The Pied Piper of Hamelin

The Pied Piper of Hamelin was an alias used by Puck, "once upon a time". ("Acquisitions")

Real-World Background

According to legend, the Pied Piper came to the German town of Hamelin when it was overrun by rats, and offered to deal with the rats, in return for a fee. After the townspeople agreed, he used a magic pipe to lead the rats to the nearby river Weser, where they drowned. The townspeople refused to pay him afterwards, however; the Piper retaliated by using his magic pipe to lead all the children out of Hamelin and into a cave in the side of a nearby hill called Koppelberg, never to be seen again (except for a lame boy who failed to reach the entrance to the cave before it closed).

The tale goes back to the late Middle Ages. The earliest surviving version (written in 1384) only says that the Piper lured the children away (providing a specific date, June 26, 1284, and stating that the children numbered 130); the rats and the townspeople cheating the Pied Piper of his pay were added later, during the sixteenth century. (The lame boy was added still later, in the seventeenth century.) Some historians have speculated that the legend was based on a migration of young people from Hamelin to other parts of Germany, apparently recruited for colonization. The most familiar version of the story is Robert Browning's poem "The Pied Piper of Hamelin".