Of all the tales told by men throughout the history, there are some that are special or unique. The story we will focus on today is one of those. It is special not only because of its scale or extraordinary happenings described, but it is comparable to other in that regard. Sometime a fable is special because of one tiny detail that anchors it well outside the realm of fantasy and legends and places it much closer to our world. This detail is a simple number, namely 1284. The year when, according to the legend, one hundred and thirty children have been taken away from Hemlin by a Ratcatcher known as Pied Piper.

The story we know today as Pied Piper of Hemlin is not the original story by this name. It is more of a fusion of stories of The Ratcatcher, as described for example by the Grimm Brothers, and the original tale of the children's disappearance. Those stories were separate up to until the XVI century, when they merged. The original version of a tale did not have any mention of rats, which are an essential element of the story we know today. It described only the Pied Piper starting to play magical tones, and those tones made all children follow him. Then all of them have disappeared into the mountain. 

The currently most known version of this story also has been written down by Grimm Brothers, but in a slightly different variant. It has all the elements we expect to find in it, but it has much more moralising tone, showing the great grievance and impact of this event on the townfolk. It did even say that it was so important for people of the town that they started counting years from this event. As we know, they did not do this, but there are mentions like:

It is a hundred years since our children left.

This is the note from the official records of the town of Hamelin, dated to the year 1384. Other sources, from XV century, add more details, such as the exact date, June 26th 1284, and a count of children that disappeared, to this mysterious event. Apparently the event itself was depicted on a stained glass window in the town’s church, but it did not survive to this day.

Yet what exactly was this event that was so horrible that people still found it worth noting in official documents after a whole century after? Nobody knows. The simplest and most obvious explanation would be some plague that killed children. It was the time when town population decimated by plagues were not unusual. And there are mass graves found in the area containing mostly children corpses dated for the period. However, whenever the city was struck by a plague, there were always multiple mentions about it in official records in an infected city and probably there should be warnings about the disease in its general area. I cannot find any such information about Hemlin.

Other hypothesis is slightly more geopolitical. 1284 was the time of German colonisation towards the eastern lands.  It was the time whole region from Baltic Sea to the Transylvania has been weakened and recuperating after multiple lost wars and conquests. At those times there was a profession called locator. It was a person who recruited colonists to the newly available lands and offered them great rewards. Maybe the citizens of Hamelin have sold their children to be send to a faraway land in hope for a better future for them. It is possible that then they felt so ashamed that they have created this tale to ease their conciousness or just present a reason why children are gone. Those were hard times, and people made hard, sometimes unimaginable, choices.

Other explanation is much more unusual. It says that perhaps they have started to dance and could not stop. This is a real social phenomenon called choreomania, the dancing plague.  When such plague occurred, many people started dancing or moving uncontrollably for hours or even days until it stopped or they passed out or died from exhaustion. There is no modern explanation for such events, but some hypothesis say it can be explained by mass hysteria or psychic epidemic, especially that most of such plagues happened in the times of stress and poverty.

We will probably never know what happened in Hamelin in 1284, but whatever it was, it must have been a terrible event. Could there be something more horrible for a parent than loosing a child or even worse, loosing probably all the children in a town. Perhaps that is the reason this story is still vivid and live with details after all this time. Maybe in some way the citizens of Hamelin have memorialised their children with it because that was the only thing they could do to honour them.

Sincerely,
— Wiktor

Title image is a courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and can be found here

• european
• fairytale
• folklore
• history
• magic
• mythical
• punishment
• supernatural
• wizard