Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm editor Candice Gibson, joined by staff writer Jane McGrath. Hey there, Hey Jane. I have a question for you. What was your favorite fairy tale growing up? Growing up? I think it had to be Cinderella. Nice choice. Yeah, what about you, snow whites. It's a good choice. I like that definitely. I like I like the Disney baby with her little bobbed dark hair cut. I think she was the only Disney princess that I can think of who had short hair. That was interesting. I never thought about that. I love us Cinderella, like I guess because of the whole magical enchanted mice and everything, which I thought was hilarious when they didn't uh and enchanted If you saw that with the real mice coming in and trying to clean the apartment, Oh yeah, well you know, rodents are really no laughing matter, as we will soon see. But first, a little background on fairy tales. As most of you probably know, fairy tales weren't always as light and fluffy and bedtime story ish as they are today. They started out with the Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, and they were pretty dark. And there's a very specific reason for that, and that's that back when Jacob and Wilhelm were around UM and the eighteen hundreds, they were trying to do more of a historical and cultural thing rather than a literary movement. When they recorded Germany's folklore. This was not an initiative that they came up with on their own. They had a friend who was compiling a lot of um local Germanic tales, and they decided that they would be sort of these cultural anthropologists and go out and collect their own stories too. But their friend was moving a little bit too slowly for their taste. So by eighteen twelve they published a volume on their own under the name Brothers Grim and it was called Children's and Household Tales. This was really popular, right it was. It was hugely popular, and at first the stories weren't really geared toward children. It was again, like I said, more of a matter of historical relevance and and writing down German folklore. But they toned it down once they saw how popular it was with children, and the reason that they were trying to be so authentic in their recording of these tales is that Napoleon was sweeping throughout Europe at this time, and they really thought that Germany would lose its identity if it wasn't recorded. And so if you look at these tales that the Grimm brothers wrote down, they have very pressing historical and cultural significance. And we're going to study one in particular and just a minute, but just to go ahead and finish out the Grim brothers story. Um, As the Napoleonic invasions came throughout Germany and throughout Europe, their professions changed a little bit too. I think that they took out a stable law school and decided that wasn't going to work out. So Jacob actually became a diplomat for a while and Wilhelm became a secretary to a librarian. And around this time they put out the second volume. Next came small Edition, which was a collection of the fairy tales that their brother Ludwig illustrated. But if you think that the Grim brothers were all fairy tales, you're mistaken, because they were philologists too, And if you aren't up too sweet on philology, essentially, it's uh, it's linguistics really and it puts a lot of emphasis on a culture's history and identity and how speech patterns really illuminate that. So they spend some time in their retirement actually compiling a German dictionary, and Jacob is credited for a pretty significant linguistic contribution called Grimm's Law. And I'm no linguist or expert, but as far as I can understand it, essentially what Grimm's Law boils down to with the alteration of of sounds in particular words, as the Germanic language became more and more disparate from other European languages. And I don't have a really good example for you guys, but you can all google Grimm's law and you can see lots of illustrated examples of how it works. And I think there's even one that I found online that shares how it works within the context of a grim Brother's fairy tale. And speaking of fairy tales, that is what we are going to talk about today, and the very very scary possibility that one of the most frightening Grimm Brothers fairy tales might actually be true. That's right, and we're talking about the Pied piper of Hamelin, and this was a really popular story as soon as it came out, like Candice was talking about and one famous poet, Robert Brownie even even did a really popular English version of the story. But to go back to the original Grimm story, you ready for story time, I am okay, I've got my cookies and lactaste free milk. Well, don't lay down in bed because this is going to freak you out so you can't sleep afterwards. So this story is set in the German town of Hamlin. This is a real place and it exists to this day. It starts back in twelve eighty four. So back then, the according to the story, the whole town was suffering from this really bad rat and a station. While it's dealing with this, uh, it doesn't know what to do. The rats everywhere. So this motley clad fellow strolls in promises the town people, I can get rid of all your rats, and uh. The townspeople are so happy about this that they're like, yes, please, and they like promise as much money as the motley fellow um once. So he takes out his pipe and he starts playing it and magically all the rats come gathering around him. They follow him wherever he goes, and eventually he leads them into a river near the near the town. Uh called the river weezer wiser I'm not sure, but no visa and that's good. And the rats follow him in to this to this river as he goes in and just blindly follow and he and they all drown. So the townspeople are ecstatic and they are so happy to be rid of the rats. So the piper is like, okay, I did my deed, where's my money? And this is is probably where we get the term pay the piper, as we'll see um. The town refuses to pay the piper in this in this situation in the story, and they say, when the rats are gone, what are you gonna do. We're not gonna pay you anymore. We're gonna bring them back to life or something. So he leaves the town and he's really mad, and justifiably so, but he swears vengeance, and his vengeance I don't know if is if it's quite as warranted. So he returns to the town a little later, and this time he's dressed a little differently, and he's playing a new tune this time, and this time, rats don't come, but children do. Every single child starts uh following him, and not just the children, right that the mayor's grown daughter. That's right. The Grim Story mentions the mayor's grown daughter. Which maybe that's a little flap in the face of the mayor right there, who is probably responsible for him not getting paid. It's really interesting. So the kids gather around, dance around him, and follow him wherever he goes, just like the rats do. And he doesn't take them into the river, but he does do something just as bad, and he takes them to a cave in a nearby nearby mountain, and they're never heard from again. And what's curious is that some say in the in the Grim Story, at least some say that the kids went into the cave and they came out on the other side, which happened to be in Transylvania. Either way, nobody heard from the kids again in the town of Hamelin. So in the context of a fairy tale, that's disturbing enough, because no one wants to see all of a town's children just vanish into thin air under the under the direction of some strange guy wearing multicolored clothes. It's pretty creepy, but the fact that it could actually be a real story. Who the heck was this piper? And I think some historians have even gone so far as to suggest that he was a pedophile and he learned the children to a secret place and then he chopped up their bodies and scattered them everywhere. Yeah, that's one theory that actually William Manchester writes, and it's kind of a controversial book. We should say it's called a world lit only by fire, and that's what he says. Um A lot of people question that, and there are other theories, and it's interesting because the story isn't the only reason people think this might have happened. There is a little bit more evidence that something terrible happened in Hamlin, and one piece of evidence is the idea of a stained glass window that the that the townspeople put up around the year thirteen hundred. And they put up this window, apparently in the church, and it depicted a motley clad fellow with a group of children just in white. And the window doesn't exist today. If you go to Hamlin, you won't see it because it was apparently destroyed. But there are accounts that exist that say that there are accounts of the window, people who had seen it and wrote about it, and I had a pretty Italian inscription, right, that's right. It had an inscription around it that said that a hundred and thirty children were brought into danger and lost. So um, it does beg the question if something did happen. And another piece of evidence that popped up was about a century after the window was put up, there is an account of this monk writing that a man playing the flute came into the town and led the kids out very curious, And by sixteen o three the town puts up a three hundred years after the story would have apparently happened. Around that year, they the townspeople put up a facade of a building with another similar inscription about a pied piper bringing the kids into danger. And one of the issues that we've actually discussed before on an earlier podcast about Lady Gdiva another story that revolved around amongst writings and a stained glass window, is that when we're talking about oral storytelling, only so much can really be trusted. And what's great about the Brothers Grim is that they finally took these oral stories and recorded them but if they were in fact based in history, real events that occurred, who knows how many times the stories have been manipulated by word of mouth and by people who didn't quite understand what they were saying into the tale that it became. And uh, you may recall an earlier podcast that Jane and I did about the crusades, and Jane discussed the children's crusade, and that's another possibility that these children followed one child in particular who may have claimed to have a vision from God that he was supposed to lead his fellow children into battle and you know, to avenge the Holy Land, and that could have been its Yeah, that is one possible theory, and it's kind of it's a little convincing. I think that could have happened because it was around that time, maybe a little bit later. But there is another really interesting theory that maybe the children are all suffering from some horrible disease and it caused them to die, and people historians they guess that perhaps this is an early form of the plague. We did an earlier podcast on the Black Death, and um, if you heard that, you'll know a little bit about about that disease and how horrible it was, and historians postulate to that the motley clad fellow who was the pied piper may not have been dressed in multicolored armands. Instead, his skin could have been motley, It could have had red splotches that were symptomatic of some sort of disease that he had. They could have been some sort of skin lesions, and the idea that he may have even been afflicted with Huntington's disease, which is a disease that manifests and people who are of middle age, and it can be characterized by um I think mild bouts of dementia, and people could act in rather exuberant ways. We know that the piper came in dancing a little bit merrily, supposedly playing on his pipe, leading the children out in a very fanciful dance and song. So maybe he could have been demented in some way. We we don't really know, but I think that there is enough historical evidence to suggest that there is a grain of historical truth to the pie Piper of Hamlin. Those true, and it's really interesting, And I do want to mention one less theory which might be the most convincing for me at least. Remember I mentioned at the end of the story that some say that the kids came out at the other side in Transylvania. And there is some evidence that a man came to the town of Hamilin around the right time of the story, and he was looking for people to help him colonize parts of eastern Europe. So there's speculation at least that the kids might have come with him and taking taking them to a place around where Transylvania was uh. And that's what actually happened to the children, and that may shed some light on the fact that the mayor's grown daughter maybe maybe she had some sort of special permission from her father as the leader of the town, to get with them and help them colonize this new land. That's right, Kenemy really know. But what is really interesting is that you may be thinking, well, thank goodness, there are no more rats in the town of Hamlin. Left another pied piper come along and take all of their children. While I'm very sorry to inform you that the Times actually reported on December seventeenth of two thousand eight that Hamlin has a rat problem again, and the particular reporter who was covering the story used the phrase rat catchers are in vogue again, so, and they're attributing the rat problem to these allot in gardens around the periphery of the city. And they're sort of like community gardens, you know, you can pay a fee to have a small parcel of land to grow flowers and vegetables and fruits, and if they're not tended to, they just they beckon for rats to come and just create a mess. So I think that they were estimating that more than two hundred packs of rats had been identified in the city as of December two thousand and eight. And rats are they're pretty productive, and the boudoir as it were, and I think that one couple can breed up to two thousand descendants per year. So there's a debate right now over how they're going to kill all of these rats and do it in a humane way, which probably was not a huge concern back when the Grim Brothers would have been writing. I think that less concerned about the humanity of of killing rats correctly, sure, so I guess the stories is a lot more alive today in Himland than they wanted to be. But also they do get a lot of tourism to this day you can visit Hammond. Um. I guess it's spilled differently now, but it's the same town and every Sunday actually in the summer they act out the story. So they do. They do, carry in's a lot of tourism for it, they do. I think they even make rat shaped bunds in local bakery. They have a musical called Rats, you know, not too dissimilar from our cats over here. Um, you can even take a rat catch your tour. And from what I understand, especially in you know, Hamlin, today, it's a pretty thriving profession. You can make a pretty penny off being a rat catcher. And back during the time of the Black Death and the plague, it was a very esteem profession because you're really putting yourself in a lot of fire like a policeman would today. You know, there's always that risk that you could die when you're on the job. So anyway, Pie Piper one of the oldest rat catchers and and uh Grim brother history. Remember to pay the piper, exactly pay the piper, and for even more about fairy tales that have a grain historical truth and other interesting characters from history, be sure to check out how stuff works dot com and if you have any ideas about a historical topic you'd like to hear us discuss, email us at history podcast at how stuff works dot com For more on this and thousands of other topics because at how stuff works dot com. M

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm editor Candice Gibson, joined by staff writer Jane McGrath. Hey there, Hey Jane. I have a question for you. What was your favorite fairy tale growing up? Growing up? I think it had to be Cinderella. Nice choice. Yeah, what about you, snow whites. It's a good choice. I like that definitely. I like I like the Disney baby with her little bobbed dark hair cut. I think she was the only Disney princess that I can think of who had short hair. That was interesting. I never thought about that. I love us Cinderella, like I guess because of the whole magical enchanted mice and everything, which I thought was hilarious when they didn't uh and enchanted If you saw that with the real mice coming in and trying to clean the apartment, Oh yeah, well you know, rodents are really no laughing matter, as we will soon see. But first, a little background on fairy tales. As most of you probably know, fairy tales weren't always as light and fluffy and bedtime story ish as they are today. They started out with the Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, and they were pretty dark. And there's a very specific reason for that, and that's that back when Jacob and Wilhelm were around UM and the eighteen hundreds, they were trying to do more of a historical and cultural thing rather than a literary movement. When they recorded Germany's folklore. This was not an initiative that they came up with on their own. They had a friend who was compiling a lot of um local Germanic tales, and they decided that they would be sort of these cultural anthropologists and go out and collect their own stories too. But their friend was moving a little bit too slowly for their taste. So by eighteen twelve they published a volume on their own under the name Brothers Grim and it was called Children's and Household Tales. This was really popular, right it was. It was hugely popular, and at first the stories weren't really geared toward children. It was again, like I said, more of a matter of historical relevance and and writing down German folklore. But they toned it down once they saw how popular it was with children, and the reason that they were trying to be so authentic in their recording of these tales is that Napoleon was sweeping throughout Europe at this time, and they really thought that Germany would lose its identity if it wasn't recorded. And so if you look at these tales that the Grimm brothers wrote down, they have very pressing historical and cultural significance. And we're going to study one in particular and just a minute, but just to go ahead and finish out the Grim brothers story. Um, As the Napoleonic invasions came throughout Germany and throughout Europe, their professions changed a little bit too. I think that they took out a stable law school and decided that wasn't going to work out. So Jacob actually became a diplomat for a while and Wilhelm became a secretary to a librarian. And around this time they put out the second volume. Next came small Edition, which was a collection of the fairy tales that their brother Ludwig illustrated. But if you think that the Grim brothers were all fairy tales, you're mistaken, because they were philologists too, And if you aren't up too sweet on philology, essentially, it's uh, it's linguistics really and it puts a lot of emphasis on a culture's history and identity and how speech patterns really illuminate that. So they spend some time in their retirement actually compiling a German dictionary, and Jacob is credited for a pretty significant linguistic contribution called Grimm's Law. And I'm no linguist or expert, but as far as I can understand it, essentially what Grimm's Law boils down to with the alteration of of sounds in particular words, as the Germanic language became more and more disparate from other European languages. And I don't have a really good example for you guys, but you can all google Grimm's law and you can see lots of illustrated examples of how it works. And I think there's even one that I found online that shares how it works within the context of a grim Brother's fairy tale. And speaking of fairy tales, that is what we are going to talk about today, and the very very scary possibility that one of the most frightening Grimm Brothers fairy tales might actually be true. That's right, and we're talking about the Pied piper of Hamelin, and this was a really popular story as soon as it came out, like Candice was talking about and one famous poet, Robert Brownie even even did a really popular English version of the story. But to go back to the original Grimm story, you ready for story time, I am okay, I've got my cookies and lactaste free milk. Well, don't lay down in bed because this is going to freak you out so you can't sleep afterwards. So this story is set in the German town of Hamlin. This is a real place and it exists to this day. It starts back in twelve eighty four. So back then, the according to the story, the whole town was suffering from this really bad rat and a station. While it's dealing with this, uh, it doesn't know what to do. The rats everywhere. So this motley clad fellow strolls in promises the town people, I can get rid of all your rats, and uh. The townspeople are so happy about this that they're like, yes, please, and they like promise as much money as the motley fellow um once. So he takes out his pipe and he starts playing it and magically all the rats come gathering around him. They follow him wherever he goes, and eventually he leads them into a river near the near the town. Uh called the river weezer wiser I'm not sure, but no visa and that's good. And the rats follow him in to this to this river as he goes in and just blindly follow and he and they all drown. So the townspeople are ecstatic and they are so happy to be rid of the rats. So the piper is like, okay, I did my deed, where's my money? And this is is probably where we get the term pay the piper, as we'll see um. The town refuses to pay the piper in this in this situation in the story, and they say, when the rats are gone, what are you gonna do. We're not gonna pay you anymore. We're gonna bring them back to life or something. So he leaves the town and he's really mad, and justifiably so, but he swears vengeance, and his vengeance I don't know if is if it's quite as warranted. So he returns to the town a little later, and this time he's dressed a little differently, and he's playing a new tune this time, and this time, rats don't come, but children do. Every single child starts uh following him, and not just the children, right that the mayor's grown daughter. That's right. The Grim Story mentions the mayor's grown daughter. Which maybe that's a little flap in the face of the mayor right there, who is probably responsible for him not getting paid. It's really interesting. So the kids gather around, dance around him, and follow him wherever he goes, just like the rats do. And he doesn't take them into the river, but he does do something just as bad, and he takes them to a cave in a nearby nearby mountain, and they're never heard from again. And what's curious is that some say in the in the Grim Story, at least some say that the kids went into the cave and they came out on the other side, which happened to be in Transylvania. Either way, nobody heard from the kids again in the town of Hamelin. So in the context of a fairy tale, that's disturbing enough, because no one wants to see all of a town's children just vanish into thin air under the under the direction of some strange guy wearing multicolored clothes. It's pretty creepy, but the fact that it could actually be a real story. Who the heck was this piper? And I think some historians have even gone so far as to suggest that he was a pedophile and he learned the children to a secret place and then he chopped up their bodies and scattered them everywhere. Yeah, that's one theory that actually William Manchester writes, and it's kind of a controversial book. We should say it's called a world lit only by fire, and that's what he says. Um A lot of people question that, and there are other theories, and it's interesting because the story isn't the only reason people think this might have happened. There is a little bit more evidence that something terrible happened in Hamlin, and one piece of evidence is the idea of a stained glass window that the that the townspeople put up around the year thirteen hundred. And they put up this window, apparently in the church, and it depicted a motley clad fellow with a group of children just in white. And the window doesn't exist today. If you go to Hamlin, you won't see it because it was apparently destroyed. But there are accounts that exist that say that there are accounts of the window, people who had seen it and wrote about it, and I had a pretty Italian inscription, right, that's right. It had an inscription around it that said that a hundred and thirty children were brought into danger and lost. So um, it does beg the question if something did happen. And another piece of evidence that popped up was about a century after the window was put up, there is an account of this monk writing that a man playing the flute came into the town and led the kids out very curious, And by sixteen o three the town puts up a three hundred years after the story would have apparently happened. Around that year, they the townspeople put up a facade of a building with another similar inscription about a pied piper bringing the kids into danger. And one of the issues that we've actually discussed before on an earlier podcast about Lady Gdiva another story that revolved around amongst writings and a stained glass window, is that when we're talking about oral storytelling, only so much can really be trusted. And what's great about the Brothers Grim is that they finally took these oral stories and recorded them but if they were in fact based in history, real events that occurred, who knows how many times the stories have been manipulated by word of mouth and by people who didn't quite understand what they were saying into the tale that it became. And uh, you may recall an earlier podcast that Jane and I did about the crusades, and Jane discussed the children's crusade, and that's another possibility that these children followed one child in particular who may have claimed to have a vision from God that he was supposed to lead his fellow children into battle and you know, to avenge the Holy Land, and that could have been its Yeah, that is one possible theory, and it's kind of it's a little convincing. I think that could have happened because it was around that time, maybe a little bit later. But there is another really interesting theory that maybe the children are all suffering from some horrible disease and it caused them to die, and people historians they guess that perhaps this is an early form of the plague. We did an earlier podcast on the Black Death, and um, if you heard that, you'll know a little bit about about that disease and how horrible it was, and historians postulate to that the motley clad fellow who was the pied piper may not have been dressed in multicolored armands. Instead, his skin could have been motley, It could have had red splotches that were symptomatic of some sort of disease that he had. They could have been some sort of skin lesions, and the idea that he may have even been afflicted with Huntington's disease, which is a disease that manifests and people who are of middle age, and it can be characterized by um I think mild bouts of dementia, and people could act in rather exuberant ways. We know that the piper came in dancing a little bit merrily, supposedly playing on his pipe, leading the children out in a very fanciful dance and song. So maybe he could have been demented in some way. We we don't really know, but I think that there is enough historical evidence to suggest that there is a grain of historical truth to the pie Piper of Hamlin. Those true, and it's really interesting, And I do want to mention one less theory which might be the most convincing for me at least. Remember I mentioned at the end of the story that some say that the kids came out at the other side in Transylvania. And there is some evidence that a man came to the town of Hamilin around the right time of the story, and he was looking for people to help him colonize parts of eastern Europe. So there's speculation at least that the kids might have come with him and taking taking them to a place around where Transylvania was uh. And that's what actually happened to the children, and that may shed some light on the fact that the mayor's grown daughter maybe maybe she had some sort of special permission from her father as the leader of the town, to get with them and help them colonize this new land. That's right, Kenemy really know. But what is really interesting is that you may be thinking, well, thank goodness, there are no more rats in the town of Hamlin. Left another pied piper come along and take all of their children. While I'm very sorry to inform you that the Times actually reported on December seventeenth of two thousand eight that Hamlin has a rat problem again, and the particular reporter who was covering the story used the phrase rat catchers are in vogue again, so, and they're attributing the rat problem to these allot in gardens around the periphery of the city. And they're sort of like community gardens, you know, you can pay a fee to have a small parcel of land to grow flowers and vegetables and fruits, and if they're not tended to, they just they beckon for rats to come and just create a mess. So I think that they were estimating that more than two hundred packs of rats had been identified in the city as of December two thousand and eight. And rats are they're pretty productive, and the boudoir as it were, and I think that one couple can breed up to two thousand descendants per year. So there's a debate right now over how they're going to kill all of these rats and do it in a humane way, which probably was not a huge concern back when the Grim Brothers would have been writing. I think that less concerned about the humanity of of killing rats correctly, sure, so I guess the stories is a lot more alive today in Himland than they wanted to be. But also they do get a lot of tourism to this day you can visit Hammond. Um. I guess it's spilled differently now, but it's the same town and every Sunday actually in the summer they act out the story. So they do. They do, carry in's a lot of tourism for it, they do. I think they even make rat shaped bunds in local bakery. They have a musical called Rats, you know, not too dissimilar from our cats over here. Um, you can even take a rat catch your tour. And from what I understand, especially in you know, Hamlin, today, it's a pretty thriving profession. You can make a pretty penny off being a rat catcher. And back during the time of the Black Death and the plague, it was a very esteem profession because you're really putting yourself in a lot of fire like a policeman would today. You know, there's always that risk that you could die when you're on the job. So anyway, Pie Piper one of the oldest rat catchers and and uh Grim brother history. Remember to pay the piper, exactly pay the piper, and for even more about fairy tales that have a grain historical truth and other interesting characters from history, be sure to check out how stuff works dot com and if you have any ideas about a historical topic you'd like to hear us discuss, email us at history podcast at how stuff works dot com For more on this and thousands of other topics because at how stuff works dot com. M