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- Hacker News
- The OctoPipers of PiperNet - Silicon Valleyby DonHopkins
- There was an actual pied piper, there were 130 actual children and they really did went missing on June 26, 1284. Landslide or sinkhole in one of the koppen (hills) around Hamelin. The remains of all of those people are probably still there, buried.
It is a literal account of a real life tragedy.
by 20251105 - "And, in fact, one 13th Century outbreak – a literal form of dance fever – occurred south of Hamelin, in the town of Erfurt, where a group of youths were documented as wildly gyrating as they travelled out of town, ending up 20km away in a neighbouring town. Some of the children, one chronicle suggests, expired shortly thereafter, having flat-out danced themselves to death, and those who survived were left with chronic tremors. Perhaps, some theorise, Hamelin witnessed a similar plague, dancing to the figurative tune of the Piper."
Early discovery of MDMA.
by mmaunder - Could have been ergot fungus in the wheat
- > Ultimately, then, the Piper didn’t just fracture a community. He also, in the end, brought a larger one together.
A propaganda phrase that ruins the end of the article.
by hulitu - > Perhaps the Piper, emblematic of a pagan shaman, playing his flute, was leading the youth of Hamelin to their midsummer festivities when the local Christian faction, hoping to cement conversion of the region, waylaid and massacred the group.
This passage doesn't make much sense to me, given that Saxony had been converted around 800 CE. What could "local Christian faction" even mean when everyone was (nominally) Christian?
by senderista - Jared gentle deadpan from "Silicon Valley":
> Well, I looked it up. It's about a predatory flautist who murders children in a cave.
by neilv - It makes you wonder how many modern facts are just a popularized copy of a copy of a copy, mangled beyond all realness.by analog8374
- Please leave AI out of this.by Ylpertnodi
- 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
by tetris11 - wikipedia does not come out and say "this happened" or "the folktale was (or "must be") based on a historical event". it seems to suggest that the folktale is all the history we have, and everything else is a retconby fsckboy
- Hamelin is located in Lower Saxony, not in the southern states.by flobosg
- "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
by b2ccb2 - Weird, I was reading the Wikipedia article about that a few days ago and thought of posting that here!
That whatsit phenomenon strikes again!
I wonder if there was or will be a typical modern twisty-take movie about this
by Razengan - 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.
by mellosouls - Quote from the article that you claim doesn't mention it:
> 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.
by IAmBroom - 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?
by willvarfar - "Pied" in clothing now means "patchwork of colors". "Parti-colored" would be more historically accurate.by IAmBroom
- 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.
by Grumbledour - 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)
by dang - 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 outdatedby iammjm
- 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.
- > On a symbolic day no less.
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.
by IAmBroom - 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.by cubefox
- I mean looking at the attested record, interpreting it, weighing evidence and motive and audience in this way, that's what historians do that is the practice of the discipline of history.
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.
by giraffe_lady - As the involvement of a magic flute is unlikely in the extreme, this devolves to kidnapping.
As to why, the article asserts the scenarios of forced migration for settling new areas, or perhaps a "childrens' crusade" to the war in the Middle East.
by chasil - 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.by jvanderbot