The Irish Piper Went to Hamelin and Made a Big Impact...

On my favorite Irish Rovers album, the hard-to-find Tales to Warm Your Mind, the lads sing a song entitled The Minstrel of Cranberry Lane. This ballad does not involve rats, but it does feature an eccentric, exceptionally talented gentleman who lures children away from the prosaic town that so stifles them. It’s clear our sympathies are meant to lie with the singer.

I was interested, as I read the note at the back of Jim Latimer’s The Irish Piper, to discover that in the first stories about the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the piper merely breezes into town and lures away the children, without the motivation of having been cheated out of pay for a job well done with the rats. It makes the Rovers’ song seem even more connected to the story than before.

The Irish Piper, which is illustrated by John O’Brien, sticks more closely to Robert Browning’s version of the story than that, but this version is written in prose rather than rhyme, and it includes some very specific details about the musician’s origins and the type of music he might have played. Latimer also takes the liberty of making the mayor into a woman, which surprised me a bit as the story takes place hundreds of years ago, and of introducing a love interest for the piper.

Like Browning’s tale, Latimer’s is sprinkled with quite a bit of humor, and on the whole it’s not as dark. For instance, the story never confirms that the rats the piper leads away from town are drowned in the river; rather, it implies that he merely directs them to some distant land where they might make a life for themselves without being such nuisances.

Additionally, not only are the members of the town council disdainful of their hero, they badmouth their own children. In an amusing twist, they are already familiar with stories of the piper recruiting children, but they are convinced that such things would not happen in real life, especially since the kids are “mostly brats” and surely wouldn’t be much fun to travel with. In light of this kind of talk, it’s little wonder the children would be eager for a chance to get out of town.

As an enthusiast of Irish music, I can definitely buy into the author’s notion that the music of Country Clare “is magical and alluring... has grace and freedom... has breathless energy and heart-stopping rhythm... might easily have charmed all of the rats and all of the children of Hamelin.” He describes the music’s effects beautifully, too, talking about how he his sad songs “could make a group of gruff, grown men suddenly burst into tears” and his strong marches could “cause little husbands to stand up and talk back to their wives, even when the wives were blacksmiths and hammer throwers.” To say nothing of his “flying” music, and his extra-special “cheese-and-bacon” reel, intended for the rats, and “balloon-and-butterfly” jig, meant for the children.

O’Brien’s illustrations have an antiquated look about them and seem to have been done at least in part with a thought for imitating Kate Greenaway’s style in the iconic Robert Browning version. The colors are a bit on the drab side, but the pictures are detailed and, like the writing, have touches of humor. Still, as with Browning, it’s the particular way in which this very old story is written that really tickles my fancy. If it’s a tale that’s ever appealed to you, check out The Irish Piper this St. Patrick’s Day and allow his music to carry you away.

Robert Browning's Pied Piper of Hamelin Is Pensive But Playful

The Pied Piper of Hamelin is one of those stories I’ve known for longer than I can remember. I’ve encountered the tale in various forms, found it referenced in L. M. Montgomery’s later Anne of Green Gables books and been enchanted by The Minstrel of Cranberry Lane, an Irish Rovers song that treads similar ground despite the lack of rats to start things off. But I’d never read the famous version of the story by poet Robert Browning, and recently I decided to correct that after encountering the title in 1001 Children’s Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up, a book that has given me a very long list of items to put on hold at the library.

I’ve always thought of The Pied Piper as a primarily sad story, especially for the parents who are left in a town devoid of children. It’s never entirely clear what happens to the youngsters who prance away after the merry sound of piping, but there is at least the possibility that they find themselves in a lovely land hidden from outsiders, as Kate Greenaway’s cover to this edition suggests. While portions of the poem are certainly tragic, Browning also emphasizes the humor of the events that lead up to the fateful disappearance of Hamelin’s children. His is a tale that often made me laugh out loud at his witty turns of phrase.

Browning presents his tale in 15 parts of unequal length. The first section consists of nine lines and is printed on the first page, while the second contains 11 lines and stretches across six pages, which accentuates the absurdity of the rats’ hold on this town. On one page a mother comforts her infant, who has been bitten by a rampaging rat; in another, a woman holds up a cheese upon which a rat has been snacking. These rodents “made nests inside men’s Sunday hats / And even spoiled the women’s chats / By drowning their speaking / With shrieking and squeaking / In fifty different sharps and flats.”

Just as amusing as the description of the rats is the depiction of the town council, a corrupt and ineffective bunch of buffoons who don’t know how to stop the infestation and who prove themselves woefully unethical when a solution to their problem manifests itself. The Mayor gets this unflattering portrait: “With the Corporation as he sat, / Looking little though wondrous fat; / Nor brighter was his eye, nor moister / Than a too-long-opened oyster, / Save when at noon his paunch grew mutinous / For a plate of turtle green and glutinous”. This isn’t a man we’re primed to like, and by the time the Piper comes along, his offer of an effective solution is so welcome, it’s hard to see him as a villain rather than a hero. And indeed, he comes across as humble and hard-working, asking a reasonable sum for his services and merely expecting that the Mayor will make good on the agreement when the job is done. Alas, he expects too much.

Browning offers a detail in his version I don’t recall hearing before - the testimony of a lone rat who survives the hypnotic effect of the Piper’s music and manages not to drown in the river that sweeps the rest of them away. The survivor rhapsodizes wistfully about the symphony of food-related sounds that tinkled in his ears when the Piper began to play: “I heard a sound as of scraping tripe, / And putting apples, wondrous ripe, / Into a cider-press’s gripe: / And a moving away of pickle-tub-boards, / And a leaving ajar of conserve-cupboards, / And a drawing the corks of train-oil-flasks, / And a breaking the hoops of butter-casks...”

So it is that we are left with two very distinct possibilities for what happens to the children whom the Piper, enraged by the mayor’s decision to pay him a pittance instead of the promised fee, lures from their homes with his music. Perhaps he draws them away into an idyllic wonderland such as that described by the lame little boy who is left standing alone, gazing morosely at the mountain as it swallows up every other child in the village. Or perhaps his vision is every bit the deceptive delusion the rats experience. Browning seems to suggest some combination of the two - that the children are led away not to doom but to grim captivity from which they manage to escape, though never to return to their own hometown.

Browning’s poem is pensive but playful and most artfully written, and Greenaway’s illustrations, while old-fashioned, are lively and full of personality. Particularly striking is the series of pages in which she illustrated, line by line, the twelfth section, during which the Piper uses his mysterious musical gift to draw away Hamelin’s children. Over the course of 17 pages, we see individuals and groups of children stop what they are doing and join the ever-growing throng, which stretches across two pages by the end of the section.

It’s a rather lengthy read at 47 pages, with many pages entirely filled with text, and as it was written in the 1800s, some of the words are likely to be unfamiliar to young readers. Additionally, those who are especially sensitive may be troubled by the darker elements of the story, including the mass extermination of the rats, despite its convenience to the townspeople. But this is an expertly written piece of literature, and it carries with it the important message that promises are not to be given lightly. If you haven’t encountered the Browning / Greenaway version of this centuries-old story, consider making a promise to yourself to read The Pied Piper of Hamelin - and then be sure you keep it!