[Sir Gawain]

Interesting stuff

[ditto h]

I prefer my version.

[Cachelot]

According to Manchester the piper was a psychopath and a pederast

Geez. Wonder what wanted all the rats for?

[Billthedrill]

It wasn't me. I have an alibi.

Actually, I always thought it was a near-historical memory of events surrounding the Children's Crusade of 1213AD. Not sure just where I got that idea, though...probably just an accident of dating.

[ditto h]

Let me tell you the TRUE story of Goldilocks and the three bears.

[Free ThinkerNY]

Rats were a definite problem for German towns...

Rats are a definite problem in every town in America. DemonRats, that is.

[Spyder]

Interesting. I just finished a novel by Ann Benson, half of which was based on a true character by the name of Gilles de Rais, a nobleman who fought alongside Joan de Arc but later confessed to killing over 200 children, mostly boys, after sodomizing them and disemboweling them. I was able to find his story in several places on line that corrorborate the major parts of her novel. He was executed by hanging after a full confession to avoid torture by the Inquisition (NO one expects the Inquisition!)

[martin_fierro]

The moral of our story:

If a man...

...reduces the threat to you caused by 'Rats...

...PAY HIM! <|:)~

[Xenalyte]

Man, I LOVE the Straight Dope!

[Cicero]

There's a great stained glass window of the Pied Piper at the Armstrong Browning Library at Baylor. I saw it when I gave a lecture there. Here's a rather tiny picture of it:

[crazykatz]

"There was a bounty on dead rats in some German town and rat tails briefly became a form of urban currency."

Wonder if that is the origin of the saying, "I don't give a rat's a$$"?

I don't give a "damm" is about a coin, isn't it?

[headsonpikes]

I like the notion that the historical persons behind the Pied Piper legend were real estate promoters.

;^)

[aristeides]

Here's what my 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica says on the legend:

Hameln is famed as the scene of the myth of the piper of Hameln. According to the legend, the town in the year 1284 was infested by a terrible plague of rats. One day there appeared upon the scene a piper clad in a fantastic suit, who offered for a certain sum of money to charm all the vermin into the Weser. His conditions were agreed to, but after he had fulfilled his promise the inhabitants, on the ground that he was a sorcerer, declined to fulfill their part of the bargain, whereupon on the 26th of June he reappeared in the streets of the town, and putting his pipe to his lips began a soft and curious strain. This drew all the children after him and he led them out of the town to the Koppelberg hill, in the side of which a door suddenly opened, by which he entered and the children after him, all but one who was lame and could not follow fast enough to reach the door before it shut again. Some trace the origin of the legend to the Children's Crusade of 1211; others to an abduction of children; and others to a dancing mania which seized upon some of the young people of Hameln who left the town on a mad pilgrimage from which they never returned. For a considerable time the town dated its public documents from the event. The story is the subject of a poem by Robert Browning, and also of one by Julius Wolff. Curious evidence that the story rests on a basis of truth is given by the fact that the Koppelberg is not one of the imposing hills by which Hameln is surrounded, but no more than a slight elevation of the ground, barely high enough to hide the children from view as they left the town.

[aristeides]

Speaking of seducers at Hameln, Adolf Hitler held his Reichsbauerntag (Reich Farmers' Day) every year in the fall at the Buckeberg outside Hameln. A color newsreel survives of at least one of them (you can see it in The World at War), and music was played during Hitler's appearance to the crowd.

[Consort]

[Cheapskate]

golly, i didin't know Scott Ritter played a real flute!

[strela]

Great. And next I suppose you'll tell me that Catherine the Great really DIDN'T have wild monkey sex with her carriage horses.

[gcruse]

I like that stuff.