The grim truth behind the Pied Piper (2020)
34 comments
·November 5, 2025tetris11
mellosouls
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.
b2ccb2
"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
mananaysiempre
> 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).
flobosg
Funnily enough, the district (Landkreis) name in English keeps the original spelling: Hameln-Pyrmont.
Razengan
Weird, I was read the Wikipedia article about that few days ago and thought of posting that here!
That whatsit phenomenon strikes again!
flobosg
Hamelin is located in Lower Saxony, not in the southern states.
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dang
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)
iammjm
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 We are talking 5 years here, and the information hasn’t become deprecated or outdated
ishouldbework
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.
mellosouls
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.
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CrazyStat
People might be interested to see what was said last time.
throw23748923
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.
jvanderbot
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.
cubefox
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.
willvarfar
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?
Grumbledour
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.
b2ccb2
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.
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nathias
> But most people recognise him for what he is, the Pied Piper incarnate
I hope this AI generated
mellosouls
2020 so unlikely
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DonHopkins
The OctoPipers of PiperNet - Silicon Valley
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