The Hamelin Project explores the history behind one of Europe’s most enduring legends: the disappearance of the children of Hamelin in 1284.  

Rather than asking only what the legend became, the project follows the evidence left behind by the people who have tried to explain it over the centuries.  

Through original sources, forgotten publications, translation and archival research, it explores not only the events themselves, but also the history of the scholarship that has shaped our understanding of them.

How it began

Every project has a beginning. Sometimes it begins with a clear plan.

Sometimes it begins with a question that quietly refuses to go away.

For me, it was the latter.

Like many people, I had known the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin for years. Yet the more I read, the more I realised that behind the familiar legend lay a remarkable history of investigation. For centuries, historians, scholars and local writers had all tried to answer the same question:

What really happened to the children of Hamelin? 

The deeper I looked, the more fascinating the journey became.

One name in particular kept drawing me back: Christoph Friedrich Fein, an eighteenth-century pastor in Hameln whose 1749 book Die entlarvte Fabel proposed an explanation that was both ambitious and surprisingly modern in its approach. What began as a simple translation project gradually became something much bigger.

Translating Fein’s work led to archive catalogues, forgotten family papers, inter-library loans, old maps, eighteenth-century correspondence, genealogical records and an ever-growing collection of books and manuscripts.

Along the way, I found myself asking new questions — not only about the legend itself, but about the history of the research surrounding it. Some discoveries answered existing questions. Others simply revealed better ones.

Following the evidence

The project combines historical research with the translation and study of primary sources, particularly those that have received little attention in the English-speaking world.

Alongside the legend itself, the research explores the lives of the scholars who investigated it, the libraries and archives that preserve their work, and the often surprising paths that historical research can take.  

The Hamelin Project is my attempt to follow those questions wherever the evidence leads.

Where the research is now

The current phase of the project centres on the work of Christoph Friedrich Fein (1705–1761) and his 1749 study Die entlarvte Fabel.

Alongside translating Fein’s work, I am examining his sources, correspondence and family history, and exploring how his interpretation fitted into — and was later overlooked by — the wider history of Hamelin scholarship.  

Meet Christoph Friedrich Fein →

An investigation still in progress

This website is not a finished work. It is a record of an ongoing journey through libraries, archives and historical sources.

Here I share the discoveries, the setbacks, the unexpected rabbit holes and the moments of excitement that make historical research such a rewarding adventure.  

Follow the investigation →