What do you think the story of The Pied Piper of Hamelin is really saying about....?

Question

....the condition of being "crippled?" What actually is the point of this part of the tale, if any? Do you think it an essential part of the account or simply a superfluous appendage tagged on the ending like the donkey's tail?

In the version of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm who gathered the material for Grimms' fairy tales a blind and a lame child could not follow the piper and were left behind. More specifically my inquiry revolves around the question of whether the tale (in the Grimm brothers' version) is saying anything about possible alternative benefits of lameness or blindness or incapacity of any kind you choose. For the mathematically inclined, are minuses just pluses of another kind?

I realize the story makes no explicit comment on incapacity but is there an implicit statement being made?

Answer 1

Oh, I think there is an element of almost Shakespearean subtlety in the Grimms' record of this story. The crippled boy who tells the townfolk what happened to the piper and the children can be seen from several different perspectives. Just as, for example, Shylock in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice on one level is a conventional Elizabeth villain but on another is a victim of Elizabeth prejudice.

Of course, to the moralists among the folk of the Grimms' day (the hard-headed, conventional tellers who used stories to teach a lesson), the message would be that the sufferer is saved by his suffering, the weak by their weakness, the poor by their poverty, the oppressed in their oppression. To be lost (from the piper) is to be saved (in the town of Hamelin). The townspeople suffer for their sins, but the one child, because of his lameness, is "saved" to tell them the story.

But that's like Shakespeare speaking on one level to the groundlings, or on another to the censors from the "puritans" who opposed his theatre, and on yet another to the imaginative within his audience who wondered about stories and their meanings.

Among the Grimms' tellers and listeners, another level of listener would be fascinated by the dual nature of the boy's condition: physically crippled, but also psychologically deprived. Caught between walking and invalidism, he is also caught between the townsfolks' world of here and now (and their perfidy with the piper) and the piper's world of "a wonderland," the ideal state of innocence prolonged and preserved (and the piper's perfidy with the child). Like Peter Pan, therefore, the "crippled" lad is caught between two worlds, no longer the innocent child but not yet the fulfilled adult. To be saved (with the townsfolk) is to be lost (to the piper, and his wonderland).

But to me the highest level of meaning would relate to the crippled child's role as storyteller. For it is he, after all, who understands what did and did not happen; it is he who experienced what one cannot experience and survive (or, having experienced, cannot retain one's lowly place among the people of a common-sense, workaday world. (Curiously, this interpretation would probably be the lowest, least respectable, most incredible to the workaday folk who tell and hear the story, especially the moralists and "realists"--like the people of the workaday community I grew up among)

It is the crippled lad who understands what it means to long for a world beyond the here and now, but never to attain such a world, to see beyond the moralism of level one of the story and the "fancy" of level two, but to be left with only a vision of a wider, higher world. It is he who can speak of the vision of the Piper but address his story to the common-sense townfolk. He perhaps plays the role that some "old wives" who handed these Grimm tales down from generation to generation played in preserving this and other stories, not merely as entertainment but for insight into other worlds, the role that ultimately the Grimm brothers themselves played in collecting and preserving them. Not as mere entertainment, not for some moral teaching, not as an historical record of a "real world," but for insight into a world of significance beyond the common-sense, everyday world of Hamelin.

Of course, what I am describing is what Coleridge called the Imagination, "the balance and reconciliation of opposites," balancing the here-and-now and the "beyond," the crude world in which we live and the "other" world that music (for example) promises to lead us into.

The "crippled" lad is the counterpart of the Coleridgean visionary who sees "a damsel with a dulcimer" and attempts to revive within himself "her symphony and song."

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw :
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome ! those caves of ice !
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware ! Beware !
His flashing eyes, his floating hair !
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise. ("Kubla Khan")

The piper is roughly equivalent to the damsel with the dulcimer. The townsfolk of Hamelin (and the hearers of the Grimms' tales) are the ones who are entranced by but also apprehensive of the story the boy tells (like the other "old wives' tales"; the Grimms grim tales): "weave a circle round him thrice / And close your eyes with holy dread." And the boy (like the tellers of these stories, and the Grimms themselves) was one who "on honey dew hath fed / And drunk the milk of Paradise." They see Meaning beyond the "real." They cannot continuously experience it themselves but they can communicate its existence (or possibility) to ordinary listeners/readers in the language of a story.

Paradise is lost in Hamelin; Paradise is regained in the telling (and preserving) of "The Pied Piper of Hamelin." The story the crippled lad tells "balances" innocence and experience, the "other worldly" with this world, signficance with story. Even to the ordinary listener/ reader it appeals to the (perhaps unconscious) "addition to significance."

Maybe.

Answer 2

"The Pied Piper of Hamelin is a folk tale, documented by the Brothers Grimm, which tells of an unusual disaster that occurred in the town of Hamelin, Germany, June 26, 1284.

"In 1284, the town of Hamelin was suffering from a dreaded rat infestation. One day, a man claiming to be a rat-catcher approached the villagers with a solution. They promised him a schilling for the head of each rat. The man accepted and thus took a pipe and lured the rats with a song into the Weser river, where all 999,999 drowned. Despite his success, the people reneged on their promise and refused to pay the rat-catcher, reasoning that he had failed to produce the heads. He left the town, but returned several weeks later. While the inhabitants were in the church, he played his pipe again, this time attracting the children of Hamelin. One hundred and thirty boys and girls followed him out of the town, where they were lured into a cave and sealed inside. Depending on the version, at most two children remained behind. Other versions claim that the Piper returned the children after the villagers paid several times the original amount of gold."

"The Theories

Certainly, everyone knew exactly what had happened in 1284. The situation was tragic and the loss unforgotten. The glass window in the market church was a reminder, or a warning.

Due to negligence or by design, the tale was changed around 1500 to a mythical, magical legend and only the historians know for certain what happened. Depending on which ones you ask, these are the answers that you get:



Fincelius writes that the Piper was the Devil himself.

Von Zimmern adds the Rats to the story for the first time.

Werner Ueffing concluded that the Hameln children had the black plague and had to be led out of the town.

Gottfried Leibniz explained that the children took part in a crusade to the holy land.

Johannes Letzner related in the Corvey Chronic that the youths were afflicted with the dancing disease, known today as Huntington’s Chorea, and were led away to protect the populace.

Wilhelm Raabe quoted Christian Fein’s older theory that the youth of Hameln were lost at the battle of Sedemuender in 1260. This was the accepted historical version until 1951.

Wilhelm Wann and Heinrich Spanuth reported through separate research that the 130 children built new villages in Maehren (CZ) or Oelmutz (CZ/SR). Each was awarded a doctorate for this work.

Hans Dobbertin explains that the group’s ship sank in the Baltic Sea after traveling on foot to the Johanniter cloister, Cophahn.

Gottfried Spanuth gave us the unsupported claim that 130 young people died as a bridge collapsed.

Hannibal Nullejus was repeated by the Brothers Grimm and Robert Browning that the children went to Siebenburgen/Transsylvania.

Waltraud Woeller expressed the claim that the children died in a landslide on the Ith Mountain.

Gernot Huesam added the precise position: the Teufelskueche, an area of collapse on the mountain known today as the Oberberg.

Prof. Juergen Udolph presented a theory in 1996 that the travelers went to the Uckermark area of Germany, north of Berlin.



Tales of swamps, precipices, and various mountains around Hameln have been in circulation for years. Should none of these theories be to your liking, UFO specialists have purported for years that the Hameln children were kidnapped into space by an alien Pied Piper!




Take your pick of theories, or study the material yourself. Perhaps you will be the one who finally finds out what happened to 130 young people from Hameln, over 700 years ago…"

There's much more to these articles than this, but this is a basic overview of the historical tragedy which became the basis for the folk tale. I'm not aware of any commentary on disabilities in the story, though.

Answer 3

The lame boy has two purposes in the narrative.
One is to report to the townspeople (and us) what the Piper did to lure the children away; he promised them a magical new country.
Another is to show that the Piper punished the townspeople's breach of promise by breaking a promise of his own. He made promises to the lame boy which he did not keep. Indeed, he broke his promise to the other children as well, since he only took them to Transylvania.
The moral of the entire story is given as: "If we've promised them aught, let us keep our promise!"
The crippled boy carries the life-long sadness of a broken promise, but it is not the promise his parents made to the Piper. It is the Piper's promise to him. This suggests to me that his lameness may serve as a metaphor for his moral incompleteness, as he does not see the Town's perfidy as the source of his sadness. The townspeople do seem to recognize this.

Answer 4

I want I knew your reference. In any telling of the story i've got heard, there is not any connection with all of us "criippled." Please tricky. thank you. It does look to me that it somewhat is slightly a donkey's tail, except those toddlers with disabilities characterize the alternative of satisfaction and conceitedness, which the cheating townspeople have been crammed with. possibly they have been spared as a results of fact they have been extra humble. i do no longer think of this is had to the story. it somewhat is a stretch to aim to discover meaning in this little "tail."