The Grim Truth Behind the Pied Piper (2020)

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.

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.

This is true, but those surviving accounts quote or paraphrase contemporaneous accounts from his generals like Ptolemy and others that have since been lost.

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.

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.

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).

"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

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.

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....