My latest *Plato's Nightmare" post is now up:

[capri0mni]

Pied Piper of Hamelin: The Children Left Behind.

I think my conclusion is the soap-boxiest (soapiest-boxed?) I've written yet. But I'm feeling a good bit RAWR!!

Comments

[smw]

Ooh, glad to see you comment on the Pied Piper story. The variation I know best (the one I believe?) involves terrible things happening to the children – drowning is how I would tell it. I could twist this around into allegory so fast that it would twang like a rubber band, but I'll leave be in favor of intellectual analysis.

[capri0mni]

That link to the Grimm Bros. version I put in my post also included stories with the same motif (of rat-catchers leading vermin away with music, and, when not paid, leading away the children) originating in countries as wide spread as China and Syria, as well as Germany.

So I have to wonder if there's any historical basis to the story at all, despite the fact that it's a recorded part of history is also a recurring motif...

One historical interpretation had the children (who were survivors of Sweden's Thirty-Years War), being lured away by a militia recruiter (with promises that he could provide a better life than if they stayed in their rubble-reduced home city), taken into battle and all killed. Another story ended with the grown-ups finally learning that the piper, in order to get the money he thought he deserved, lured the children onto a sailing ship, sailed to Constantinople, and sold every last one of them on the auction block, into slavery.

One version that's simmering away in my brain (since I'm coming at this from a "Disability is Real, and People try to wrap their minds around it" filter) is that it's a fable, perhaps, of a meningitis epidemic, which kills most victims, but can leave survivors with a range of permanent disability: Blindness, Deafness or Paralysis, depending on which part of the brain was hit worst...

or... it could just be a narrative where people try to work out their feelings of anxiety about strangers, and mind-control...

[megaptera]

I don't think I ever read the versions with the horror ending. But that makes more sense to me, it can't be a happy ending when all the children are led away forever by some strange man.

This is like how in Sunday school they ended the story of Balaam's ass with a lesson about being kind to animals. That's not really what it was about.

[capri0mni]

This.

Browning's version kind of foreshadows the horror ending, since I betcha none of the rats whom he led into the river to drown had visions of drowning when they followed him.

By having the end of the story being told by the lame boy who stayed behind, though, he leaves us with the happy vision of what was promised, without us ever having to contemplate if that promise was a truth or not...