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.
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.
This is true, but those surviving accounts quote or paraphrase contemporaneous accounts from his generals like Ptolemy and others that have since been lost.
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.
> 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
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.
> Also, every town in Germany looks like that.
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
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, 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."
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.
That whatsit phenomenon strikes again!
I wonder if there was or will be a typical modern twisty-take movie about this
He is referring to the Baader-Meinhof-Komplex book, that pretty much documents the RAF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction
> 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 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?
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.
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.
The grim truth behind the Pied Piper - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24450760 - Sept 2020 (23 comments)
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....
I hope this AI generated
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