Fantasy
Hannes is trained in magical piping by the Piper's Guild. Like other medieval guilds, the Piper's Guild allows workers of one trade to help support one another. The difference is the pipers are no ordinary tradesmen. They use magic to promote justice and mercy wherever they go, and live on the rewards they sometimes receive for the help they give.
Their magical flutes are similar to recorders in that they are played in front, rather than to the side, like a modern flute. The ends are flared, like the ends of trumpets, and there are no stops; everything is done with the fingers.
The pipers use these magical flutes to enter the Pipeworld. Though the pipers never leave the real world (at least not in The Rats of Hamelin), access to the Pipeworld lets them operate in another dimension, layered on top of the world everyone else experiences. In the Pipeworld, pipers use their music and their minds to pull objects with invisible strings, transfer illness from others to themselves, freeze things, summon lightning, control animals, and cast terrible curses. They can also feel other people's souls in the Pipeworld; and if they understand someone's feelings well enough, they can enter that person's mind and experience the memories associated with those feelings. The state of a piper's own mind or soul is very important in the Pipeworld. Spells cast by a piper who has not resolved inner conflicts are vulnerable to attack and theft.
In an address to middle-schoolers in Virginia Beach, Virginia, Adam McCune traced the inspiration of the Childrule curse (from the end of the book) to Isaiah 3:4 in the Bible. In the New International Version, the verse reads, "I will make boys their officials; mere children will govern them."
Interestingly, in addition to the curses that pipers cast, which have obvious effects and take place immediately, there is another kind of curse in The Rats of Hamelin: the one pronounced by the Old Woman of Aerzen. Though there is no reason to think that the Old Woman has magical powers, she nonetheless foretells a curse that eventually takes place.
Read more about this topic: The Rats Of Hamelin
Famous quotes containing the word fantasy:
“Religion is doing; a man does not merely think his religion or feel it, he “lives” his religion as much as he is able, otherwise it is not religion but fantasy or philosophy.”
—George Gurdjieff (c. 1877–1949)
“The search for conspiracy only increases the elements of morbidity and paranoia and fantasy in this country. It romanticizes crimes that are terrible because of their lack of purpose. It obscures our necessary understanding, all of us, that in this life there is often tragedy without reason.”
—Anthony Lewis (b. 1927)