wizards thinking of clerics as hacks cause we spent years of study learning the secrets of the universe they cheated and got a god to do their magic for them
clerics thinking of wizards as hacks cause we spent years serving and cultivating a deeply personal relationship with a god they copied down some cheat codes to make stuff blow up
And sorcerers are like “no wait, hold on. This is basically a curse. I’ve been *experiencing* magic against my will since I was born and it’s hurt a lot of people.”
… and then everyone glares at the warlock in the corner. Their response: “Yeah, no. That’s fair. I blew Cthulhu in the parking lot behind the McDonald’s and now I can do magic. Best deal ever. You all can (and should) suck it.”
“Isn’t it weird that [thing humans commonly eat] is poisonous to literally every domesticated animal” I mean, there’s a pretty good chance that [thing humans commonly eat] is at least mildly poisonous to humans, too. One of our quirks as a species is that we think our food is bland if it doesn’t have enough poison in it.
Humans have a really weird mix of mundane superpowers.
We’re not fast and don’t have a lot of natural weaponry but we’re bizarrely tolerant to a broad range of toxins to the point that one toxin is considered a morning necessity for some to perform at work. Gotta love us.
Yeah. The Hamelin town records literally begin in 1384 with the phrase “it is 100 years since our children left.” The first known record, dating circa 1300, was a stained glass window in a local church commemorating the event. It was destroyed in the 1660s, but enough written and even painted records survive that it was possible to make a reconstruction of it:
(Credit to Hans Dobberton.)
To give you an idea of how accurate this reconstruction might be, by the way, here’s a drawing from 1592 in which the Piper shown is the one from the window:
Written references to the story up through the 1500s are astonishing in number. “Astonishing?” Well. This wasn’t London or Rome. These people were not royalty, nobility, or even gentry. They were peasants and working people. And yet we have this commissioned window only sixteen years after the event, plus a further three either surviving or “we don’t have the original original but we have copies or attestations of the original” written records, and also the records of Hamelin itself. All agree on the date–1284–and the number of taken children–130. In 1816 we see the Brothers Grimm documenting the story in their first compilation of folktales*, which drew on eleven different past sources (which is more than the total amount I’ve found in research, meaning they either had more sources in German, some of their sources are now lost, or both). A now-lost choirbook actually contained a written eyewitness account, which we can no longer check against the other surviving records (because it was, you know, lost), but which is attested in other sources. We even know who it belonged to: Johannes de Lüde, whose mother was the eyewitness.
The oldest known surviving account–beyond that heartbreaking line at the beginning of the Hamelin town history–dates to 1440-50, and actually used the inscription on that stained-glass window to affirm the exact date–the children left or were taken from the town on 26 June 1284.
I would like to pause here to say that the amount of documentation we have for the story is frankly insane, given the time period and the fact that Hamelin was just a town built around a monastery (that doesn’t even seem to have still existed at the time of the story). The earliest record we have of its population is in 1689, when it had just 2400 people; it’s reasonable to assume that at the time of the tale, there were only a few hundred. And there were seven hundred years for these texts to get lost, and many probably did–it’s reasonable to assume the local church had birth and death records that would have told us whether the children died or just vanished, for example, but those records were probably destroyed along with the church in 1660. Hamelin has been invaded due to acts of war several times. Being a German town, there’s literally no telling what records of the place Hitler might have destroyed. That we still have this much record of a single event in a small town speaks to how catastrophic the event truly was, given the time period. Like just so we’re clear, England wasn’t yet fully unified when this was happening and the age of Vikings was only 200 years past. When I say it’s astonishing we have this many records (especially coming out of Europe at the time), it’s fucking astonishing.
So what actually happened to the children? Unfortunately, this is the point at which we know it’s nonfiction because fiction would never have such an unsatisfying ending: we don’t know. Some research has been done that suggests the lost “children” were actually teenagers who just…migrated somewhere else, or went on a Children’s Crusade, and there is some evidence to support both these theories. Earlier theories that the children died in a plague don’t hold up–this theory says that the place from which “they were not seen again” would have been their mass grave, but there’s no indication of any such grave existing, and also, let’s not insult the medieval Germans that way, shall we? They knew the difference between “left” and “died.” If it was a mass death (somehow, of only children), they would have said “our children died.” Or, if they were feeling poetic, something like “our children were taken from us by the hand of the Lord.” Any theory that relies on our medieval counterparts being fucking morons doesn’t hold a whole lot of weight.
Now.
Regardless of whether I was able to give you an actual end to the story, isn’t that a whole fucking lot more interesting than Heinrich Himmler?
*I know we think of them as writing fairy tales, but actually they were more in the business of writing them down. The Grimms were actually scholars.
ALT
