"The Pied Piper of Hamelin," by Robert Browning

In which it is important to pay your rodent-exterminating musicians lest he leads your children into a mountain forever, and in which the narrator pretends he has some sense of poetic rhythm.



Hey hey, everyone! One of the creepier classic children's stories out there has always been "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," what with the stealing all the children away and piping and such, so that's this year's choice for our (slightly belated) Halloween story. As I discuss in the probably overlong intro, the story is inspired by a circa 1300 stained-glass church window in the town of Hamelin, Germany, and the earliest written record of the town from 1384 which states "It is 100 years since our children left." The actual cause is unknown (Plague? Drowning? Landslide? Children's crusade? Mass emigration?), as is what the piper represents. He might've been an actual person leading them away (like an emigration recruiter, or a crusade leader), or a symbolic figure of death or the devil. The rats were added to the story a few hundred years later.

1592 painting based on the Hamelin window, which was destroyed in 1660.

 Illustrations and notes after the jump!

I decided to go with the Robert Browning poetic version, published in his collection Dramatic Lyrics in 1842, partly because I liked its humor and wordplay and largely because it's longer than most other versions and I didn't want this to be only like five minutes long. The poem was published on its own in 1888 by Frederick Warne with beautiful illustrations by Kate Greenaway (1846-1901). Greenaway was an author as well and generally preferred to illustrate only her own works, so this was a bit of a rare exception for her. Pretty unusually for a children's illustrator, she actually became pretty influential in the world of fashion. See, as the daughter of a seamstress she paid especially close attention to the clothing of her characters, and generally dressed them in detailed styles from the early 1800s, rather than in current fashion. The popularity of her illustrations is actually credited with a late-Victorian resurgence in Regency children's fashion. Anyway, it's her illustrations I'll be sharing here. There are so many of them and many of them are packed so tightly together that I won't bother time-stamping them (also I forgot.)

Frontispiece, which seems to assume the children got a happy ending.

Title page illustration

Verso (the back of) the title page illustration

Crest. Of the town, maybe? It looks like
Greenaway might've just made this up.

Story header: The mayor and council speaking to the Piper

Rats!
They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,

And ate the cheeses out of the vats

And licked the soup from the cooks' own ladles

Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men's Sunday hats,

Oh, and notes! At 5:44 here, a sprat is a small type of fish, eaten in many places around the world.

And even spoiled the women's chats

Ladies and their chattin', amirite?

By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats.

At last the people in a body
To the Town Hall came flocking:
"Tis clear,'' cried they, "our Mayor's a noddy;
"And as for our Corporation -- shocking"

And at the scarf's end hung a pipe;
And his fingers, they noticed, were ever straying
As if impatient to be playing
Upon this pipe, as low it dangled
Over his vesture so old-fangled.)

In the piper's boasting around 8:30, he first says he did great feats of extermination for the Cham in Tartary. Tartary we talked about in Frankenstein, but the Cham probably refers to the Cham Albanians, who originate in Albania and northern Greece, which... are not really close to what was called Tartary, but are at least somewhat closer and more likely to be known to an English writer than the Cham people of southeast Asia. The Cham Albanians did have a large Islamic population that some called by some variety of "Turk," which may be how they were conflated into Tartary.

The piper goes on to talk about the Nizam in Asia, who was the hereditary monarch of Hyderabad, a princely state in India from 1724 until Indian independence in 1948. This is rather notably anachronistic for a poem taking place in 1376.

"And as for what your brain bewilders,
"If I can rid your town of rats
"Will you give me a thousand guilders?''
"One? fifty thousand!'' -- was the exclamation
Of the astonished Mayor and Corporation.

At 8:44, a guilder (from the Middle High German gulden pfenninc, or "golden penny") was originally a sort of generic term in the Holy Roman Empire for any sort of gold coin in the 14th to 16th centuries. At the time, the actual gold currency in use was properly called the Fiorino d'oro, or the florin, and the two remain largely synonymous. (Fans of The Princess Bride who did not know this fact may suddenly find themselves getting a very subtle joke.) Eventually, "guilder" became the general term for some countries' currencies, whether golden or not. Most notably and recently, the Netherlands used the Dutch guilder until adopting the Euro in 2002.

And ere three shrill notes the pipe uttered,
You heard as if an army muttered

9:07 - "like a candle-flame where salt is sprinkled." Try this for yourself! (With safety goggles, a fire extinguisher, and an adult safety partner.) In chemistry, different elements have different emission spectra, meaning that when their electrons transition from a high energy state to a lower energy state they release the extra energy in the form of photons. These photons will be at very distinct wavelengths corresponding to the amount of energy released. Since no two elements will have the exact same number of electrons all transitioning from the exact same states, the exact amount spectrum of light emitted is unique to that specific element.

In other words, if you (say) run an electric current through a gas or sprinkle grains of a solid into a fire, the resulting color(s) of light will tell you what elements make up that gas or solid. For instance, running electricity through hydrogen will cause it to release red, blue-green, blue-violet, and violet light, which all mix together to make a pretty purple color. To see the individual colors (since science likes to be more exact than "a mix that makes a pretty purple color") you would view that light through a diffraction grating, like those glasses you wore as a kid that made everything look all rainbowy. Some release far more colors, as well (here's iron, for instance). This is how, say, neon signs make light (though only ones that make a nice red-orange color actually use neon itself), and how we figure out what the sun, stars, and other astronomical bodies are made out of.

Which brings us back to our poem! What Browning describes is technically know as a flame test. The sodium in table salt has a distinctive emission spectrum that is primarily a very pure yellow color, which can easily be seen if you, say, sprinkle some salt into a candle flame.

Have I mentioned that my day job is as a science educator?

And out of the houses the rats came tumbling.

10:14 - "train-oil flasks." Train-oil is another term for whale oil, which was, yes, harvested from whales and used in food, soap, and as a lamp oil. We'll learn more about this when we read Moby Dick.*

10:29 - "nuncheon." I could swear we already did this one, didn't we? In like... Alice, or something? No, I guess not. Well, anyway, a nuncheon is a midday snack.

10:32 - "sugar-puncheon." Hey, I'm as surprised as you that Browning got not one but two perfect rhymes for "luncheon." A puncheon was a specific barrel size, holding in the neighborhood of 80 gallons.

"Go," cried the Mayor, "and get long poles,
"Poke out the nests and block up the holes!"

"First, if you please, my thousand guilders!"

11:22 - "cellar's biggest butt." Heh. Heh heh. I'm sorry, I'm, like, twelve. If you scroll up in the link for puncheon, you'll see that a butt or a pipe is another barrel size, of about 120 gallons. Some say this is actually what people originally referred to when talking about a buttload of something. Sure.

I forgot to timestamp this, but it's probably around 11:00 - "put in your poke." Remember from the first (and, um, only so far) installment of Anne of Avonlea, a poke is an old term for "bag."

"A thousand guilders! Come, take fifty!"

12:19 - "don't think I'll bate a stiver!" Remember the Dutch guilder, mentioned above? A stiver or stuiver is one-twentieth of that. He's basically saying he won't haggle over even a nickel of his fee.

Once more he stept into the street,
And to his lips again
Laid his long pipe of smooth straight cane;

And ere he blew three notes

(such sweet
Soft notes as yet musician's cunning
Never gave the enraptured air)

There was a rustling

that seemed like a bustling

Of merry crowds justling at pitching and hustling

Small feet were pattering, wooden shoes clattering

Wooden shoes, stivers... Browning does realize this takes place in Germany and not the Netherlands, right? And that those are two different places?

Little hands clapping and little tongues chattering

And, like fowls in a farm-yard when barley is scattering

Out came the children running.

All the little boys and girls

With rosy cheeks and flaxen curls

And sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls

...okay Browning, now you're starting to creep me out in a different way.

Tripping

and skipping

ran merrily after

The wonderful music with shouting and laughter.

The Mayor was dumb, and the Council stood
As if they were changed into blocks of wood,
Unable to move a step, or cry
To the children merrily skipping by

Did I say, all? No! One was lame,
And could not dance the whole of the way;

Eesh, words we don't use anymore to describe people.

16:11 - "pipe or tabor." A tabor is a type of snare drum, usually hung about the neck and played with one hand. Often, the other hand is used to play -- yes -- a pipe.

Incidentally, the street Browning is referring to here is known as Bungelosenstrasse, or "Drumless Street." On the corner of it is the Rattenfängerhaus, or Rat-catcher House, built in the 1600s and which has an inscription on its facade mentioning the legend. It's a restaurant now. I bet you can guess its theme!

So, Willy, let me and you be wipers
Of scores out with all men -- especially pipers!
And, whether they pipe us free from rats or from mice,
If we've promised them aught, let us keep our promise!

I... really don't know who Willy is supposed to be here. I mean, the reader, obviously, but why "Willy?"

End papers

And that's it! We'll be moving on with Anne of Avonlea soon, I promise. I've got one in the can already. Really!


If you would like to read along, the text and illustrations can be found at Project Gutenberg, or as actual scans from this edition at the University of Indiana Library. No reading ahead, though!


*We will not be reading Moby Dick. [Back]