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 We are talking 5 years here, and the information hasn’t become deprecated or outdated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.
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.
«
the average period, generally considered to be about 20–30 years, during which children are born and grow up, become adults, and begin to have children.
»
> a great example of that phenomena
This is wrong. "Phenomena" is plural. The singular is "phenomenon."
> It's hardly mentioned in history books
Because it is living memory for a small number of people.
"Spanish flu" is widely remembered, and just 4-5 years ago thousands of articles were published comparing the measures taken a century before against a pandemic.
> small blubs
I think you meant "blurbs", as in "short informal pieces of writing", and it's a poor choice of words anyway. "To blub" means to cry.
Your off-topic ad hominems or pedantic takedowns weaken any point you might have had, if you'd had one. This is not high school debate or reddit. We can do better here. It's best to take the most generous view of a post and address the core thesis.
100 years doesn't require a game of telephone with 20 people. It requires maybe 2 or 3. And for a event known to a whole town, you have multiple independent narrators which can help stabilize information.
My family has far more trivial information passed down orally that is way older than 100 years.
Mine doesn't. I know just a handful of things about my great grandparents. Things I do know about my family history didn't come from oral traditions but rather records placing my ancestors in places.
Even from what I know of my parents, I'm sure I've forgotten or misremembered a bunch of stories that they've told me about their lives. I couldn't reliably retell more than a handful of stories.
If that game of telephone includes the sentence "I'm going to kidnap your child", I'll bet it travels faster and more accurately than you think it will.
The telephone game lacks features in the telling that are common in oral storytelling that help reinforce the content and reduces the number of errors. Repeated telling, repetition in the structure, rhyming and alliteration (which is used, or even if they're used, depends on the language), being made into a song (seems to stick better than just straight speaking), etc. If you played the telephone game with a deliberately constructed story using those elements and taught that story to the next "generation" by repetition over a period of time before they, in turn, repeated it to the next generation it would be much more reliable. It also wouldn't be the telephone game.
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.
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."
I go to many metal and other shows a year. A 3-day outdoor festival in the woods with hundreds of tripping manchildren moshing in the rain resulted in a very muddy shallow depression, not a landslide. I have brief cameo in the video below. Want to see a hundred hippies sitting in the mud pretending to row ancient Roman galley?
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...
The point I was addressing from the parent comment was the implication that Hamelin is located in southern Germany. It could be rewritten to, as you pointed out:
TIL that the term Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is based upon this nugget:
> The name "Baader–Meinhof phenomenon" was coined in 1994 by Terry Mullen in a letter to the St. Paul Pioneer Press.[1] The letter describes how, after mentioning the name of the German militant group Baader–Meinhof once, he kept noticing it.
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.
It would not surprise me. Clothing took a lot of labor to make. A large part of the labor was women's labor which history doesn't record much of. When you are doing that much effort it isn't that much more to die in bright colors, and people like colorful clothing (some like the Amish make non-color part of their identity of course, but they like colors they are just rejecting them anyway because they think that helps them get to heaven). Colors were limited to what they could make so probably not as bright as modern, but not dark in general.
Not sure, the costume reminds me of a jester. If I'd take a jab at it, here is the original transcription from Brüder Grimm:
"Im Jahr 1284 ließ sich zu Hameln ein wunderlicher Mann sehen. Er hatte einen Rock von vielfarbigem, bunten Tuch an, weshalben er Bundting soll geheißen haben, und gab sich für einen Rattenfänger aus…"[0][1]
"In the year 1284, a strange man appeared in Hameln. He had a skirt, made from differently colored fabrics, which is why his name was 'bundle(?)', pretending to be a rat catcher…"
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....
That makes sense, sorry for my negative interpretation
I really appreciate respectful interactions like this on HN. It's easy to misinterpret things in text!
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.
I see! my bad
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.
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.
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.
> It's a full generation.
This is wrong. It is 4 generations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation
« the average period, generally considered to be about 20–30 years, during which children are born and grow up, become adults, and begin to have children. »
> a great example of that phenomena
This is wrong. "Phenomena" is plural. The singular is "phenomenon."
> It's hardly mentioned in history books
Because it is living memory for a small number of people.
"Spanish flu" is widely remembered, and just 4-5 years ago thousands of articles were published comparing the measures taken a century before against a pandemic.
> small blubs
I think you meant "blurbs", as in "short informal pieces of writing", and it's a poor choice of words anyway. "To blub" means to cry.
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/blub
These repeated errors strongly weaken your argument, and suggest that despite your confident tone you don't know as much as you think.
Your off-topic ad hominems or pedantic takedowns weaken any point you might have had, if you'd had one. This is not high school debate or reddit. We can do better here. It's best to take the most generous view of a post and address the core thesis.
Wow, you achieved being an asshole. Good for you?
Go play a game of telephone with 20 people and see how well information travels. Now multiply that by 100 years.
100 years doesn't require a game of telephone with 20 people. It requires maybe 2 or 3. And for a event known to a whole town, you have multiple independent narrators which can help stabilize information.
My family has far more trivial information passed down orally that is way older than 100 years.
Mine doesn't. I know just a handful of things about my great grandparents. Things I do know about my family history didn't come from oral traditions but rather records placing my ancestors in places.
Even from what I know of my parents, I'm sure I've forgotten or misremembered a bunch of stories that they've told me about their lives. I couldn't reliably retell more than a handful of stories.
If that game of telephone includes the sentence "I'm going to kidnap your child", I'll bet it travels faster and more accurately than you think it will.
The telephone game lacks features in the telling that are common in oral storytelling that help reinforce the content and reduces the number of errors. Repeated telling, repetition in the structure, rhyming and alliteration (which is used, or even if they're used, depends on the language), being made into a song (seems to stick better than just straight speaking), etc. If you played the telephone game with a deliberately constructed story using those elements and taught that story to the next "generation" by repetition over a period of time before they, in turn, repeated it to the next generation it would be much more reliable. It also wouldn't be the telephone game.
That calculation doesn't make sense.
Except oral histories seemed to have been very important to people and passing them down accurately has been noted throughout history
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.
Sure but now we're doing history in the comment section where I only intended to point out that this is exactly how history is done.
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
> 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).
It comes from the same place as the i in Munich.
I’m an English speaker and when I saw it written “Hameln” I thought it was a typo.
Funnily enough, the district (Landkreis) name in English keeps the original spelling: Hameln-Pyrmont.
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
Well, I'm convinced! What else could have caused a pit, but pagan dancing?
The historical precursor of a mosh pit.
I go to many metal and other shows a year. A 3-day outdoor festival in the woods with hundreds of tripping manchildren moshing in the rain resulted in a very muddy shallow depression, not a landslide. I have brief cameo in the video below. Want to see a hundred hippies sitting in the mud pretending to row ancient Roman galley?
https://youtu.be/X-BtJBDi8OA?si=Gtzeibmuokx39KhP
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.
The point I was addressing from the parent comment was the implication that Hamelin is located in southern Germany. It could be rewritten to, as you pointed out:
> Also, every town in Germany looks like that.
Yes, I know. I was trying to stress exactly that.
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.
Hah, macabre and word play. I see you my German brethren.
He is referring to the Baader-Meinhof-Komplex book, that pretty much documents the RAF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction
Um, no, he isn't. He is referring to the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
TIL that the term Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is based upon this nugget:
> The name "Baader–Meinhof phenomenon" was coined in 1994 by Terry Mullen in a letter to the St. Paul Pioneer Press.[1] The letter describes how, after mentioning the name of the German militant group Baader–Meinhof once, he kept noticing it.
Thanks!
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
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.
Was that kind of garb common back then? Reminds me of Swiss guard uniforms(granted, developed in the early 20th c, but based off 16th century imagery)
It would not surprise me. Clothing took a lot of labor to make. A large part of the labor was women's labor which history doesn't record much of. When you are doing that much effort it isn't that much more to die in bright colors, and people like colorful clothing (some like the Amish make non-color part of their identity of course, but they like colors they are just rejecting them anyway because they think that helps them get to heaven). Colors were limited to what they could make so probably not as bright as modern, but not dark in general.
Not sure, the costume reminds me of a jester. If I'd take a jab at it, here is the original transcription from Brüder Grimm:
"Im Jahr 1284 ließ sich zu Hameln ein wunderlicher Mann sehen. Er hatte einen Rock von vielfarbigem, bunten Tuch an, weshalben er Bundting soll geheißen haben, und gab sich für einen Rattenfänger aus…"[0][1]
"In the year 1284, a strange man appeared in Hameln. He had a skirt, made from differently colored fabrics, which is why his name was 'bundle(?)', pretending to be a rat catcher…"
[0] https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Seite:Deutsche_Sagen_(Grimm)_... [1] https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Seite:Deutsche_Sagen_(Grimm)_...
"Pied" in clothing now means "patchwork of colors". "Parti-colored" would be more historically accurate.
It makes you wonder how many modern facts are just a popularized copy of a copy of a copy, mangled beyond all realness.
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.
> But most people recognise him for what he is, the Pied Piper incarnate
I hope this AI generated
2020 so unlikely
The OctoPipers of PiperNet - Silicon Valley
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-l6btZcJ54
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