The Folklore of Discworld

corners of their minds, various half-remembered tales and no-longer-properly-believed beliefs which pop up again in the right circumstances. The tale of the shifting shop, for instance:
    Glod looked up at a blank wall.
    ‘I knew it!’ he said. ‘Didn’t I say? Magic! How many times have we heard this story? There’s a mysterious shop no one’sever seen before, and someone goes in and buys some rusty old curio, and it turns out to—’
    ‘Glod—’
    ‘—some kind of talisman or a bottle full of genie, and then when there’s trouble they go back and the shop—’
    ‘Glod—?’
    ‘—has mysteriously disappeared and gone back to whatever dimension it came from— yes, what is it?’
    ‘You’re on the wrong side of the road. It’s over here.’ [ Soul Music ]
    But in fact Glod was right. This shop was magic, and contained, among other things, a flute which you mustn’t blow unless you want to be knee-deep in rats, a trumpet which can make the world end and the sky fall down, and a gong which can make seven hundred and seventy-seven skeletal warriors spring up out of the earth. Two out of the three would work on Earth too. Not the gong, since according to Greek myth, the correct way to make warriors spring up out of the earth is to sow the ground with dragon’s teeth, as the heroes Cadmus and Jason did. But the Bible does mention a Last Trump with which, according to prophecy, an angel will announce that Doomsday has come; and the flute is clearly a pair to the fife with which the Pied Piper of Hamlin summoned rats.
    The Hamlin story is a fine example of the weird power of narrativium. It seems reasonably certain that something did happen in the German town of Hamlin in 1284, something involving a stranger and the children of the town, and that everyone found it very upsetting. There are sober, reliable chronicles, written less than a hundred years after the event, which declare that someone marched into the town on 26 June in 1284 and marched away with 130 of its children. But they do not say anything about rats, or a pipe, or curiously coloured clothes. In fact, there’s no magic involved at all. He marches in, he marches away, taking the children … that’s all there is to it, at first.
    But that won’t do. Surely, people thought, something so terrible as the loss of all those children must have more to it than that. It must be due to sorcery, or a punishment for some sin – or both. Now, it was widely believed throughout Europe that some men had an uncanny power over snakes, or rats, or mice; they would summon the vermin by playing on a flute or pipe, and then lead them into deep water or order them to leap into a bonfire, and so destroy them all. Perhaps a man who could lure rats could also lure children? Could one of these legendary ratcatchers have come to Hamlin in great-great-grandfather’s time? Could something have angered him? Maybe the townsfolk tried to cheat him of his pay, and he took his revenge?
    And so the story of the Pied Piper was born. Back in 1284, people said, the town had been overrun with rats, until a stranger arrived, proclaiming himself a ratcatcher. He was dressed in a multi-coloured coat and carried a small fife, so they called him the Pied Piper, and promised him a great deal of money if he would help them. As soon as he started playing rats came running out of every house, and followed him as he marched out of town. He led them down to the river Weser and waded in; they followed, and drowned. But then the citizens regretted having promised so much money, so they made excuses not to pay, and he went off in a furious rage. On 26 June he returned, this time dressed as a hunter. Again he played his fife, but this time it was children who came running to him, and he led them out of the town, where they disappeared with him into a cave in a mountain, and were never seen again – though some said they came out alive, hundreds of miles away, in Transylvania.
    By the middle of the sixteenth century this had become the official explanation. The Mayor had the entire story illustrated in stained-glass windows in the main church; a new city gate erected in 1556 carried an inscription stating that it was put up ‘272 years after the sorcerer abducted 130 children’; another inscription on the City Hall commemorated ‘130 children lost by a piper inside a mountain’.
    Of course, there are always some people who prefer a rationalexplanation to a magical one. With the