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| Petrus and Catherine Gonsalvus may have been the real inspiration for "Beauty and the Beast". |
The first story I want to talk about the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Everyone knows this story. A medieval town is overrun by rats so the people hire a piper to lead them away. He plays his magic pipe and the rats follow him all the way to a river where they drown. But when the piper asks the townspeople to pay him they refuse. That's a strange part of the story. Why were these people unwilling to pay for the service they requested?
Anyway the piper came back and played his magic pipe again. This time all the children in the town followed him down the road. He led them to a nearby mountain where a great cavern opened up. The townspeople followed the children, calling out their names. But the kids didn't respond to their parents. They marched into the giant cavern and it closed behind them.
There really is a town called Hamelin and it honors the legend of the lost children. A historian named Frank Soural argues that Hamelin's children simply answered a call to go build a new town in Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic. This is not as sad and tragic a tale as a mountain swallowing all the kids, but it must have been sad for their families to see them go.
I used to wonder if Hamelin's children died in a plague but there is no record of the plague in Germany in the late 1200s, when the 130 children left the town.
The second story I have in mind is the legend of Mulan. Historians cannot decide whether a historical Mulan existed or not. Her story is traced back to the 500s. The legend was very close to the Disney movie. Mulan took her father's place in the army when war broke out because he was very old. She served faithfully for 10 years and then returned home. She is said to have dressed as a woman before her fellow soldiers left so that they could see who she truly was.
Mulan's story became an important tale in Chinese folklore and it inspired at least one dramatic adaptation by in Chinese theater. Some later versions of the legend include her love interest. The Disney movie doesn't change all that much about the supposed historical details of the fully developed legend of Mulan.
Another great story is the tale of Beauty and the Beast. This fairy tale was written by French novelist Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve and published in 1740. Scholars have thought for hundreds of years that de Villeneuve simply made it all up. It's a fantastic story about a beautiful young girl who takes her father's place in a castle owned by a great beast. She eventually falls in love with him.
But now historical research suggests that the story may have been inspired by the real life tale of Petrus Gonsalvus. He was born with hypertrichosis, a disease that causes hair to grow all over one's body. Petrus lived from the 1530s to about 1618. He was taken to the court of Henry II of France and eventually sent to the Netherlands. He married a young woman named Catherine. They had seven children, of whom four also suffered from hypertrichosis.
The last fairy tale I want to share is the story of Beowulf. He was a great warrior from a Swedish tribe called the Geats. The Geats were a real people and many of the people and events mentioned in the "Beowulf" poem were real, historical people and events. But Beowulf himself doesn't seem to have existed. Scholars believe that "Beowulf" was composed by an Anglo-Saxon poet no earlier than the 500s.
There are so many interesting things about Beowulf's world. It's like someone wrote a historical novel or a modern fantasy tale for the Anglo-Saxons. Maybe there are older legends that inspired "Beowulf" but for now scholars believe that the poem incorporates real events as a background.
These fairy tales are kind of like glimpses of living history. They say that the "Iliad" is based on some fact too. The city of Troy was real and there is archaeological evidence that some of the events described in the poem really happened. But the people of the story may not have been real. Homer may have made up some names to fill in the blanks. He lived a couple hundred years after the Trojan War.
