There are cities whose world fame has been brought by legends and fairy tales. Our Murom, for example, is known for the fact that the hero Ilya was born near him, the German city of Bremen is famous for the fairy tale of the brothers Grimm, and Hamelnu (Prussia) was infamous for the legend of the Pied Piper. Who is he - a villain, a benefactor or a slandered deraiser of the Middle Ages?
In the summer of 1284, in the glorious city of Hameln, exhausted from the invasion of rats, a stranger in an outlandish motley outfit appeared, promising to save the inhabitants from misfortune for a fee. Hope dawned upon the townspeople, and they promised to pay Pied Piper even more than he asked. The mysterious stranger began to play the pipe, attracted by its sounds, the rats crawled out of their holes and followed the musician to the Weser River, rushed into the water and drowned. The city was saved. However, the greedy townspeople refused to pay the stranger not only the promised, but also the amount he requested. “You will bitterly regret that you broke your promise,” the Pied Piper promised before leaving the city.
And soon in Hameln the melody of the flute sounded again.
This is how the ending of this story is presented in the book by Yobus Finzelius “Miraculous Signs. True descriptions of extraordinary and miraculous events , written in 1556:
"It is necessary to report a completely extraordinary incident that took place in the town of Hameln, in the diocese of Mindener, in the Lord's year 1284, on the day of Saints Peter and Paul. A certain fellow of about 30, well dressed so that those who saw him admired him, crossed the bridge over the Weser and entered the city gates. He had a strange-looking silver pipe and began to whistle all over the city. And all the children, about 130 in number, having heard that tune, followed him out of the city, left and disappeared, so that no one could later find out if at least one of them had survived."
During the holidays in Hameln, local theater actors must perform the play "Pied Piper of Hamelin" in front of the audience
Different versions of the ending
In the classic version of the legend, the children, spellbound by the rock music, ran out of their homes and followed the Pied Piper to a mountain near Hamelin. In the depths of it, they have sunk. According to another version, the Pied Piper took the children to Weser, where they drowned one after another - a terrible picture!
According to the children's version, adapted, like many other old horror films, sometimes striking even adults with their cruelty, everything ends well. The musician gets paid in full for his work, and the children return home.
There is another version of the legend: the Pied Piper is a fiend of hell, he takes children up the hill, but his strength is not enough to destroy innocent creatures, and he disappears without a trace. And the children, wandering in the bowels of the mountain, go out into a certain wild place, where the smallest are fed with their milk deer and wild goats, and those that are older begin to build a happy city. With God's help, they manage to build it, and they live in it, not knowing sorrow and grief, but no one else has a way to this city.
And finally, the latest version of the legend. The rat-catcher, passing through the mountain, takes the children to a wonderful country, where milk rivers flow between the banks of milk and they forget their ungrateful and cruel parents.
Isn't it a lot of endings for a generally simple story?
Promotional video:
Medieval postcard.
Ground for a legend
Since cats, as "demonic offspring", were exterminated by Christians in the Middle Ages throughout Europe, there was no one to fight with rats, and their invasions became truly destructive. Mention of the harm caused by them is often found in legends and chronicles. The Basel Annals, for example, note in 1271: "Rats destroy grain, severe famine." Hunger was not the only problem with rats, however. They not only destroyed and spoiled grain supplies, but also spread the plague across the Christian countries, from which almost half of the population of Europe died. It was then that the profession of the rat catcher arose.
As for Hamelin, after 1300 the figure of the Pied Piper was depicted on the church stained-glass window, and later on one of the beams of the old town hall an inscription appeared: “In the year 1284, on the day of Saints Peter and Paul on June 26, the Motley Pied Piper lured 130 children to Mount Koppen in the vicinity of Hamelin, where they disappeared. " Around 1375, the description of the "exodus of children" was included in the chronicle of the city, and the street along which the children left Hameln is still called Silent and it is forbidden to play musical instruments on it.
Inventor of the psychotronic flute
There is only one hypothesis about how the Pied Piper managed to rid Hamelin of rats with the help of a pipe - besides the one where he is interpreted as a messenger of Satan. The brightly dressed, cheerful rat-catcher, who assured him that he would cope with the rats with the help of a pipe, could not only attract the burgomaster's attention, but also fulfill his promise thanks to the special design of his musical instrument. After all, the sounds of a pipe are especially impressive for small animals. Recently, they have learned to scare away rats with the help of emitters of sound waves of a certain frequency, so why not a certain nugget create a "flute", the sounds of which made the animals follow them?
And if he managed to influence the rats, then could he not have lured the children out of the city in the same way?
Fact-based versions
There are many hypotheses about how the Pied Piper lured the children out of Hamelin, based on the fact that two real, unrelated facts - ridding the city of rats and the disappearance of children - merged in someone's rich imagination and gave rise to this amazing legend.
Traditionally, three versions were named: the capture of prisoners by the invaders of the city, an epidemic, a children's crusade. However, Hameln was a wealthy city, and always bought off the attackers. The first large-scale epidemic - the bubonic plague, or black death, came to these parts a hundred years after the described event. The children's crusade, by contrast, passed through Germany seventy years earlier.
Another version: there was a cave on Mount Koppen, in which the pagans in ancient times made sacrifices to their gods, and the Gamelnians called it "devil's cuisine." Could not a cunning piper take the children to pagan altars, where they took part in some kind of magic ritual? The participants in the action committed a mortal sin, they died for the faith and the church, and the death of the Christian soul was more terrible than bodily death.
Another version boils down to the fact that in 1284 a certain recruiter, passing through Hameln, persuaded young townspeople to follow him for resettlement to another place. Crossing the mountains, all these people ended up on the territory of modern Romania and settled there. However, it is enough to look at the map to see how far Hameln is from Transylvania, and to understand that this is not the best place to recruit artisans.
There are other versions, for example, of the famous German researcher Waltraut Wöller, who put forward in the 1980s the hypothesis of the death of children in a swampy basin surrounded by gloomy rocks during the summer solstice, but they all have one or another flaw. And the solution to the mystery once again escapes - the dates, distances do not agree, the actions of people look psychologically unconvincing …
The scent of mystery remains
Ballads are composed about the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the legend about him inspired the creation of brilliant works by Goethe and Heine, Browning, Selma La Gerleuf, Marina Tsvetaeva and Alexander Green. The image of the Pied Piper continues to be used in their work by modern poets, writers and directors, each of whom interprets it in his own way. And the secret still remains, although it sometimes seems that at least part of it has already been revealed. And the image of the Pied Piper - terrible and captivating - still excites the minds, excites the imagination and forces us to put forward more and more new hypotheses about what happened that distant summer of 1284 in the glorious city of Hameln.
Gleb CHERNOV
