The people of present-day Hamelin are quite proud of their claim to fame, the Pied Piper, who, according to legend rid the village of rats and then, after having his payment denied, led away the city’s children.¹ They hold a festival every year, which includes a reenactment of the rat-banishing, children-losing event. Monuments to the Piper and children stand all throughout the city, a fountain has a Pied Piper motif, and the town clock is even equipped with carved figurines of the Piper leading the rats out of town.² Tourism brings money into the city and the legend of the Pied Piper brings the tourists.

Hamelin has grown considerably since the thirteenth century and now embraces its past mistake, and so the tale of the Pied Piper has evolved as well. The brief notation in a manuscript from the mid-fifteenth century stating simply that children were led out of Hamelin on 26 June 1284, has developed into many different stories, each account complete with different motives and lessons to be learned.³ The European versions of the legend—recorded by Englishmen Richard Rowlands, Robert Burton, and Robert Browning, Frenchman Charles Marelles, and the German Grimm Brothers—said as much about their contemporary fears and situations as the “actual” events in the original tale.

¹ In German, the town is spelled “Hameln,” but in English, it is “Hamelin.”
² City of Hameln, “Pied Piper,” available from;
www.hameln.com/tourism/piedpiper/index.htm; Internet; accessed on 11 December 2004.
³ Werner Wunderlich, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin in History and Literature,” Michigan Germanic Studies, 19 (1993), 4.

This is a section of my History thesis, © Susan C. Campriello Kenyon College 2005. Interested? Click here for more.