The Pied Piper

Nestled in the enchanted forests of Lower Saxony is the town of Hamelin. The town has kept a ledger, a log of events in the town, for centuries. If you go all the way back to the beginning of this record, you'll find an entry from 1384, as heartbreaking as it is enigmatic:

"It has been one hundred years since our children vanished."

So begins the true story of the Pied Piper. The historical record gives nothing more.

The Pied Piper Acrylic by Kate Lollio 

Like the plagues in the Holy Scriptures, the horde of rats fell upon Hamelin. This was no simple nuisance, it was a catastrophe. The food supply was threatened, and death and disease always seemed to follow the vermin horde.  Try as they may, the town's officials could not solve the problem, until a mysterious stranger appeared offering a solution...for a price.

One day, a colorfully clothed piper arrived in Hamelin and offered to rid the town of rats for a hefty sum of gold. Desperate, the officials agreed to pay. The piper played as he marched through the streets of the town. Entranced by his music, the horde of rats followed the piper out of town and into the countryside, to the river Weser where they were drowned.

Finally free of the rats, however, the town officials went back on their word, and refused to pay. Angry and bitter, the piper left Hamelin, vowing to return to have his revenge on the townspeople for their treachery.

Woe unto those who forsake the oaths to which they are foresworn.

"In the year 1284 on the feast day of St. John and St. Paul, the 26th of June, 130 children born in Hamelin were led away by a piper clothed in many colors, to their Calvary hill where they were lost." - Luneberg Manuscript, 1440

So, while the people of Hamelin feasted during the Saints day, the piper again marched through the town. This time, it was the children entranced by his melodies. The piper led 130 children through the streets, and out into the countryside, never to be seen again. Of all the children of Hamelin, only three remained. The first child, crippled, could not follow. The second child, deaf, could not hear the piper's music. The third child, blind, could not see where the rest were going.

The clock tower, one of many monuments in the city depicting the legend.

This is my version of the story, immortalized in western tradition, and told by the Brothers Grimm in their 19th-century collection of fairy tales. They were elaborating on an actual event that had occurred centuries earlier, already obscured by hundreds of years of oral tradition.

I walked the streets of Hamelin during my time living in Germany. It was amazing to stand in a fairy tale town, but what really fascinated me was that the story of the Pied Piper had an actual root in reality, a place and time in history you could put your finger on. The details of the event, however, are almost nonexistent. What remains is a skeleton, the framework of a story which the mind rushes to fill with detail. I needed to know more, and there was no more to be found, so my imagination spun with possibilities. I realized that this was the process that created myths and legends.

A tragedy befell the town of Hamelin, an event so traumatizing that it still grips our collective consciousness almost a thousand years later, this we know for certain. In a world filled with massacres and genocide, this story is intimate, one town and it's calamity. The story taps one of our most primal fears, the loss of our kids. It endures, ironically, as a fairy tale we tell our children when we tuck them in safely at night.

The importance of myths and legends to a culture can't be underestimated, a true storyteller understands this. The human mind longs to find meaning in even the most random event, and this process helps in the formation of our philosophies and worldview. Has the modern digital age replaced oral tradition, and if so, can we still find meaning in the events unfolding around us? With these questions in mind, perhaps the simple bedtime story becomes far more important than we ever imagined.

A story without an allegory is a waste of breath.