History
The Rats of Hamelin is set mostly in the year 1284. At this time, Germany was the Holy Roman Empire, a group of dukedoms loosely united under an emperor. That is why there is talk of involving the Duke of Braunschweig (Brunswick) when a capital crime is committed.
In the backstory of the novel is the Children's Crusade of 1212. This really took place, and the fictional character of the Old Woman of Aerzen is like many real parents who lost their children.
The German cities of Hamelin, Aerzen, (Hessisch-)Oldendorf, and Koeln (Cologne) are real cities, although there may not have been manors with serfs near Aerzen and Oldendorf, and Koeln is not known to have housed a Piper's Guild.
The Pied Piper himself seems to have some historical basis, and is thus a figure of history as well as legend. The Lueneberg Manuscript of 1450, which serves as an epigraph for the novel, sums up the little we know historically about him: "In the year 1284, on the days of John and Paul, the 26th of June, a piper clothed in various colors came and led away 130 children born in Hamelin to Calvary on the Koppen."
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“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
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