China Had Its Pied Piper As Well As Germany

Radio Record, Volume XII, Issue 35, 10 February 1939, Page 6

China Had Its Pied Piper As Well As Germany

Browning Uninterested In His Poem

CHOOL boys and school girls sometimes perform a feat of memory by reciting Robert Browning’s "Pied Piper of Hamelin," without a single mistake or breaking down. Not many of them know that the legend is but a variant of similar ones which come from _ other places both in Germany and China. Browning’s "Piper" was named Bunting, from his dress. He undertook, for a certain sum of money, to free the town of Hamelin, in Brunswick, of the rats which infested it; but when he had drowned all the rats in the river Weser, the townsmen refused to pay the sum agreed upon. The piper, in revenge, collected all the children of Hame’in and enticed them by his piping into a cavern in the side of the mountain Koppenberg, which instantly closed upon them, and 130 went down alive into the pit (June 26, 1284). The street through which Bunting conducted his victims was. Bungen, and from that day to this no music is ever allowed to be played in this particular street,

The Chinese legend depicts a dwarf piping the rats into the river. Retribution for non-pay-ment of the agreed-upon fee was exac’ " by an old black woman, fifty feet high, who on four su¢ cessive days strangled of the principal women. On the fifth day she led forty others to a magic tower, into which she drove them, and from which they 1.-ver again emerged. Robert Browning wrote "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" to amuse William Macready’s little boy in illness, that he might draw pic tures to illustrate it. The poet thought so little of it, that but for his sister, and his friend Alfred Domett, a poet who was to emigrate to New Zealand and become Prime Minister, this most spirited and-popular narrative poem woutd never have seen the light. "The Pied Piper" has at length come in for the attentions of Walt Disney, who built a Silly Symphony around it. ‘4 2YA listeners heard a recording of "The Pied Piper" recently.