Piper = Death – Children died of disease/natural disaster
Piper = Recruiter – Children leave on crusade/pilgrimage and never returned
Children = Emigrants
While I can see the plausibility/likelihood of the emigration hypothesis I don’t quite see how it fits with the rats? In that sense disease fits best: a town plagued by diseased rats, the rats either die but not before the weaker members of the town’s population die from it or in poisoning the rats the children are also accidentally poisoned. The Piper represents Death taking away the rats, but then also the children – perceived punishment for reneging on a bargain with who/whatever.
Or perhaps it’s just a story – if anything even happened it happened several hundred years ago so I guess we’ll never know.
Things like this make me wonder about how well our history of the present will survive in the future – every generation must see its advances in recording history as so far ahead of their predecessors but with our advances in technology we’re rendering storage media obsolete within years. I suppose the mighty Interweb/cloud computing mean that everything’s out there rather than rotting in dusty tomes or sitting locked away on unreadable discs but there’s a distinct Library of Babel factor to it. Perhaps the difficulties facing historians of the distant future will be an excess of information rather than a scarcity of it.
After amputation, the epidermis migrates to cover the stump in less than 12 hours, forming a structure called the apical epidermal cap…Motor neurons, muscle, and blood vessels grow with the regenerated limb, and reestablish the connections that were present prior to amputation. The time that this entire process takes varies according to the age of the animal, ranging from about a month to around three months in the adult and then the limb becomes fully functional.
Ōsanshōuo or Japanese Giant Salamander are frickin huge
And are pretty much living fossils. The Chinese Giant Salamander is even bigger but unfortunately both are critically endangered due to habitat loss, over-collection, and in the acse of the Chinese Giant Salamander it’s used in traditional Chinese medicine and considered something of a delicacy.
Finally…
As any good medieval bestiary will tell you Salamanders are impervious to flame, even Aristotle believed that the salamander, ‘not only walks through the fire, but puts it out in doing so.’ (not actually true)
And as a result of the misconception, when asbestos was discovered it was thought to be the wool of the salamander – Pope Alexander III had a tunic made from it (as did Prester John, but he’s made up)
