"Children's" Tales

The Pocket University selection for September 17th is a poem by Robert Browning.  I expect most everyone is familiar with the tale told in this poem, but I for one did not read it in the form of a poem originally.

Robert Browning was born in 1812 in a London suburb, and died in 1889.  The selected poem is a rendition of the familiar story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.  In the Browning version, published around 1842, the tale follows what for me is the conventional storyline:  A village overrun by rats is de-infested by the Pied Piper using a mystical pipe, but the town leaders refuse to pay him the agreed amount once he is done, so he pipes the children out of town.  Here, my memory of this tale ends, I did not know what happened to the children.  I frankly thought, and perhaps it happened this way in the version I read as a child, that the townspeople recanted, paid him, and the children were returned.

The literary history of the tale, however, is somewhat darker.  In the Browning version, which is quite fairy tale-like, the children follow the piper into a magical portal or gateway that closes behind them, and they are never seen or heard from again.  One lame child is left behind who explains what he heard in the music, about a magical land of plenty and joy.

Other versions of the story have the piper drowning the children in the Weser River, where he had previously drowned the rats, or piping them away into a cave or other inaccessible location and, pardon the euphemism, "had his wicked way with them".  Both much darker endings than what I was familiar with.  Definitely not the children's tale I learned.  The rats apparently did not enter the Pied Piper story until sometime around 1559.

According to this article on wikipedia, there may apparently be some historical basis to the story.  The town Hamelin does exist, and somewhere in the 1300s something may have happened to the children of the town, though the actual event is not known.  Possible theories involve the children of Hamelin dying of the black death, being sold or recruited into a military or resettlement campaign, etc.

Again from the wikipedia article, a suggestion based on a 1621 account by Richard Burton, is forwarded by William Manchester in "A World Lit Only by Fire", in which the children of a town called Hammel are abducted and variously abused and slaughtered by a psychopathic pedophile in 1484.

I think I'll read some more Holinshed!

Comments are welcome, though moderated.