Priča o čarobnom frulašu u djelima Jacoba i Wilhelma Grimma i Roberta Browninga

Fairy tales are stories that aim to entertain and teach children valuable life lessons. One such fairy tale would be the story of the Pied Piper. Most people know the following version of the story. Once upon a time, rats were plaguing a town. The citizens were at their wits’ end trying to figure out how to get rid of them. Then, one day, a man comes to the town offering them help in exchange for a certain sum of money. The town agrees to the bargain and the man enchants all the rats by playing on his magic pipe thus leading all the rats away. However, when he comes back for his deserved payment, the town dismisses the deal that they had previously made with the Piper. The Piper, now angry, plays on his pipe again and this time, instead of rats, all the town’s children follow him out of the town never to be seen again. The moral of the story is to keep one’s promises, and the tale even inspired an idiomatic phrase “pay the piper.” Rarely does one stop and wonder where the story itself came from or whether there is some truth behind it. This paper will explore how German fairy tale collectors Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and the Victorian poet Robert Browning depicted the story in order to show how their contemporary worlds inspired their respective versions of the story: one nationalist, the other religious – both in the Christian sense and in the sense of natural worship. This paper will also highlight the, sometimes neglected, profundity of children’s literature