The Pied Piper of Hamelin
Classical Stories · No. 70 — A town that wouldn't pay its debt, and the terrible price of the tune.
- Classical Stories
- 32 min
- Ages 8–13
- 7 chapters
About this audiobook
The town of Hamelin is plagued by rats — everywhere, into everything — until a stranger in a coat of many colors arrives and offers, for a fee, to rid them of the rats entirely. The town council agrees to a rich reward. The piper plays a haunting tune, and every rat in Hamelin follows him out of town and into the river, drowned. But when he returns for his payment, the council, safe now, laughs and offers a fraction of what they promised. So the piper plays again — a sweeter, stranger melody — and this time it is the children of Hamelin who come dancing out of their houses and follow him out of the town, through a door in the mountainside that closes behind them, gone. Only one or two children, left behind, remain to tell what a broken promise cost.
Why it's worth a listen
A town overrun with rats hires a strange piper in patchwork clothes who charms the rats away with a magical tune — and then refuses to pay him. So the piper plays a different melody, and this time it is not the rats who follow him out of Hamelin. A genuinely eerie medieval legend, unsettling and unforgettable, with a whisper of true history behind it.
A question to keep
What is owed when a promise is broken — and who ends up paying it?
Chapters
- The Gray Tide
- The Stranger in Patchwork
- The Song of the River
- The Broken Promise
- The Second Tune
- Into the Mountain
- The Silent Town