They Were Already Arguing About It
Hazel Johnson 
Were scholars asking the same questions about the Pied Piper 300 years ago?
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I spend a lot of my time asking questions about evidence..
✦ Where did this particular detail in the Pied Piper story come from?
✦ Can we trust it?
✦ Is this writer actually giving us new information, or just repeating somebody else?
✦ If part of an account is clearly fabulous or incredible, does that mean we should dismiss the whole thing?
They're the sort of questions I ask constantly while researching the story.
What I hadn't realised until recently was that some scholars were asking remarkably similar questions more than three hundred years ago.
Until now, I'd tended to think of these early writers mainly in terms of the explanations they offered for the disappearance of the children; One thought they went here, another thought they went there, somebody else blamed something supernatural.
But that's not quite what was happening.
Some of them were doing something much more recognisable; They were looking at the evidence available to them: They compared earlier accounts, questioned inherited traditions, considered whether particular claims were credible and disagreed with other scholars' conclusions.
In other words, they were trying to work out what the evidence could actually tell them.
Which is pretty much what I'm trying to do now.
And, naturally, they couldn't agree either.
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Everyone had an opinion
Take Transylvania.
By the seventeenth century, there was already a theory connecting the missing children of Hamelin with the German-speaking population of Transylvania.
Some writers supported the idea - Georg Kreckwitz, for example, presented the connection positively in 1688.
Others explicitly rejected it, including Laurentius Toppeltinus in 1667 and Christian Franz Paullini in 1697.
So this wasn't simply an explanation that appeared in an old book and was repeated ever afterwards. It was being discussed, challenged and rejected.
Then there was the supernatural explanation.
Martin Schoock was discussing, and rejecting, diabolical explanations in 1659.
But while checking some earlier sources, I came across something older: a Latin poem printed by Heinrich Kornmann in 1614 which explicitly describes the disappearance of the Hamelin children in terms of Satan's deception and snares.
So apparently the Devil had joined the debate by 1614.
He gets everywhere.
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But what if the story had changed?
This is where things became much more interesting to me.
In 1688, Heinrich Vagedes wasn't simply choosing between competing explanations for where the children went. He was thinking about what happens to traditions over time.
Circumstances are forgotten. Stories are passed on. Details change.
In other words, perhaps the story people were telling in the seventeenth century wasn't quite the story that had begun centuries earlier.
That feels remarkably close to some of the questions I'm asking now.
Then, in 1705, an anonymous writer in the Auserlesene Anmerckungen seems to have been wrestling with an even more familiar problem: if fabulous elements have become attached to an account, does that mean the underlying event must also be false?
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An old argument
None of this brings us any closer to solving what happened in Hamelin in 1284.
But it has changed the way I think about the history of the story.
There wasn't simply an old tradition which everybody accepted until modern historians arrived and started asking difficult questions.
People much closer to the surviving early traditions were already examining the evidence and disagreeing about what could be believed.
They compared sources. They questioned traditions. They proposed explanations and challenged other people's conclusions. They wondered whether stories had become distorted over time. They tried to separate the credible from the fabulous.
And several centuries later, here I am asking:
Where did this detail come from?
Who said it first?
Can I trust it?
Has the story changed?
Apparently, I'm rather late to the argument.⠀
Hazel
The Hamelin Project
First published 19th August 2026
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Sources mentioned in this article
These are the early sources discussed in this journal entry in the order in which they appear.
Translated titles are provided in parenthesis for convenience.
- Georg Kreckwitz, Totius Principatus Transylvaniae Accurata Descriptio (An Accurate Description of the Principality of Transylvania), 1688, p. 13.
- Laurentius Toppeltinus, Origines et Occasus Transylvanorum (The Origins and Decline of the Transylvanians), 1667, p. 8 ff.
- Christian Franz Paullini, Zeitkürzende erbauliche Lust (Time-Shortening Edifying Delight), 1697, pp. 34–37.
- Martin Schoock, De Fabula Hamelensi (On the Hamelin Fable), 1659.
- Heinrich Kornmann, De Miraculis Vivorum (On the Wonders of Living Things), 1614, pp. 291–292.
- Heinrich Vagedes, Quaestiones Selectae (Selected Questions), 1688, pp. 11–12.
- Auserlesene Anmerckungen (Selected Observations), 1705, p. 336.
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The Hamelin Project Research Journal documents the ongoing process of researching the history behind the Pied Piper of Hamelin through original sources, archival research, translations, and historical scholarship.
Categories: : ❓ Questions & Myths, 📖 Research Diary
