Pied Piper of Hamelin | German Legend of Promises Broken (9-12+)

Browning pictures Hamelin as a pleasant town near Hanover beside the deep, wide Weser. In the distant past of his poem, the people of Hamelin were suffering terribly, and it was all because of rats.

Rats! They fought the dogs and killed the cats. They bit babies in their cradles. They ate the cheese out of the vats and licked the soup from the cook’s own ladle. They split open the barrels of salted fish, made nests in men’s Sunday hats, and squeaked and shrieked so loudly that the women could not hear themselves talk.

At last the townspeople marched together to the Town Hall. “Our Mayor is a fool,” they shouted, “and the Council is no better! We buy them gowns trimmed with ermine, and they cannot decide how to get rid of the rats. Wake up, sirs! Rack your brains and find a cure, or we will throw you out!” The Mayor and the Council shook with fright.

For an hour they sat in the council chamber. At last the Mayor spoke. “I would sell my ermine gown for a single coin if I could be a mile away from here! It is easy to tell a man to rack his brains. My poor head aches from scratching it, and all for nothing. Oh, for a trap, a trap, a trap!”

Just as he said it, there was a gentle tap at the door. “Bless us!” cried the Mayor, who was very fat and not very clever. “What was that? Only someone wiping his shoes on the mat? Anything that sounds like a rat makes my heart go pit-a-pat!”

“Come in!” he called, trying to look important. And in came the strangest figure. He wore a long coat that was half yellow and half red, and he was tall and thin, with sharp blue eyes like pins and light, loose hair. He had no beard or whiskers, and a smile kept coming and going on his lips. Nobody could guess where he came from, and everyone stared at him and his odd clothes. One man said it was as if his great-grandfather had stepped down from the painting on his tombstone.

The stranger walked up to the council table. “If it please your honours,” he said, “I have a secret charm. With it I can make any living creature, anything that creeps or swims or flies or runs, follow me as you have never seen. I use my charm mostly on creatures that do harm, like moles and toads and newts and snakes, and people call me the Pied Piper.”

Then they noticed that round his neck he wore a scarf striped red and yellow to match his coat, and at the end of it hung a pipe. His fingers kept wandering toward it, as if they could not wait to play.

“Poor piper as I am,” he went on, “last June I freed the Khan of Tartary from his swarms of gnats, and I rid the Nizam in Asia of a terrible brood of vampire bats. If I can rid your town of rats, will you give me a thousand guilders?”

“One thousand? Fifty thousand!” cried the astonished Mayor and Council.

The Piper stepped out into the street, smiling a small smile as if he knew what magic was sleeping in his quiet pipe. He put it to his lips, and his sharp eyes twinkled green and blue like a candle flame when salt is sprinkled on it. Before the pipe had sounded three shrill notes, there came a noise like an army muttering. The muttering grew into a grumbling, the grumbling grew into a mighty rumbling, and out of the houses the rats came tumbling.

Great rats and small rats, thin rats and fat rats, brown and black and grey and tawny rats, serious old plodders and frisky youngsters, fathers and mothers, uncles and cousins, brothers and sisters, with tails up and whiskers twitching, they came in families of tens and dozens and followed the Piper as if their lives depended on it. From street to street he went, piping, and step for step they danced after him, until they came to the river Weser. There they all plunged in and drowned.

All except one. He was as tough as Julius Caesar, and he swam across the river and lived to carry the tale home to Rat-land. When he heard the first notes of the pipe, he said, it sounded like apples being squeezed in a cider press, like pickle jars being opened and jam cupboards left ajar, like butter barrels being broken open. A voice sweeter than any harp seemed to be calling, “Rejoice, rats! The whole world has become one great pantry! Munch on and crunch on, breakfast, dinner, supper and lunch!” And just as a huge barrel of sugar seemed to shine in front of him like the sun, saying, “Come and bite me!”, he found the river rolling over his head.

How the people of Hamelin rang the bells until the steeple rocked! “Go and get long poles,” cried the Mayor. “Poke out the nests and block up the holes! Call in the carpenters and builders, and leave not a trace of the rats!” But just then the Piper’s face appeared in the market square. “First, if you please,” he said, “my thousand guilders.”

A thousand guilders! The Mayor turned pale, and so did the Council. Their grand dinners cost a great deal, and half that money would fill their cellars. Why should they pay so much to a wandering fellow in a coat of red and yellow?

“Besides,” said the Mayor with a wink, “the job is finished. We saw the rats sink with our own eyes, and what is dead cannot come back to life. We are not the kind of people to refuse you a drink, and a little money for your pocket. But as for the thousand guilders, you know very well that was only a joke. Our losses have made us careful. Come, take fifty!”

The Piper’s face fell. “No games!” he cried. “I cannot wait. I have promised to be in Baghdad by dinnertime, where the Caliph’s head cook is going to give me his finest dish for clearing a nest of scorpions out of his kitchen. I did not haggle with him, and I will not take a penny less from you. People who make me angry may find that I can play a different tune.”

“What?” cried the Mayor. “Do you think I will be treated worse than a cook? Insulted by a lazy good-for-nothing with an idle pipe and a patchwork coat? Are you threatening us? Do your worst! Blow your pipe until you burst!”

Once more the Piper stepped into the street and lifted his long, smooth cane pipe to his lips. Before he had played three notes, notes softer and sweeter than any musician had ever played, there came a rustling and a bustling, like a merry crowd pushing and jostling. Little feet pattered, wooden shoes clattered, little hands clapped and little tongues chattered. And, like hens in a farmyard running when barley is scattered, out came the children, all the little boys and girls, with rosy cheeks and golden curls and bright eyes, skipping and tripping after the wonderful music, shouting and laughing as they ran.

The Mayor could not speak, and the Council stood still as if they had been turned into blocks of wood. They could not move or cry out to the children skipping past. They could only watch the happy crowd following the Piper. How their hearts pounded when he turned out of the High Street toward the river, right in the path of their sons and daughters!

But then he turned from south to west and headed for Koppelberg Hill, and the children hurried after him, full of joy. “He can never cross that great hill,” the people thought. “He will have to stop playing, and the children will stop too.” But when they reached the hillside, a wonderful door opened wide, as if a cave had suddenly been carved out of the rock. The Piper went in, and the children followed, and when the very last one was inside, the door in the mountain shut tight.

Did I say all of them? No. One boy was lame and could not dance all the way. For years afterward, whenever anyone asked why he was so sad, he would say, “It is dull in our town since my friends left. I can’t forget the lovely things they see, which the Piper promised me too. He said he was leading us to a happy land close by, where streams gushed and fruit trees grew, where flowers were brighter and everything was new. The sparrows there were finer than our peacocks, the dogs ran faster than our deer, the bees had no stings, and the horses were born with eagles’ wings. And just as I felt sure my lame foot would be cured, the music stopped, and I stood still outside the hill, left behind, to limp along as before and never hear of that country again.”

Poor Hamelin! The Mayor sent messengers east, west, north and south to find the Piper, wherever he might be, and offer him as much silver and gold as he wanted if only he would come back the way he had gone and bring the children with him. But when they saw it was no use, and the Piper and the dancing children were gone forever, they made a law. Every official record had to give not only the date but also the words, “So long after what happened here on the twenty-second of July, thirteen hundred and seventy-six.”

To keep the memory alive, they named the street where the children were last seen Pied Piper’s Street. No one was allowed to play a pipe or a drum there, and no inn could be merry in a street so solemn. Opposite the place of the cave they wrote the story on a stone column, and they painted it in the great church window, so that the whole world would know how their children had been stolen away. That is how Browning’s poem imagines the town preserving its loss; the old church window does not survive today.

Some say that in Transylvania there lives a group of people with strange clothes and customs, who believe their ancestors came up out of an underground prison long ago, in a great crowd, from Hamelin town in Brunswick land, though they do not know how or why.

So, children, let us always settle our debts with everyone, and especially with pipers. And whether they pipe us free from rats or from mice, if we have promised them something, let us keep our promise!

Where this story comes from

The Pied Piper belongs to Hamelin’s German legendary tradition, associated with the loss of 130 children in 1284. The Brothers Grimm included “The Children of Hameln” in German Legends (1816). This prose retelling follows Robert Browning’s 1842 poem. Its details should be distinguished from both the town’s earlier tradition and a verified account of an actual disappearance.

Browning dates the event to 1376 and adds the lame boy left behind. The ending, where the Piper is never seen again, is the old legend’s ending too. Browning closes with a lesson about promises. The children’s innocence also makes it possible to question the revenge. Hamelin’s official account says the old church window connected with the legend was lost around 1660.

Read the original: Robert Browning, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, illustrated by Kate Greenaway (Project Gutenberg)

Suggested for ages 9–12 with an adult: includes rats drowning and children taken away permanently, with a surviving child grieving their loss.

The children did not make the bargain

The mayor’s refusal is dishonest, but the Piper takes children who had no part in setting or withholding his fee. That gap makes the revenge disturbing rather than just. Browning’s final lesson about promises does not exhaust the ethical questions his plot creates.

The two survivors also hear different promises in the music: the rat imagines food, while the boy imagines a transformed world and a healed foot. Their accounts reveal how the tune works on desire, and the boy’s grief prevents being left behind from becoming a simple happy rescue.

Hear the tune from two viewpoints

List what the rat and boy think the Piper offers. Compare those imagined futures with what the town actually loses. Then identify who broke the contract and who paid for it.

Talk about it

• How did the Piper get rid of the rats?
• Why did the Mayor refuse to pay? Was he right that it was a “joke”?
• How do you think the lame boy felt, being left behind?

Related stories

• The Bremen Town Musicians — another German tale with music at its heart
• Rumpelstiltskin — a German tale about a bargain and a promise
• The Golden Goose — a Grimm tale where a crowd follows one young man