than a complaint.
What a guy, to criticise dang himself. :P
HN users aren't shy about doing that, nor should they be.
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In case it isn't clear from the responses, dang is the HN moderator. He regularly groups related stories and references past threads.
I'd always imagined the "pied piper" as being 'pied' as in patched or even checkerboard of black and white. A piebald pony is patches of black or white, for example.
Is it that 'pied' is or was less specific and can mean patches of any colour, or is it that the English name is a bit lost in translation?
It's "Rattenfänger von Hameln" in german, so the literal translation would be "Rat-Catcher of Hamelin".
I do remember him wearing brightly colored patchwork clothing in the stories, but I could not say if that was an integral part of the original fable or just added in retellings to make the character stand out more as a mysterious stranger.
Here is a picture on Wikipedia. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rattenf%C3%A4nger_von_Hameln#/...
I grew up around Hameln and can confirm, that is how he is depicted.
Also a depiction of him from 1592: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rattenf%C3%A4nger_von_Hameln#/...
So it is part of the fable.
Was that kind of garb common back then? Reminds me of Swiss guard uniforms(granted, developed in the early 20th c, but based off 16th century imagery)
Not sure, the costume reminds me of a jester. If I'd take a jab at it, here is the original transcription from Brüder Grimm:
"Im Jahr 1284 ließ sich zu Hameln ein wunderlicher Mann sehen. Er hatte einen Rock von vielfarbigem, bunten Tuch an, weshalben er Bundting soll geheißen haben, und gab sich für einen Rattenfänger aus…"[0][1]
"In the year 1284, a strange man appeared in Hameln. He had a skirt, made from differently colored fabrics, which is why his name was 'bundle(?)', pretending to be a rat catcher…"
[0] https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Seite:Deutsche_Sagen_(Grimm)_... [1] https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Seite:Deutsche_Sagen_(Grimm)_...
Someone needs to work on the wiki etymology.. (not saying it's wrong, just that there seems to be a story missing there that connects 1 & 2 :)
It would not surprise me. Clothing took a lot of labor to make. A large part of the labor was women's labor which history doesn't record much of. When you are doing that much effort it isn't that much more to die in bright colors, and people like colorful clothing (some like the Amish make non-color part of their identity of course, but they like colors they are just rejecting them anyway because they think that helps them get to heaven). Colors were limited to what they could make so probably not as bright as modern, but not dark in general.
> A large part of the labor was women's labor which history doesn't record much of
Women spent much of their lives making textiles. It likely wasn't recorded much because it was so ubiquitous.
For example, my family photographs when I was growing up were nearly all about documenting unusual events, like birthdays, holidays, and vacations. The humdrum ordinary things were not photographed. For example, there was only two photos with the family car incidentally in the frame. No photographs of the neighborhood. One photo of the school I attended. No pictures of my dad at work. No pictures of my mom cleaning the house. And so on.
It gives a fairly skewed vision of life then.
That too, but we know more about men's work that was just as ubiquitous. Though the vast majority of history is about those in charge - the 0.0001%.
> the 0.0001%
The ones who can read and write expect to be paid, and the wealthy and powerful will commission them to write about what interests the wealthy and powerful - i.e. themselves.
This state of affairs persisted until the advent of the printing press, which made for a mass market of ordinary people.
Bright colors fade more noticeably over time, so bright clothing was a good indication of new, regularly replaced clothing. The dyes themselves could also be phenomenally expensive. The scarlet red of Catholic cardinals was historically made from Kermes, an especially lightfast dye. Kermes was in turn a cheaper alternative to the Tyrian Purple worn previously.
Daily clothing would have been more pastel than the saturated colors we associate with "colorful" today.
"Pied" in clothing now means "patchwork of colors". "Parti-colored" would be more historically accurate.
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The Wikipedia article has actual information instead of the storytelling that the BBC article is insisting on
> Udolph favours the hypothesis that the Hamelin youths wound up in what is now Poland.[40] Genealogist Dick Eastman cited Udolph's research on Hamelin surnames that have shown up in Polish phonebooks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pied_Piper_of_Hamelin
Also, every town in Southern Germany looks like that. Hamelin is nothing special in that respect
Quote from the article that you claim doesn't mention it:
> In fact, Udolph found that the family names common in Hamelin at the time show up with surprising frequency in the areas of Uckermark and Prignitz, near Berlin, that he locates as the centre of the migration.
Maybe try reading the whole article before condemning it, instead of just the first couple of paragraphs.
Is Berlin in Poland ?
The Wikipedia article has actual information instead of the storytelling that the BBC article is insisting on
Strange thing to note (and wrong), given they have completely different purposes and the BBC article conveys "actual information" as well just in a less clinical way.
Weird, I was reading the Wikipedia article about that a few days ago and thought of posting that here!
That whatsit phenomenon strikes again!
I wonder if there was or will be a typical modern twisty-take movie about this
Baader-Meinhof.
Hah, macabre and word play. I see you my German brethren.
He is referring to the Baader-Meinhof-Komplex book, that pretty much documents the RAF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction
Um, no, he isn't. He is referring to the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.
TIL that the term Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is based upon this nugget:
> The name "Baader–Meinhof phenomenon" was coined in 1994 by Terry Mullen in a letter to the St. Paul Pioneer Press.[1] The letter describes how, after mentioning the name of the German militant group Baader–Meinhof once, he kept noticing it.
Thanks!
"Hameln" is in northern Germany, don't know where the I comes from in the English transliteration.
There are many theories, one of them is the Children's Crusade[0], diseases, pagan sects, but yes, the leading one is the "Ostsiedlung".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Crusade [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostsiedlung
Funnily enough, the district (Landkreis) name in English keeps the original spelling: Hameln-Pyrmont.
> don't know where the i [in Hamelin] comes from in the English transliteration
Could just be that it’s a very inconvenient consonant cluster (and and a speaker of modern English will to some degree turn it into a [lən] or [lɪn], however you spell it).
I’m an English speaker and when I saw it written “Hameln” I thought it was a typo.
It comes from the same place as the i in Munich.
Oh, and my favorite theory:
"Eine andere, weniger stark vertretene Theorie besagt, dass die Hamelner Kinder einem heidnischen Sektenführer aufgesessen sein könnten, der diese zu einem religiösen Ritus in die Wälder bei Coppenbrügge geführt hat, wo sie heidnische Tänze aufführten. Dabei habe es einen Bergrutsch oder Erdfall gegeben, wodurch die meisten umgekommen seien. Noch heute lässt sich dort eine große Kuhle finden, die durch ein solches Ereignis entstanden sein könnte." > https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rattenf%C3%A4nger_von_Hameln#H...
I'll roughly translate it:
"Another, less thought after theory says, the children of Hameln got seduced by a pagan cult leader. He lead the children to the forest of Coppenbrügge for a religious ritual, where they performed pagan dances. This caused an landslide, causing most of them to die. There is, to this day, still a large pit, that could have been caused by such an event."
Edit: Expanded translation
Well, I'm convinced! What else could have caused a pit, but pagan dancing?
The historical precursor of a mosh pit.
I go to many metal and other shows a year. A 3-day outdoor festival in the woods with hundreds of tripping manchildren moshing in the rain resulted in a very muddy shallow depression, not a landslide. I have brief cameo in the video below. Want to see a hundred hippies sitting in the mud pretending to row ancient Roman galley?
Hamelin is located in Lower Saxony, not in the southern states.
And there, many cities look like that, too.
It's all about the angle. I am sure that just outside of the camera frame, there's a mobile phone shop, a Burger King or MacDonald's, and other trivially universal city commerce. :-) Let's see...
https://maps.app.goo.gl/hbRSXaDvfKNFmQtT6
No, but there's Rossmann, Kik, Döner, and Woolworth's.
The point I was addressing from the parent comment was the implication that Hamelin is located in southern Germany. It could be rewritten to, as you pointed out:
> Also, every town in Germany looks like that.
Yes, I know. I was trying to stress exactly that.
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wikipedia does not come out and say "this happened" or "the folktale was (or "must be") based on a historical event". it seems to suggest that the folktale is all the history we have, and everything else is a retcon
It makes you wonder how many modern facts are just a popularized copy of a copy of a copy, mangled beyond all realness.
Please leave AI out of this.
> Ultimately, then, the Piper didn’t just fracture a community. He also, in the end, brought a larger one together.
A propaganda phrase that ruins the end of the article.
Jared gentle deadpan from "Silicon Valley":
> Well, I looked it up. It's about a predatory flautist who murders children in a cave.
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"And, in fact, one 13th Century outbreak – a literal form of dance fever – occurred south of Hamelin, in the town of Erfurt, where a group of youths were documented as wildly gyrating as they travelled out of town, ending up 20km away in a neighbouring town. Some of the children, one chronicle suggests, expired shortly thereafter, having flat-out danced themselves to death, and those who survived were left with chronic tremors. Perhaps, some theorise, Hamelin witnessed a similar plague, dancing to the figurative tune of the Piper."
Early discovery of MDMA.
Could have been ergot fungus in the wheat
There was an actual pied piper, there were 130 actual children and they really did went missing on June 26, 1284. Landslide or sinkhole in one of the koppen (hills) around Hamelin. The remains of all of those people are probably still there, buried.
It is a literal account of a real life tragedy.
> Perhaps the Piper, emblematic of a pagan shaman, playing his flute, was leading the youth of Hamelin to their midsummer festivities when the local Christian faction, hoping to cement conversion of the region, waylaid and massacred the group.
This passage doesn't make much sense to me, given that Saxony had been converted around 800 CE. What could "local Christian faction" even mean when everyone was (nominally) Christian?
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The OctoPipers of PiperNet - Silicon Valley
Initially read the headline and thinking it would be about a certain TV show about Silicon Valley. Not disappointed
I recently got into the show "Silicon Valley" after never making it past season 1. Really loving it..... and thought this was the Pied Piper company too.
Can we talk about the dance pandemic of 1518?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_plague_of_1518
Is this when they invented the Harlem Shake?
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Their CTO is a Satanist.
I too read the title and thought it would be about the show. It's not, unfortunately.
Nice chain Dinesh
not height per se, but d2f
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> But most people recognise him for what he is, the Pied Piper incarnate
I hope this AI generated
2020 so unlikely
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