Sir Thomas More by Hals Holbein (Accessed via Wikipedia ) During lockdown, we had Time. Remember that? I was in my probationary year of teaching: almost certainly among the most exhausting years for any profession. All my time had been taken up with school work, and I regularly stayed at school until after 6pm, having arrived there at eight in the morning. Now, children, this is not sustainable and, very soon, I decided I didn’t like working where I was. Then I realised that I didn’t like teaching at all. But, in fact, neither was particularly true: I just needed to be true to myself and to say no, which would give me the ability to manage my work/life balance in a more appropriate way. What does this have to do with historical fiction, I hear you say? Well, during March 2020, we went into lockdown and suddenly I went from working ten-hour-days to ten-hour-weeks. I met up with my class on Google Meet, I put work up for them on a meticulously designed Google Classroom, but I just h...
#HistFicThursdays - The Pied Piper of Hamelin (If we've promised them aught, let us keep our promise) - For Revenge or Revenue?
For me, there is no one in history more fascinating than the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Poised between the historical and the mythological, his legend is one which has inspired multiple works of art and studies of science. None have given a conclusive answer to who he was or what happened to the children he stole. The only certainty is that Hamelin town did indeed suffer a lost generation at the end of the 13th Century.
This sort of figure is a dream come true for a historical writer, especially one who likes to teeter on the edge of mythology. I couldn't let a chance like this pass me by. In fact, the events at Hamelin are also destined to be interwoven in another book I'm in the process of writing - whether that ever gets finished or not remains to be seen!
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So what are the facts?
Well, two things of note happened in what is now northern Germany in the year 1284: a fire in the city of Hamburg which destroyed all but one house in the area, and the mysterious disappearance of 130 children from the town of Hamelin. Opinion is divided on the idntity and purpose of the instigator of either thing, and I wanted to tie the two of them together, so Stephan sprang to life (you can read the short story here).
Historically speaking, the pied piper might not have been pied at all. The earliest accounts of him don't have him in different colours as his title might suggest, but dressed in green finery. Was this then a representation of a natural force which swept away the youth of the town? Could it have been the threat of the forest, so engrained in the primeval mindset of our ancestors? Some have excused the legend as an outbreak of St Vitus' Dance (now largely identified as Sydenham's cholera), others reason it as a possible recruiting officer, looking for a young and able workforce to take east. DNA evidence has suggested that there is a group of people in an area in eastern Europe which show strong links with families from the Lower Saxony town, suggesting that whoever left Hamelin might have lived on in a new location. Others have speculated another attempt at the disasterous Children's Crusade.
But one thing which continues to stand out is that there is a caution to this tale. The pied piper as we know him today, through the works of Goethe, the Grimm Brothers, and Browning, arrived in Hamelin as a helper. Or is it possible that his story became lost in a mix of other tales, and that well-intentioned fablers chose to use the mass kidnap as a warning to honour any promise which is made. The addition of rats to the story appears to have happened very early on, suggesting the link with the plague - or a host of other illnesses - might have been the cause.
Interestingly, the stragglers have never changed. The disabled child who tried to follow, and the deaf child who could not hear the playful tune of the piper, were both left behind. This suggests that, whoever the pied piper was, he was only interested in taking those without disabilities. He clearly was not solely interested in wiping out an entire generation.
The overwhelming truth is that we will never know the ins and outs of his story, nor who he really was. And the most appealing thing about him is precisely that! Whatever the truth, the behaviour of the adults in the town at that time led only to their grief. Nothing is recorded of who that mysterious figure was or who called him there - beyond the heartbreak of what was to follow. To me, this hints that, through intent or neglect, they held themselves responsible - at least in part.
Today, the road out of Hamelin, Bungelosenstrasse, remains quiet and calm. Dancing is forbidden, as is music. This was the final place where all those children were seen, following their new leader to their new life. The weight of the guilt and the collective memory, now distorted by centuries of folk tales and mythologies, is ever-present in the town of Hamelin.
The joy of writing historical fiction is that these clues to true events are our only guidelines. The rest can be built into whatever we want it to be. I'm adding my own version of Hamelin events to the ever-growing and ever-evolving canon, but I love that the truth of that summer day in 1284 - though it is entire and honest - will never be known.
What do you think happened?
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