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The Pied Piper: A Handbook. By Wolfgang Mieder. Greenwood Folklore Handbooks. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007. Pp. xi + 189, illustrations, glossary, bibliography, Web resources, index.)
The story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin (der Rattenfänger von Hameln, literally meaning "the rat catcher of Hamelin") is short and easily retold: in 1284, the town of Hamelin in Germany was plagued by rats and hired a piper dressed in colorful clothes to get rid of them. He played the pipe and led the rats out of the town to drown in a nearby river. However, the town fathers refused to pay him his fee, so he played his pipe again, this time leading 130 children out of the town as revenge. And yet, despite (or perhaps because of) its brevity, the story of the Pied Piper has served as inspiration for numerous stories, poems, artworks, and advertisements, among others. To cite a few relevant examples, poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Robert Browning, Bertolt Brecht, and Ambrose Bierce are rooted in the tale; a variety of cartoons inspired by the story have appeared in periodicals like The New Yorker; and the Pied Piper has been used to hawk toys, computers, automobiles, and pest control, among other products. Beyond this, numerous scholarly studies of the legend have appeared; the town of Hamelin bills itself as "the Pied Piper's town" (e.g., on the town website, http://www.hameln .com/) and has developed a substantial tourist industry based on the legend; and "pied piping" has been adopted as a technical term in theoretical linguistics. There is, however, relatively little scholarship on the Pied Piper available in English. The volume reviewed here, one of the Greenwood Folklore Handbooks, aims to fill that gap. The author, Wolfgang Mieder, professor of German at the...