Talk:Pied Piper of Hamelin

To check out

'Locations'

To the east of Hamelin was a gallows where criminals were hung. A 1622 image of the city can be seen here: https://www.dewezet.de/region/hintergrund/hintergrund-seite_artikel,-aberglaube-am-galgenberg-_arid,2504090.html It is today occupied by Galgenberg (literally "gallows hill") a street located at: 52.105078, 9.381509

"Calvary" is another name for golgotha, the place where Jesus was crucified. When the early text says "Calvary", it is possible that the place they were mentioning is the gallows to the east of Hamelin. This means the hill/koppen is the Basberg / Morgenstern hill immediately to the east of the gallows.

'Dancing'

Tarantism was a form of Dancing mania, and was often performed on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, which was the same day the children disappeared from Hamelin.

It may be that the midsummer celebrations in Hamelin 1284 were accompanied by entertainers from outside who were able to get the children to do a dancing craze, which led them out of Hamelin past the gallows area and the hill. There they kidnapped them and the children were then forcibly emigrated elsewhere.

--One Salient Oversight (talk) 03:17, 10 September 2020 (UTC)

Greatly in need of more recent scholarship

The overall tone of this entry is very amateurish. It is based on two unsupported assumptions:

• All myths are garbled accounts of actual historical events.
• People in former times were incapable of remembering things as they actually occurred, and were compelled to recall them via some unexplained dream-like process.

These are the twin assumptions of positivist scholarship which has been out-of-date for generations. Advances in structural anthropology and myth analysis have rendered this kind of thinking obsolete.

It is in one way extremely patronising towards other cultures, making them out to be uncomprehending children incapable of understanding their own experiences.

It is also just unconvincing. Chroniclers of the time seem to have been perfectly capable of recording all sorts of traumatic contemporary events such as plagues, regicides, fire, and earthquakes, but when modern readers encounter an aspect of a culture they have difficulty understanding, they immediately assume the explanation must be that the culture is cognitively defective in some way. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 118.127.126.38 (talk) 02:08, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for this. We are still looking forward to your help editing the article to improve it. DBaK (talk) 18:32, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

Need photograph

Hi, In two places this article talk about some old written evidence about 1824, one on piped piper's house and at the town's gate. If you live in Hemlin, Germany, you have access 9f these places, I want you to add photographs of these evidences, so readers can read it.Success think (talk) 10:32, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Proposed merge of Pied Piper of Hamelin in popular culture into Pied Piper of Hamelin

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

No opposition to merging, so consensus comes out as merge of only referenced content. - Cukie Gherkin (talk) 05:12, 24 June 2023 (UTC)

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Most of this list is WP:OR. If we remove all of the unsourced content, then there would probably only be 3 entries left. As such, I suggest we merge this article per WP:MERGE#Text. Pizzaplayer219^Talk_Contribs 14:56, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

• Support Per nom. There is not much of substance in the article, which was a pointless split full of original research. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 15:12, 5 June 2023 (UTC)
• Support Serious issues with WP:V and what's left would be too small to be split out. QuicoleJR (talk) 01:08, 6 June 2023 (UTC)
• Support, and I'd suggest removing all of the uncited items in Pied_Piper_of_Hamelin#Adaptations as well, unless a work literally has "Pied Piper" in the title and we have an article on it. Shouldn't be hard to keep the list short if we follow WP:V. ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 07:38, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

• Support with an emphasis on information cited to reliable third-party sources. Shooterwalker (talk) 01:28, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

• Support a merge of only sourced content. - Cukie Gherkin (talk) 05:27, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

"It is 100 years since our children left"

I have removed the following claim from the article, as it is not adequately supported by its references:

The earliest written record is from the town chronicles in an entry from 1384 which reportedly states: "It is 100 years since our children left."

The two references given for this claim were:

• Kadushin, Raphael. "The grim truth behind the Pied Piper". www.bbc.com. Retrieved 2020-09-03.
• Asher, Jay; Freeburg, Jessica (2017). Piper. New York: Razorbill. ISBN 978-0448493688. Researching earliest mentions of the Piper, we found sources quoting the first words in Hameln's town records, written in the Chronica ecclesiae Hamelensis of AD 1384: 'It is 100 years since our children left.'

The first of these references is a BBC Travel article which does not give references. The article is from 2020, long after the claim appeared in Wikipedia, so it is likely that this is a case of "citogenesis". The second of these references is to the introduction of a novel, not a scholarly work of non-fiction. It does include a citation to the Cronica ecclesiae Hamelensis (the chronicle of the church of Hamelin), but that is not adequate by itself: we need a more precise reference or a quotation of the original Latin.

There is an 1882 critical edition of the chronicle here (the text of the chronicle starts on p. 29):

• Meinardus, Otto (1882). "Hameler Geschichtsquellen". Zeitschrift des Historischen Vereins für Niedersachsen. 47: 1–40.

However, I could not find anything like the claim in the chronicle, so this seems to be a dead end.

Previously there was a third reference (for a variant of this claim with "10" rather than "100"):

• Harty, Shiela (1994). "Pied Piper Revisited". In David Bridges; Terence H. McLaughlin (eds.). Education and the Market Place. Routledge. p. 89. ISBN 0750703482. No written account appears in town chronicles until a 1384 entry that read: 'It is 10 years since our children left.'

Harty does not say which "town chronicles" the entry appears in, so we are no better off. I think the burden ought to be on the proponents of the claim to locate a better source than any of these. Gdr 15:39, 31 January 2024 (UTC)