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- Hacker News
- > 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
- 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 - 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 - 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 - 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.