So what? Like if something was posted years before should it never be posted ever again? We are talking 5 years here, and the information hasn’t become deprecated or outdated
Not at all! As the other commenters have pointed out, no criticism is implied. Reposts are fine after a year or so. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
I do not believe that is dang's point. He often posts comments like these under recurring posts, I assume in hope that the past discussions could also be of interest to the readers.
What's the chance this event happened as recorded in popular memory? The inscription dates to 1284, but the earliest mention according to the article is 1384, 100 years later. On a symbolic day no less. The plaque, where 1284 is inscribed, is on a house dating to the 1500s.
It seems much more plausible that e.g. children emigrated as adults to another region (as mentioned in the article) and the old-timers who stayed behind lamented the 'loss of their children' so to speak; when the history was recorded in town records, it's unlikely that any of these old-timers or children were around. Hundreds of years of historical layering, where the most interesting version of the story is the one that is reinforced likely explains the mythological nature of the tale.
Combining all the elements, a foreigner-led emigration of adult / young adults en masse because of a rat/disease/sanitation problem seems just fine as an explanation.
As the involvement of a magic flute is unlikely in the extreme, this devolves to kidnapping.
As to why, the article asserts the scenarios of forced migration for settling new areas, or perhaps a "childrens' crusade" to the war in the Middle East.
People in medieval times had more time off not working than today. Feast days were actual feast days, they often didn't work during them.
Feast days were not something written on a calendar that only a few people could consult and say "hmm, oh look today is the feast day of such and such... meh, what's for supper?" :-)
They had to a greater or lesser extent, fairs, games, dances - they were literally festivals. People looked forward to and prepared in advance for feast days. There are at least 2 things that I think are relevant: firstly feast days punctuated and delimited the calendar and people's lives and secondly feast days were very memorable shared whole-community events.
This doesn't necessarily make the story more believable but it can make it more memorable. Think of a story where it says "it happened at Halloween and again at Christmas" and it could just help fix that story in a specific time making it more memorable in our brains.
100 years isn't that long though. Enough to transmit an exact date to multiple people. Also, the oldest surviving record isn't necessarily the earliest record there ever was.
The Spanish flu is a great example of that phenomena. It's hardly mentioned in history books yet we had a flu season where people were dying in the streets. Very shortly after it happened, people stopped talking about it or mentioning it.
COVID is looking like it will very much turn into the same thing.
These are massive global events that may only get small blubs 100 years later. Now imagine an event that happens in a localized area. How much of that event will get carried on or reported?
You also have to remember that in the 1200s, things like paper and ink were a lot more expensive than modern paper. That's part of the reason literacy rates were a lot lower.
I mean looking at the attested record, interpreting it, weighing evidence and motive and audience in this way, that's what historians do that is the practice of the discipline of history.
100 years later is actually pretty damn close all things considered! For comparison we have contemporaneous inscriptions and epigraphs attesting the existence of alexander the great but the earliest surviving accounts of his actions are from 200-300 years later. It can be the dedicated work of a scholar's lifetime to pry a handful of verifiable facts from these second- and third-hand, biased, incomplete accounts. But the lifetimes stack up and the guesses come into focus as knowledge.
> For comparison we have contemporaneous inscriptions and epigraphs attesting the existence of alexander the great but the earliest surviving accounts of his actions are from 200-300 years later.
This is true, but those surviving accounts quote or paraphrase contemporaneous accounts from his generals like Ptolemy and others that have since been lost.
I'd always imagined the "pied piper" as being 'pied' as in patched or even checkerboard of black and white. A piebald pony is patches of black or white, for example.
Is it that 'pied' is or was less specific and can mean patches of any colour, or is it that the English name is a bit lost in translation?
It's "Rattenfänger von Hameln" in german, so the literal translation would be "Rat-Catcher of Hamelin".
I do remember him wearing brightly colored patchwork clothing in the stories, but I could not say if that was an integral part of the original fable or just added in retellings to make the character stand out more as a mysterious stranger.
The Wikipedia article has actual information instead of the storytelling that the BBC article is insisting on
> Udolph favours the hypothesis that the Hamelin youths wound up in what is now Poland.[40] Genealogist Dick Eastman cited Udolph's research on Hamelin surnames that have shown up in Polish phonebooks
Quote from the article that you claim doesn't mention it:
> In fact, Udolph found that the family names common in Hamelin at the time show up with surprising frequency in the areas of Uckermark and Prignitz, near Berlin, that he locates as the centre of the migration.
Maybe try reading the whole article before condemning it, instead of just the first couple of paragraphs.
The Wikipedia article has actual information instead of the storytelling that the BBC article is insisting on
Strange thing to note (and wrong), given they have completely different purposes and the BBC article conveys "actual information" as well just in a less clinical way.
> don't know where the i [in Hamelin] comes from in the English transliteration
Could just be that it’s a very inconvenient consonant cluster (and and a speaker of modern English will to some degree turn it into a [lən] or [lɪn], however you spell it).
"Eine andere, weniger stark vertretene Theorie besagt, dass die Hamelner Kinder einem heidnischen Sektenführer aufgesessen sein könnten, der diese zu einem religiösen Ritus in die Wälder bei Coppenbrügge geführt hat, wo sie heidnische Tänze aufführten. Dabei habe es einen Bergrutsch oder Erdfall gegeben, wodurch die meisten umgekommen seien. Noch heute lässt sich dort eine große Kuhle finden, die durch ein solches Ereignis entstanden sein könnte."
> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rattenf%C3%A4nger_von_Hameln#H...
I'll roughly translate it:
"Another, less thought after theory says, the children of Hameln got seduced by a pagan cult leader. He lead the children to the forest of Coppenbrügge for a religious ritual, where they performed pagan dances. This caused an landslide, causing most of them to die. There is, to this day, still a large pit, that could have been caused by such an event."
It's all about the angle. I am sure that just outside of the camera frame, there's a mobile phone shop, a Burger King or MacDonald's, and other trivially universal city commerce. :-) Let's see...
"And, in fact, one 13th Century outbreak – a literal form of dance fever – occurred south of Hamelin, in the town of Erfurt, where a group of youths were documented as wildly gyrating as they travelled out of town, ending up 20km away in a neighbouring town. Some of the children, one chronicle suggests, expired shortly thereafter, having flat-out danced themselves to death, and those who survived were left with chronic tremors. Perhaps, some theorise, Hamelin witnessed a similar plague, dancing to the figurative tune of the Piper."
I recently got into the show "Silicon Valley" after never making it past season 1. Really loving it..... and thought this was the Pied Piper company too.
Discussed at the time (of the article):
The grim truth behind the Pied Piper - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24450760 - Sept 2020 (23 comments)
So what? Like if something was posted years before should it never be posted ever again? We are talking 5 years here, and the information hasn’t become deprecated or outdated
Not at all! As the other commenters have pointed out, no criticism is implied. Reposts are fine after a year or so. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
It's just that readers are often curious to look at past discussions. Sometimes I point that out: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
2 replies →
I do not believe that is dang's point. He often posts comments like these under recurring posts, I assume in hope that the past discussions could also be of interest to the readers.
1 reply →
What a guy, to criticise dang himself. :P
Its very normal on HN to point to earlier discussions on the same article or subject and is normally intended as help rather than a complaint.
People might be interested to see what was said last time.
What's the chance this event happened as recorded in popular memory? The inscription dates to 1284, but the earliest mention according to the article is 1384, 100 years later. On a symbolic day no less. The plaque, where 1284 is inscribed, is on a house dating to the 1500s.
It seems much more plausible that e.g. children emigrated as adults to another region (as mentioned in the article) and the old-timers who stayed behind lamented the 'loss of their children' so to speak; when the history was recorded in town records, it's unlikely that any of these old-timers or children were around. Hundreds of years of historical layering, where the most interesting version of the story is the one that is reinforced likely explains the mythological nature of the tale.
But what do I know? I suppose it is curious.
Combining all the elements, a foreigner-led emigration of adult / young adults en masse because of a rat/disease/sanitation problem seems just fine as an explanation.
As the involvement of a magic flute is unlikely in the extreme, this devolves to kidnapping.
As to why, the article asserts the scenarios of forced migration for settling new areas, or perhaps a "childrens' crusade" to the war in the Middle East.
> On a symbolic day no less.
Meh, the feast day of two saints. Pretty much any day of the year. Today is the feast day for Saints Bertille, Zechariah, and Elizabeth.
People in medieval times had more time off not working than today. Feast days were actual feast days, they often didn't work during them. Feast days were not something written on a calendar that only a few people could consult and say "hmm, oh look today is the feast day of such and such... meh, what's for supper?" :-)
They had to a greater or lesser extent, fairs, games, dances - they were literally festivals. People looked forward to and prepared in advance for feast days. There are at least 2 things that I think are relevant: firstly feast days punctuated and delimited the calendar and people's lives and secondly feast days were very memorable shared whole-community events.
This doesn't necessarily make the story more believable but it can make it more memorable. Think of a story where it says "it happened at Halloween and again at Christmas" and it could just help fix that story in a specific time making it more memorable in our brains.
100 years isn't that long though. Enough to transmit an exact date to multiple people. Also, the oldest surviving record isn't necessarily the earliest record there ever was.
Go play a game of telephone with 20 people and see how well information travels. Now multiply that by 100 years.
8 replies →
Yeah it is. It's a full generation.
The Spanish flu is a great example of that phenomena. It's hardly mentioned in history books yet we had a flu season where people were dying in the streets. Very shortly after it happened, people stopped talking about it or mentioning it.
COVID is looking like it will very much turn into the same thing.
These are massive global events that may only get small blubs 100 years later. Now imagine an event that happens in a localized area. How much of that event will get carried on or reported?
You also have to remember that in the 1200s, things like paper and ink were a lot more expensive than modern paper. That's part of the reason literacy rates were a lot lower.
3 replies →
I mean looking at the attested record, interpreting it, weighing evidence and motive and audience in this way, that's what historians do that is the practice of the discipline of history.
100 years later is actually pretty damn close all things considered! For comparison we have contemporaneous inscriptions and epigraphs attesting the existence of alexander the great but the earliest surviving accounts of his actions are from 200-300 years later. It can be the dedicated work of a scholar's lifetime to pry a handful of verifiable facts from these second- and third-hand, biased, incomplete accounts. But the lifetimes stack up and the guesses come into focus as knowledge.
> For comparison we have contemporaneous inscriptions and epigraphs attesting the existence of alexander the great but the earliest surviving accounts of his actions are from 200-300 years later.
This is true, but those surviving accounts quote or paraphrase contemporaneous accounts from his generals like Ptolemy and others that have since been lost.
1 reply →
I'd always imagined the "pied piper" as being 'pied' as in patched or even checkerboard of black and white. A piebald pony is patches of black or white, for example.
Is it that 'pied' is or was less specific and can mean patches of any colour, or is it that the English name is a bit lost in translation?
It's "Rattenfänger von Hameln" in german, so the literal translation would be "Rat-Catcher of Hamelin".
I do remember him wearing brightly colored patchwork clothing in the stories, but I could not say if that was an integral part of the original fable or just added in retellings to make the character stand out more as a mysterious stranger.
Here is a picture on Wikipedia. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rattenf%C3%A4nger_von_Hameln#/...
I grew up around Hameln and can confirm, that is how he is depicted.
Also a depiction of him from 1592: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rattenf%C3%A4nger_von_Hameln#/...
So it is part of the fable.
6 replies →
"Pied" in clothing now means "patchwork of colors". "Parti-colored" would be more historically accurate.
The Wikipedia article has actual information instead of the storytelling that the BBC article is insisting on
> Udolph favours the hypothesis that the Hamelin youths wound up in what is now Poland.[40] Genealogist Dick Eastman cited Udolph's research on Hamelin surnames that have shown up in Polish phonebooks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pied_Piper_of_Hamelin
Also, every town in Southern Germany looks like that. Hamelin is nothing special in that respect
Quote from the article that you claim doesn't mention it:
> In fact, Udolph found that the family names common in Hamelin at the time show up with surprising frequency in the areas of Uckermark and Prignitz, near Berlin, that he locates as the centre of the migration.
Maybe try reading the whole article before condemning it, instead of just the first couple of paragraphs.
The Wikipedia article has actual information instead of the storytelling that the BBC article is insisting on
Strange thing to note (and wrong), given they have completely different purposes and the BBC article conveys "actual information" as well just in a less clinical way.
"Hameln" is in northern Germany, don't know where the I comes from in the English transliteration.
There are many theories, one of them is the Children's Crusade[0], diseases, pagan sects, but yes, the leading one is the "Ostsiedlung".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Crusade [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostsiedlung
Funnily enough, the district (Landkreis) name in English keeps the original spelling: Hameln-Pyrmont.
> don't know where the i [in Hamelin] comes from in the English transliteration
Could just be that it’s a very inconvenient consonant cluster (and and a speaker of modern English will to some degree turn it into a [lən] or [lɪn], however you spell it).
2 replies →
Oh, and my favorite theory:
"Eine andere, weniger stark vertretene Theorie besagt, dass die Hamelner Kinder einem heidnischen Sektenführer aufgesessen sein könnten, der diese zu einem religiösen Ritus in die Wälder bei Coppenbrügge geführt hat, wo sie heidnische Tänze aufführten. Dabei habe es einen Bergrutsch oder Erdfall gegeben, wodurch die meisten umgekommen seien. Noch heute lässt sich dort eine große Kuhle finden, die durch ein solches Ereignis entstanden sein könnte." > https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rattenf%C3%A4nger_von_Hameln#H...
I'll roughly translate it:
"Another, less thought after theory says, the children of Hameln got seduced by a pagan cult leader. He lead the children to the forest of Coppenbrügge for a religious ritual, where they performed pagan dances. This caused an landslide, causing most of them to die. There is, to this day, still a large pit, that could have been caused by such an event."
Edit: Expanded translation
3 replies →
Hamelin is located in Lower Saxony, not in the southern states.
And there, many cities look like that, too.
It's all about the angle. I am sure that just outside of the camera frame, there's a mobile phone shop, a Burger King or MacDonald's, and other trivially universal city commerce. :-) Let's see...
https://maps.app.goo.gl/hbRSXaDvfKNFmQtT6
No, but there's Rossmann, Kik, Döner, and Woolworth's.
2 replies →
Weird, I was reading the Wikipedia article about that a few days ago and thought of posting that here!
That whatsit phenomenon strikes again!
I wonder if there was or will be a typical modern twisty-take movie about this
Baader-Meinhof.
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"And, in fact, one 13th Century outbreak – a literal form of dance fever – occurred south of Hamelin, in the town of Erfurt, where a group of youths were documented as wildly gyrating as they travelled out of town, ending up 20km away in a neighbouring town. Some of the children, one chronicle suggests, expired shortly thereafter, having flat-out danced themselves to death, and those who survived were left with chronic tremors. Perhaps, some theorise, Hamelin witnessed a similar plague, dancing to the figurative tune of the Piper."
Early discovery of MDMA.
Could have been ergot fungus in the wheat
Can we talk about the dance pandemic of 1518?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_plague_of_1518
Is this when they invented the Harlem Shake?
Jared gentle deadpan from "Silicon Valley":
> Well, I looked it up. It's about a predatory flautist who murders children in a cave.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ70b-WRHlU&t=18s
It makes you wonder how many modern facts are just a popularized copy of a copy of a copy, mangled beyond all realness.
Please leave AI out of this.
Initially read the headline and thinking it would be about a certain TV show about Silicon Valley. Not disappointed
I recently got into the show "Silicon Valley" after never making it past season 1. Really loving it..... and thought this was the Pied Piper company too.
Their CTO is a Satanist.
I too read the title and thought it would be about the show. It's not, unfortunately.
Nice chain Dinesh
not height per se, but d2f
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The OctoPipers of PiperNet - Silicon Valley
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-l6btZcJ54
[flagged]
> But most people recognise him for what he is, the Pied Piper incarnate
I hope this AI generated
2020 so unlikely