Every project has a beginning

Sometimes it begins with a clear plan.
Sometimes it begins with a question that quietly refuses to go away.  

For me, it was the latter.  
Like many people, I had known the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin for years.
Yet the more I read, the more I realised that behind the familiar legend lay a remarkable history of investigation. For centuries, historians, scholars and local writers had all tried to answer the same question:  

What really happened to the children of Hamelin?

The deeper I looked, the more fascinating the journey became.  

One name in particular kept drawing me back: Christoph Friedrich Fein, an eighteenth-century pastor in Hameln whose 1749 book Die entlarvte Fabel proposed an explanation that was both ambitious and surprisingly modern in its approach. Yet despite the originality of his work, Fein himself had largely faded into obscurity.  

What began as a simple translation project gradually became something much bigger.  

Translating Fein's work led to archive catalogues, forgotten family papers, inter-library loans, old maps, eighteenth-century correspondence, genealogical records and an ever-growing collection of books and manuscripts. Along the way, I found myself asking new questions—not only about the legend itself, but about the history of the research surrounding it.  

Some discoveries answered existing questions. Others simply revealed better ones.  

The Hamelin Project is my attempt to follow those questions wherever the evidence leads.  

This website is not a finished work. It is a record of an ongoing journey through libraries, archives and historical sources. Here I share the discoveries, the setbacks, the unexpected rabbit holes and the moments of excitement that make historical research such a rewarding adventure. 

Thank you for visiting. I hope you'll enjoy following the evidence with me.