Last night I read Molli Malou one of a series of Danish fairy-tale books we’ve been working through lately. It was (in Danish) called “The Rat-Catcher of Hameln,” which I had never heard of.
I thought she’d heard enough Danish from me lately, so I translated to English on the fly. That’s not an easy thing to do at a pace that keeps a five-year-old content, but I can usually manage – but it prevents me from thinking about much more than how to translate the next sentence.
The story opens in the village of Hameln, which is utterly overrun by rats. They’re everywhere, and the book details this with comic images. Rats in shoes, in pockets, in closets, in bowls of soup, in cups of tea. The people appeal to their mayor and his council.
“We’ve tried everything,” the mayor says, “poison, traps, cats, dogs, everything. And nothing works. I don’t know what to do.”
His council is of no help.
Then this guy, this rat-catcher in a clown suit – clown like Harlequin, not like bozo – and carrying a flute shows up. He tells the mayor he can rid Hameln of all the rats by midnight that night but wants to know what his reward will be.
“One dollar per head,” the mayor says.
The rat-catcher consents to this deal and leaves. The council is aghast: there could be hundreds of thousands or even millions of rats! How could they afford such a fee?
“Leave it to the mayor,” says the snarky mayor.
Now we’re told about the rat-catcher: how he rid one city of bats and another of grashoopers, and how all he ever used was his flute.
Anyway, he starts playing his flute in the city square. All the rats are enchanted and follow him. They follow him out to the river, where they dive in and are swallowed into the whirlpool. The king of the rats is the last one, and is carrying a big book that’s a kind of rat census.
“How many rats are there?” the rat-catcher asks.
“999,999,” says the rat king – then he, too, dives in to the oblivion of the river.
The rat-catcher goes to fetch his reward.
“That’s 999,999 dollars,” he tells the mayor.
“Very good. Show me their heads and you’ll have your fee.”
The rat-catcher says the heads are all in the river.
The king says no deal: the agreement was a dollar per HEAD. He offers the rat-catcher 50 bucks to show he’s not ungrateful.
The rat-catcher refuses the money.
“Hmm,” I say to Molli Malou, as I’m finally catching on, “I think in English we call this story the Pied Piper.”
“Keep going,” she says.
Well, the Rat-Catcher shows up in the town square on Sunday when all the townspeople are in church. He plays his flute and all the kids come swarming around him. He leads them out into the woods, up a mountain, and into a cave, whose portal shuts behind them.
One kid broke his leg on the journey and didn’t make it into the cave in time.
And I’m thinking, “Hm, not many pages left, wonder how they’re gonna wrap this up?”
I’m thinking, “Surely the kid with the broken leg will tell the parents what happened, they’ll go up to the cave, and the Pied Piper will free the children now that they’ve learned their lesson. Maybe they’ll even make him mayor.”
Imagine my surprise when I translate the last paragraph on the last page and hear it go something like this:
“The poor little boy who broke his leg cried and cried because all the other children were gone and he had no one to play with. And the whole village was sad forever, because the children were never heard from again.”
I may have gasped.
“Daddy, that’s not a good ending,” Molli Malou said flatly, stiffening.
“Jesus Christ,” I exclaimed absently, urgently clawing at the endpage of the book in the hopes some hitherto unseen page would magically appear.
“Oh my god, that’s a really BAD ending,” Molli Malou said. Her voice was tremulous.
“I’m sorry, hon, I didn’t know, I really–”
“It’s the dumb rat-catcher’s fault because he took the children away!” Molli Malou was sitting up now, angry, indignant. “He’s a stupid man! He’s BAD! I hate him!”
“Well, yes, but the mayor tried to trick him, the mayor broke his promise and so…”
“Yes, it was the mayor, he tried to trick the rat-catcher, but the rat-catcher was bad because he took the kids away, and you can’t do that daddy. You can’t! YOU CAN’T!”
“No. That’s right. And it just shows, you should never follow a stranger, ever.”
My impromptu moralizing was ignored.
“You better read me a happy story, Daddy. Read Pinkalicious.”
And so we dove into the familiar saccharine-sweet world of Pinkalicious and she eventually fell into untroubled slumber.
Moral: know how the book ends before you read it to a child.
I should point that in the original many fairy tales have very different endings than our Disneyified versions.
In some ways it helps kids to know there are bad folks out there.
AML
Dad
That's an adorable story but a really c_____ book. How can they publish something with an ending like that.
Good for Molli Malou for being angry. Go girl!