Rather, the circularity tells the folklorists that
a folk culture is a dialectical process, the group and traditions defining one
another, and that it is always an empirical question whether a given group
is a folk group.
a folk culture is a dialectical process, the group and traditions defining one
another, and that it is always an empirical question whether a given group
is a folk group.
Childens - Folklore
PREFACE
This book began when the late Sue Samuelson, my first teaching assistant
in 1977 for the children's folklore course at the University of Pennsylvania,
told me that it would not be possible to do a thesis in children's folklore
because there was absolutely no interest in children either at the American
Folklore Society (AFS) or in the Folklore Department at the university. What-
ever the truth of her indictment, it led me to approach Barbara Kirshenblatt-
Gimblett and Tom Burns (also of that department) with the proposal that
we begin a Children's Folklore Society within AFS. And we did just that.
The society continues with admirable autonomy, now issuing its own jour-
nal, Children's Folklore Review, under the editorship of C. W. Sullivan III.
The idea for the second phase, which became the present work,
emerged one evening in 1980 at the annual Folklore Meeting. Jay Mechling,
Tom Johnson, and I decided that the next step in assisting children's
folklore to academic credibility would be the development of a handbook
for course use. It took about five years to find the authors and get the first
outlines of the present work on the table. For the next five years I used the
outline as a text in my children's folklore course and benefited immeasur-
ably from the student critiques of it. During those ten years the manuscript
wandered in and out of the University of Pennsylvania Press and the Smith-
sonian Press, finally coming to rest at Garland Publishing, owing to the zest
of Garland editor Marie Ellen Larcada. From 1990 to the present, we all
suffered the vicissitudes of trying to get all this material into the computer.
Ultimately we were saved by Felicia R. McMahon of Syracuse Uni-
versity, who undertook the prodigious work of scholarly editorship to bring
the work to fruition-as well as to add materials from her own research.
Along the way it was decided that our work was not comprehensive enough
to be a handbook, but that it was a step in that direction and a useful first
sourcebook. Her efforts were aided greatly by the assistance of Dr. Nancy
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? ? Shawcross of the University of Pennsylvania and Professor Susan Wadley of
Syracuse University.
For my part, all of this was originally made possible because Barbara
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett had once suggested that a course I had taught for ten
years at Teachers College, Columbia University, which I entitled "The Psy-
chology of Childlore," be called "Children's Folklore" and brought to the
University of Pennsylvania. I did that for a year and then joined the Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania with appointments in both education and folklore, a
move made possible by the support of Kenneth Goldstein and Henry Glassie
of the Folklore Department and Dell Hymes and Erling Boe of the Educa-
tion School. I owe to all these people-and particularly to Barbara-a dis-
tinct debt of gratitude for the good life I've found and the interdisciplinary
flavor that became possible in my scholarship after that career change.
Brian Sutton-Smith
Xii PREFACE
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? ? CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
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? ?
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? ? INTRODUCTION
WHAT IS CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE?
Brian Sutton-Smith
Children's folklore is not easy to define. Folklore itself as a scholarly disci-
pline is in a process of transition. In earlier definitions, attention was given
predominantly to traditional stories, dances, proverbs, riddles, poetry, ma-
terial culture, and customs, passed on orally from generation to generation.
The emphasis was upon recording the "survivals" of an earlier way of life,
believed to be fading away. Attention, therefore, was on the antique, the
anonymous in origin, the collective in composition, and the simple in char-
acter (Ben-Amos 1971).
Today's definitions, by contrast, place more emphasis on the living char-
acter of these customs in peoples, whether tribal, ancient, ethnic, or modern.
Folklorists today are more concerned with the actual living performance of
these traditional materials (dance, song, tale) in their particular settings, with
their functional or aesthetic character in particular contexts. Unfortunately,
such "live" studies are more difficult to carry out than studies of collected
records or reports-and so we have very few of them. In the chapters that
follow, contributions range from attempts to catch contemporary children's
play and games (Zumwalt, McDowell, Beresin and Hughes) to surveys of col-
lected children's folklore (Sullivan, Roemer, Tucker, and Jorgensen). Most chap-
ters share some of both, the "contextual" and the "textual. "
THE RHETORICS OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
What these changes in the definition of folklore make clear is the relativity
of definitions of folklore to the scholarly rhetorics of a particular time and
place. Apparently, there is never going to be any final definition of children's
folklore (or of any other human subject matter). At any given time folklore
will be a cumulative subject, young scholars contending that their new per-
spectives are more valid than those of their predecessors. If we are lucky we
will have, as a result, an increasing number of excellent records to argue
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? ? about. What all children's folklorists seem to have in common, however, is
their interest in expressive rather than instrumental culture; in celebration
rather than work; and perhaps in humor rather than sobriety. There is also
the recurrent note of empathy that these folklorists appear to share with those
folk who are not in the mainstream of modern culture but who find them-
selves on its edge. Folklore is a "romantic" undertaking, still not divorced
from its antiquarian origins in the early 1800s. Whether or not current folk-
lorists are any more faithful to the "folk" than were the Brothers Grimm,
the identification lives on (Ellis 1983; Tatar 1992). For some of us childhood
itself is such an edge, and within its sometimes sullen joys we find also so-
lace for our idiosyncratic selves.
But children's folklore is primarily about children, and is therefore
heir to all the difficulties the concept of "childhood" has encountered in this
century. What seems remarkable about the chapters that follow is that the
children who appear in these pages are so different from the children who
appear almost everywhere else in twentieth-century social-science literature.
We can seek therefore to discover how the rhetoric of childhood in folklore
differs from that, for example, in psychology, where child development has
been a major subject. We must hurriedly add that there are many rhetorics
of childhood-a subject in the context of psychology we have dealt with else-
where (Sutton-Smith 1994). In the psychological literature, there is a rheto-
ric of children as relatively passive experimental subjects who become at-
tached to their parents, who begin to gain understanding of the world around
them, who progress through various steps in language development, in so-
cial development, and in moral development. They learn to relate to their
peers and to their teachers, and in due course they go through their physi-
cal, emotional, and intellectual growth and become adolescents. We hear
either of the extent to which their behavior is determined by patterns of child
rearing or sex-role stereotyping, or we hear about the inevitability of the
growth crises and growth sequences through which they pass.
What we do not hear about are the many ways in which they react
to or do not fit into these apparently normative schemes of socialization. It
is true that in this sober psychological literature the function of peer inter-
action and peer groups is said to be to socialize children into sex and ag-
gression. But we are not given any real sense of the antithetical character of
the events that such "socialization" might well and often does imply. It is
not that we are not given indications of extreme behavior such as child abuse,
infantile autism, and anorexia nervosa; it is just that these extremes are used,
if anything, to mark the regularity of normal and predictable patterns. By
emphasizing atypical extremes, the ordinary "extremities" of everyday life
4 INTRODUCTION
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? ? are overlooked in this psychological rhetoric. Given what Foucault has writ-
ten, even if perhaps exaggeratedly, about psychology and its use of clinical
and developmental information to empower its experts in the control of other
people's lives, it is hard to treat their doings as purely the science that they
think it is (Foucault 1973, 1987). It is hard not to agree that much of de-
velopmental and child psychology includes a set of political rhetorics about
childhood.
What the contents of this present Source Book seem to say, to the con-
trary of that psychological rhetoric of childhood, is that ordinary life is much
more marked by disruptive interest and reaction than the conventional psy-
chological or sociological story of child development usually brings to
our attention. Thus, the chapters that follow discuss the literature on ghosts,
verbal dueling, obscenity, graffiti, parties, levitation, slang, pranks, automo-
bile lore, autograph and yearbook verses, puns and parodies, special argots,
initiation rituals, folk speech, institutional legends, urine and excrement play,
toilet lore, panty raids, riots, fire play, food fights, recreational drug use,
jokes, insults, sex play, folk beliefs, skits, camp songs and verses, scoff lore,
hazing, rituals of separation and incorporation, school lore, types of play-
grounds, oral transmission, gaming rhetoric, forts, go-carts, toys, playthings,
empty lots, play equipment, oral legislation, wit and repartee, guile, riddles,
impropriety, nicknames, epithets, jeers and torments, half beliefs, calendrical
customs, fortune, partisanship, ambushes, telephone jokes, shockers, preju-
dice and scapegoating, fartlore, kissing games, superstitions, scaries, divina-
tion, mean play, Halloween and April Fool's Day, among many others. While
this miscellaneous list of items hardly adds up to an alternative rhetoric of
childhood, it does imply the need for a rhetoric that unites such Dionysian
or irrational elements with the Apollonian conventionalities of "normal"
childhood socialization theory (Spariosu 1989).
It is true that there are some modern psychologists who consider the
antithesis of the child and the aleatoric quality of life as important as the
predictability of growth and development, but they are by and large excep-
tional (Gergen 1982). Most social scientists of growth are caught into pre-
diction as the measure of their science, and therefore are not particularly
interested in, or tolerant of, the unpredictable waywardness of everyday child
behavior and the surreptitious antitheticality of child-instigated traditions
that are often the concern of the folklorist. What appears to have happened
is that the scientists of human development have taken an adult-centered view
of development within which they privilege the adult stages over the child-
hood ones. It is implicit in their writings that it is better to be at the moral
stage of conscience than at the earlier stage of fear of consequences; better
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? ? to have arrived at ego integrity than to be still concerned with ego autonomy;
better to be capable of adult genitality than of childhood latency. The "hero"
story they tell, however, is a story on behalf of adults. In its "scientific" char-
acter it does not acknowledge that this version of the classic Western "hero"
tale is a "vestige" of the theory of cultural evolution long rejected within
anthropology (see, for example, the chapter by Zumwalt in this volume).
It can be argued that the linear directionality in these theories of de-
velopment does disservice to our understanding of the gestaltlike character
and intrinsic qualities of each phase of child life. We constantly subsume
present activities to their utility for sober and sensible (hence conservative)
adult outcomes. By contrast, the present work pronounces so strongly that
what children find most enjoyable is often ecstatic or subversive: It is a rev-
elry of their own youthful actions that no longer seem profound or moving
to adults or it is an antithetical reaction to the institutional and everyday
hegemonies of the life about them.
RHETORICS OF PLAY
This brings us to the point where we acknowledge that children's folklore
is not only influenced by our underlying concepts of childhood, it is also
influenced by our underlying concepts of play, or some synthesis of the con-
cepts of childhood and those of play. More important, we must repeat that
we are not just dealing here with scientific concepts of two different kinds,
but rather with two rhetorics about how we should think about our schol-
arship. At this point it is useful to think of the possibility that large-scale,
historically derived attitudes and values can be seen as determiners of what
we think it is worthwhile to study and how we think we should go about
it. The rhetoric of developmental psychology, for example, seems to be the
familiar "rhetoric of progress" in the service of a conservative view of child
growth. It is a rhetoric highly influenced by the historical intellectual inher-
itance from the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and from the theory
of evolution in the nineteenth century.
The rhetoric of much of the chapters that follow with their celebra-
tion of childish culture, including childish protest, is as we have said, by
contrast, a rhetoric deriving from historical romanticism. We might call it a
rhetoric of play, as the imagination or as fancy. The faculty of the imagina-
tion, as Kant called it, however, has been tied too strongly to rationalistic
enterprises for explaining mental functions to be useful as a governing term.
We need some term that implies not only the creativity of the imagination
but also its irrational capacities. We are dealing not just with Shirley Temple
here, we are also dealing with Mad Magazine (Sutton-Smith 1988). Presum-
6 INTRODUCTION
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? ? ably some rhetorics of fancy underly not only folklore but are also influen-
tial throughout the arts and humanities in thought about play.
Elsewhere we have dealt with the two other rhetorics that seem to
share with these first two the larger part of the intellectual grasp of the world
of play; they have their impact in this volume also. These are the rhetoric
of power and the rhetoric of optimal experience. The first is a rhetoric of
play as power, contest, conflict, war, competition, hierarchy, hidden tran-
scripts, and so forth. It is a rhetoric that dominates the thinking about play
to be found in sport sociology, in mathematical game theory, and in anthro-
pology; in the present volume it is particularly apparent in the gaming analy-
ses of girls by Hughes. The second rhetoric is about the quality of optimal
experience (fun, flow, etc. ) in play; it is found in phenomenological writings
and in the leisure sciences. It has also become a popular way of thinking in
modern consumer culture where good experiences are said to be those that
allow for a choice, freedom, and fun, all of which are said to occur in play
(Sutton-Smith 1993).
The children in children's folklore as seen through the spectacles of
fancy or power are very different from children seen through the progress
rhetoric of psychology. In bringing them into view as we do in this work,
our own implicit rhetorical purpose is to ask our readers not to deny or re-
press this socially creative childhood that we have described. We ask them
to take fully the measure of the fact that if play is what is most important
to children, why is it we do so much to ignore that fact? Why is it we con-
tinue to combat in childhood that play that has become so central to the
childhood we have unwittingly created these past several hundred years?
This is not to say that the children's societies are not themselves of-
ten remarkably conservative, ritualistic, and governed by routine, as well as
manifesting moments of high fantasy and silly innovation (see McDowell,
below). Within their groups, children appear to be governed by a dialecti-
cal representation of the society of which they are a part (Zumwalt). They
capture its conservative organization and attitudes in their mimicry of moth-
ers and monsters, but at the same time they willfully caricature what they
thus represent. Both mimicry and mockery are the substance of child play
and children's folklore, at least as viewed through spectacles of a rhetoric
of fancy. Our rhetoric of children's folklore, then, is that it is a branch of
folklore characterized by that dialectical mimicry and mockery, performance
and parody, of which children seem to be especially capable, given their
adaptively neotonous and sociologically marginal characteristics.
Our rhetoric of children's folklore speaks also of their "own group
traditions," which raises the question, Just what are the folk groups to which
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? ? children belong? Folklorists have expanded considerably their definition of
the "folk group. " No longer reserving this term for isolated rural commu-
nity or urban enclave, most folklorists would agree with Alan Dundes's view
that a folk group consists of two or more people who share something in
common-language, occupation, religion, residence-and who share "tra-
ditions" that they consider important to their shared sense of identity
(Dundes 1965, 2). Folk groups should be small enough that each member
has, or could have, face-to-face interaction with every other member. That
means that folk groups could be fairly large, but the definition excludes
"groups" that are mere aggregations of individuals who share some element
but never interact so as to develop group traditions.
Children's folk groups, therefore, can be many and overlapping. The
smallest folk groups can be composed of playmates. These tiniest folk groups
often develop rich traditions of interaction (Oring 1986). The family sibling
group and the family itself are an important folk group, as folklorists are
coming to see (Sutton-Smith and Rosenberg 1970). Moving out in larger and
larger concentric circles, we see that the neighborhood, the street corner gang,
the play group, the school class, the Cub Scout den or Brownie troop, the
organized sports team, the "secret club," and so on are all likely folk groups
for the child and adolescent. And, as is true for adults, the child's constella-
tion of folk groups likely consists of a mix of the informal and the formal.
As several of the following chapters indicate, one feature of children's cul-
ture is the increasing organization of their folk groups and folk-group ac-
tivities by adults. And just as common is the child's resistance to that orga-
nization. The folklorist, for example, more readily assumes that he or she
will find a folk group at the "pickup" softball game at the neighborhood
sandlot than at the Little League stadium game. But, as Fine shows in his
work, the Little League team might constitute a folk group in spite of its
"artificial" formation by adults (1987). Indeed, kids often form folk groups
in such settings precisely because they want to assert their own group cul-
ture against the adults' definition of the group.
In other words, the apparent circularity of Dundes's definition-that
a folk group exists where there are folk traditions, and that folk traditions
are the expressive communications a group shares-is not meant to avoid
the need to define our domain.
Rather, the circularity tells the folklorists that
a folk culture is a dialectical process, the group and traditions defining one
another, and that it is always an empirical question whether a given group
is a folk group. The folklorist must look at the group, observe their culture,
and decide whether this is a folk group. To paraphrase the old joke, If it looks
like a folk group, acts like a folk group, smells like a folk group, and tastes
8 INTRODUCTION
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? ? like a folk group, it must be a folk group.
This dialectical process between group and tradition poses a pecu-
liar problem of organization for the editors of a sourcebook for children's
folklore. Most older textbooks in folklore and folklife organized the sub-
ject matter by genre, devoting individual chapters to songs, jokes, riddles,
dance, crafts, and so on. Toelken's textbook (1979) stands alone in its or-
ganization around contexts and folk groups. The editors of this Sourcebook
combined these approaches, commissioning some chapters on genres,
method, settings, or theory. This solution is no more completely satisfying
than the solitary genre or solitary contextual approach, but our aim is to
remind the reader of this underlying complexity of the folklorist's constantly
shifting perspective between group and tradition, between "context" and
"text. " Perhaps we can argue that our very diversity need not be seen as a
lack of coherence, but is rather emblematic of the ever-present multiplicity
that characterizes cultural events, especially in the post-modern view of schol-
arship.
In the rest of this section we turn to Grider to answer the question,
Who are the folklorists of children? What we print here are edited and re-
vised excerpts from an article in which she introduces a special issue of West-
ern Folklore in 1980 and celebrates the Year of the Child in 1979. We con-
clude our introduction with her reminder to the reader of the dialectical situ-
ation within which children live and that we are dealing with here:
Ladles and jellyspoons,
I come before you to stand behind you
To tell you something I know nothing about
The next Wednesday (being Good Friday)
There will be a mother's meeting
For Fathers only.
If you can come please stay at home.
Wear your best clothes
If you haven't any.
Admission free (pay at the door)
Take a seat but sit on the floor.
It makes no difference where you sit
The man in the gallery's sure to spit.
The next number will now be
The fourth corner of the round table.
We thank you
For your unkind attention.
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? ?
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? ? WHO ARE THE FOLKLORISTS
OF CHILDHOOD?
Sylvia Ann Grider
Most scholars date the serious study of children's folklore to two nineteenth-
century collections of children's games: The Traditional Games of England,
Scotland, and Ireland: Tunes, Singing-Rhymes and Methods of Playing Ac-
cording to the Variants Extant and Recorded in Different Parts of the King-
dom (1894-98) by Lady Alice Bertha Gomme and Games and Songs of
American Children (1883) by William Wells Newell, the first secretary of
the American Folklore Society.
Lady Alice was married to the distinguished British scholar Sir George
Laurence Gomme, and together they formed a successful research team.
Consistent with Victorian mores, she limited her studies almost exclusively
to children's games while her husband's interests ranged much more widely.
The two of them intended to edit a multivolume Dictionary of British Folk-
lore with Traditional Games as Part I, but the project was never completed.
The Gommes were part of the intellectual milieu that adhered to the theory
of cultural survivals, and Traditional Games reflects that discredited bias.
Lady Alice regarded the games in her vast collection as remnants from the
ancient past that reflected the ideas and practices of primitive peoples. She
arranged the games alphabetically, which, as one historian has pointed out,
"camouflaged Lady Gomme's primary intent, to reconstruct the evolution-
ary ladder of children's pastimes" (Dorson 1968, 27). For example, she de-
cided that the game of "Sally Water" originated as a pre-Celtic "marriage
ceremonial involving water worship," and that "London Bridge" echoed an
ancient foundation sacrifice. She gathered her data from a network of ret-
rospective adult correspondents rather than from direct fieldwork. Dorothy
Howard writes the following in her introduction to the 1963 edition:
The games in her Dictionary, it must therefore be inferred, are games
belonging to Lady Alice's childhood or earlier and not necessarily
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? ? current among children at her time of reporting; the descriptions came
from the memories (accurate or otherwise) of adults and not from
observation of children at play. The games reported represent the play
life (or part of the play life) of articulate, 'proper' Victorian adults
(of Queen Victoria's youth) reporting on 'proper' games. Lady Alice,
if she had any inkling of improper games lurking in the memories of
her literate adult informants, gave no hint of it. And she chose to ig-
nore the games of Dickens' illiterate back alleys and tenements though
she could hardly have been unaware that they existed. Since, accord-
ing to statistics, Dickens' children far outnumbered well-fed-and-
housed Victorian children and since psychological excavators have
dug up evidence to indicate that nice Victorian children were often
naughty, we can only conjecture that Lady Alice's Dictionary might
have run to twenty volumes, had she undertaken a different study with
a different point of view. (Howard 1964, viii)
Although Traditional Games is her most significant work, Lady Gomme
published other works on children's games, including Old English Singing
Games (1900); Children's Singing Games (1909-1912), a schoolbook co-
edited with the distinguished folksong collector and educator Cecil J. Sharp;
and British Folklore, Folk-Songs and Singing Games (1916), in which she
collaborated with her husband, Sir George.
Games and Songs of American Children was first published in 1883
by American folklorist William Wells Newell, eleven years before Lady Alice's
work in England; it was enlarged and reissued in 1903. As the preface to
the 1963 edition points out, "It was the first systematic large-scale gather-
ing and presentation of the games and game-songs of English-speaking chil-
dren. More important still, it was the first annotated, comparative study
which showed conclusively that these games and their texts were part of an
international body of data" (Withers 1963, v-vi). A literary scholar, poet,
and translator who was also the first editor of the Journal of American Folk-
lore, Newell "gathered the melodies, formulas, rules, and prescribed move-
ments of the games both from the memories of adults and by observing and
interviewing the children who played them. He set them down with tender-
ness and extraordinary sensitivity to the imaginative qualities of childhood
and with a surprising amount of surrounding social circumstance to illumi-
nate their use. . . . He accomplished his descriptions of children's pastimes
with many literary and other testimonies to the antiquity and tenacity of
childhood tradition. Since Newell believed-somewhat wrongly-that the
games were vanishing so rapidly in a general ruin of popular traditions that
12. WHO ARE THE FOLKLORISTS OF CHILDHOOD?
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? ? they would soon be wholly extinct, the book conveys an elegiac quality of
lament. " He categorized his games according to function, or how they were
used, instead of arbitrarily, as Lady Alice did later by alphabetizing hers; there
are few games in her collection that he had not already documented. Both
of these Victorian compendia are still valuable to students of childlore to-
day, in part because of the vast amount of well-documented raw data they
contain.
Although these two monumental studies are probably the most im-
portant studies of childlore, they were not the first. The predecessors included
Joseph Strutt, Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801); Rob-
ert Chambers, Popular Rhymes of Scotland (1826); James Halliwell, The
Nursery Rhymes of England (1842) and Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales
(1849); and G. E Northall, English Folk-Rhymes (1892). Consistent with the
late-Victorian interest in collecting and organizing novelties was the 1897
publication of Golspie: Contributions to Its Folklore by Edward W. B.
Nicholson, librarian of the Bodleian at Oxford. Nicholson asked Scottish
schoolchildren to write down descriptions of their traditional lore and
awarded prizes for the best essays. These essays are the basis of the book,
and the names of the seven young prizewinners are listed as coauthors. The
subject matter ranged from legends and ghost stories to songs, rhymes,
games, and superstitions. [In 1952-53, Golspie Scottish schoolchildren filled
out a special questionnaire for the Opies based on the items in the books,
and thus provided some valuable comparative data (Opie and Opie 1959).
The results predictably indicate considerable stability of these traditions over
time. ]
By World War I, interest in children's folklore became more and more
diversified. Researchers sought more than conventional and socially accept-
able games and nursery rhymes. Various journals on both sides of the At-
lantic featured a spectrum of articles. In 1916 Norman Douglas published
London Street Games, which, according to one authority, is a "pioneer work
and social document of first importance . . . . Written by a fastidious liter-
ary craftsman, and based on genuine research amongst young cockneys, it
records the secret joys of the gutter in a finely printed limited edition for
the bibliophile. Even so, the book might have been a success if it had not
been almost incomprehensible to anyone but a street arab. It is a skillful
prose-poem fashioned out of the sayings and terminology of Douglas's ur-
chin friends" (Opie and Opie 1959, v). Like Newell before him, he wrongly
believed that all of the games he recorded were on the verge of extinction
and so he wanted to preserve an accurate account of them-whether his read-
ing audience could understand the esoteric argot or not.
13
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? ? A radical change in the approach to collecting, interpreting, and pub-
lishing children's folklore came about in the 1950s with the work of the
English husband-and-wife team of Peter and Iona Opie, who were greatly
influenced by the pioneering work of the American Dorothy Howard (Cott
1983). Two decades earlier, Howard successfully experimented with collect-
ing traditional materials directly from children without the filter of adult
memory (1937, 1938). Unlike the Opies, however, her work never reached
a wide international lay and professional audience (1937, 1938). Howard's
approach was also paralleled by the work of Brian Sutton-Smith, who used
this direct technique in his fieldwork in New Zealand in 1949-51 (1954),
although his direct approach was influenced by current trends in cultural
anthropology (Beaglehole 1946). He says that he remembers meeting Peter
Opie in a London pub in 1952 after his own thesis on games was complete.
At that time the Opies had just completed their work on nursery rhymes
(1952).
The Opies are recognized today as the world's foremost authorities
on the traditions associated with childhood. Their works are consulted by
specialists from museums, libraries, and universities regarding details about
children's books, toys, games, and beliefs. The Opie home, not far from
London, is a veritable museum and library of childhood. Their first major
book, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, was published in 1952
and has been reprinted eleven times. The Dictionary led to The Lore and
Language of Schoolchildren in 1959, Children's Games in Street and Play-
ground in 1969, and The Singing Game in 1985. As one reviewer stated,
"The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren for the first time, uncovered and
thoroughly explored 'the curious lore passing between children aged about
6-14, which. . ,. continues to be almost unnoticed by the other six-sevenths
of the population. Based on the contributions of five thousand children at-
tending seventy schools in parts of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland,
the Opies' book presents the riddles, epithets, jokes, quips, jeers, pranks, sig-
nificant calls, truce terms, codes, superstitions, strange beliefs, and rites of
the modern schoolchild, examining and commenting on them with fascinat-
ing historical annotation and comparative material that suggest the extraor-
dinary continuity of the beliefs and customs of the tribe of children" (Cott
1983, 54).
The Opies were leaders in refuting the premise that literacy and the
pervasive mass media are destroying the traditions of children, and of course
we know today that the media even help to diffuse many traditions (Grider
1976, 1981). As they remark in the preface to Lore and Language, "The
modern schoolchild, when out of sight and on his own, appears to be rich
14 WHO ARE THE FOLKLORISTS OF CHILDHOOD?
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? ? in language, well-versed in custom, a respecter of the details of his own code
and a practising authority on self-amusements. And a generation which cares
for the traditions and entertainments which have been passed down to it is
not one which is less good than its predecessors" (Opie and Opie 1959, ix).
The Opies speak of the continuity of children's traditions:
No matter how uncouth schoolchildren may outwardly appear, they
remain tradition's warmest friends. Like the savage, they are respect-
ers, even venerators, of custom. And in their self-contained commu-
nity their basic lore and language seems scarcely to alter from gen-
eration to generation. Boys continue to crack jokes that Swift collected
from his friends in Queen Anne's time; they play tricks which lads
used to play on each other in the heyday of Beau Brummel; they ask
riddles that were posed when Henry VIII was a boy. Young girls con-
tinue to perform a major feat of body raising (levitation) of which
Pepys heard tell. . . , they hoard bus tickets and milk-bottle tops in
distant memory of a love-lorn girl held ransom by a tyrannical fa-
ther; they learn to cure warts (and are successful in curing them) af-
ter the manner in which Francis Bacon learnt when he was young.
They call after the tearful the same jeer Charles Lamb recollected; they
cry "Halves! " for something found as Stuart children were accus-
tomed to do; and they rebuke one of their number who seeks back a
gift with a couplet used in Shakespeare's day. They attempt, too, to
learn their fortune from snails, nuts, and apple parings-divinations
which the poet Gay described nearly two and a half centuries ago;
they span wrists to know if someone loves them in the way that
Southey used at school to tell if a boy was a bastard; and when they
confide to each other that the Lord's Prayer said backwards will make
Lucifer appear, they are perpetuating a story which was gossip in
Elizabethan times. "(Opie and Opie 1959, 2)
Other folklorists, of course, were turning their sophisticated attention to-
ward children's lore in the 1950s, leading to a major assault on the "trivial-
ity barrier" (Sutton-Smith 1970a). In 1953 the influential American Non-
Singing Games by Paul Brewster was published. Then in 1959, the same year
as The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, the University of California
published the first major work by Brian Sutton-Smith, The Games of New
Zealand Children. According to Dorothy Howard, "Dr. Sutton-Smith, work-
ing in a folklorist's paradise (two small isolated islands with a total popula-
tion of two million people) spent two years (1949 and 1950) in the equable
I5
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? ? climate traveling, sleeping in a sleeping bag, watching children play and re-
cording what he saw and heard. The study is a unique gem" (Howard 1964,
vii). In the twenty years or so since the Opies popularized the trend, innu-
merable studies of children's lore have been published, including a popular
American analog to The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren entitled One
Potato, Two Potato: The Secret Education of American Children by the
husband-and-wife team Herbert and Mary Knapp (1976). The subtitle of
the book was changed in later editions to The Folklore of American Chil-
dren. The most recent significant contribution to the field is the extensive
and thoroughly annotated collection of children's folklore compiled and
edited by Simon J. Bronner and aptly entitled American Children's Folklore:
A Book of Rhymes, Games, Jokes, Stories, Secret Languages, Beliefs and
Camp Legends for Parents, Grandparents, Teachers, Counselors and All
Adults Who Were Once Children (1988).
In general, contemporary international scholarship dealing with
children's folklore tends toward limited, specialized case studies based on
meticulous ethnographic fieldwork. Significant work is being done through-
out Scandinavia, Germany, and Australia. Two important reference books,
Jump-Rope Rhymes: A Dictionary (1969) and Counting-Out Rhymes: A
Dictionary (1980), have been edited by the American folklorist Roger D.
Abrahams. Scholars also finally are investigating previously taboo topics such
as children's use of obscenity and scatalogical materials. Graduate students
at major universities throughout the country have written dissertations deal-
ing with children's folklore. Brian Sutton-Smith, long an international leader
in the field, has focused his work primarily on games and play behavior. In
1975 he helped organize The Association for the Anthropological Study of
Play (TAASP) in order to facilitate communication among researchers. His
most recent work in children's folklore, The Folkstories of Children (1981b),
however, departs from games and play and turns instead to narrative, using
a phenomenological approach radically different from that of previous stud-
ies.
This book began when the late Sue Samuelson, my first teaching assistant
in 1977 for the children's folklore course at the University of Pennsylvania,
told me that it would not be possible to do a thesis in children's folklore
because there was absolutely no interest in children either at the American
Folklore Society (AFS) or in the Folklore Department at the university. What-
ever the truth of her indictment, it led me to approach Barbara Kirshenblatt-
Gimblett and Tom Burns (also of that department) with the proposal that
we begin a Children's Folklore Society within AFS. And we did just that.
The society continues with admirable autonomy, now issuing its own jour-
nal, Children's Folklore Review, under the editorship of C. W. Sullivan III.
The idea for the second phase, which became the present work,
emerged one evening in 1980 at the annual Folklore Meeting. Jay Mechling,
Tom Johnson, and I decided that the next step in assisting children's
folklore to academic credibility would be the development of a handbook
for course use. It took about five years to find the authors and get the first
outlines of the present work on the table. For the next five years I used the
outline as a text in my children's folklore course and benefited immeasur-
ably from the student critiques of it. During those ten years the manuscript
wandered in and out of the University of Pennsylvania Press and the Smith-
sonian Press, finally coming to rest at Garland Publishing, owing to the zest
of Garland editor Marie Ellen Larcada. From 1990 to the present, we all
suffered the vicissitudes of trying to get all this material into the computer.
Ultimately we were saved by Felicia R. McMahon of Syracuse Uni-
versity, who undertook the prodigious work of scholarly editorship to bring
the work to fruition-as well as to add materials from her own research.
Along the way it was decided that our work was not comprehensive enough
to be a handbook, but that it was a step in that direction and a useful first
sourcebook. Her efforts were aided greatly by the assistance of Dr. Nancy
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? ? Shawcross of the University of Pennsylvania and Professor Susan Wadley of
Syracuse University.
For my part, all of this was originally made possible because Barbara
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett had once suggested that a course I had taught for ten
years at Teachers College, Columbia University, which I entitled "The Psy-
chology of Childlore," be called "Children's Folklore" and brought to the
University of Pennsylvania. I did that for a year and then joined the Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania with appointments in both education and folklore, a
move made possible by the support of Kenneth Goldstein and Henry Glassie
of the Folklore Department and Dell Hymes and Erling Boe of the Educa-
tion School. I owe to all these people-and particularly to Barbara-a dis-
tinct debt of gratitude for the good life I've found and the interdisciplinary
flavor that became possible in my scholarship after that career change.
Brian Sutton-Smith
Xii PREFACE
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? ? CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
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? ?
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? ? INTRODUCTION
WHAT IS CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE?
Brian Sutton-Smith
Children's folklore is not easy to define. Folklore itself as a scholarly disci-
pline is in a process of transition. In earlier definitions, attention was given
predominantly to traditional stories, dances, proverbs, riddles, poetry, ma-
terial culture, and customs, passed on orally from generation to generation.
The emphasis was upon recording the "survivals" of an earlier way of life,
believed to be fading away. Attention, therefore, was on the antique, the
anonymous in origin, the collective in composition, and the simple in char-
acter (Ben-Amos 1971).
Today's definitions, by contrast, place more emphasis on the living char-
acter of these customs in peoples, whether tribal, ancient, ethnic, or modern.
Folklorists today are more concerned with the actual living performance of
these traditional materials (dance, song, tale) in their particular settings, with
their functional or aesthetic character in particular contexts. Unfortunately,
such "live" studies are more difficult to carry out than studies of collected
records or reports-and so we have very few of them. In the chapters that
follow, contributions range from attempts to catch contemporary children's
play and games (Zumwalt, McDowell, Beresin and Hughes) to surveys of col-
lected children's folklore (Sullivan, Roemer, Tucker, and Jorgensen). Most chap-
ters share some of both, the "contextual" and the "textual. "
THE RHETORICS OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
What these changes in the definition of folklore make clear is the relativity
of definitions of folklore to the scholarly rhetorics of a particular time and
place. Apparently, there is never going to be any final definition of children's
folklore (or of any other human subject matter). At any given time folklore
will be a cumulative subject, young scholars contending that their new per-
spectives are more valid than those of their predecessors. If we are lucky we
will have, as a result, an increasing number of excellent records to argue
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? ? about. What all children's folklorists seem to have in common, however, is
their interest in expressive rather than instrumental culture; in celebration
rather than work; and perhaps in humor rather than sobriety. There is also
the recurrent note of empathy that these folklorists appear to share with those
folk who are not in the mainstream of modern culture but who find them-
selves on its edge. Folklore is a "romantic" undertaking, still not divorced
from its antiquarian origins in the early 1800s. Whether or not current folk-
lorists are any more faithful to the "folk" than were the Brothers Grimm,
the identification lives on (Ellis 1983; Tatar 1992). For some of us childhood
itself is such an edge, and within its sometimes sullen joys we find also so-
lace for our idiosyncratic selves.
But children's folklore is primarily about children, and is therefore
heir to all the difficulties the concept of "childhood" has encountered in this
century. What seems remarkable about the chapters that follow is that the
children who appear in these pages are so different from the children who
appear almost everywhere else in twentieth-century social-science literature.
We can seek therefore to discover how the rhetoric of childhood in folklore
differs from that, for example, in psychology, where child development has
been a major subject. We must hurriedly add that there are many rhetorics
of childhood-a subject in the context of psychology we have dealt with else-
where (Sutton-Smith 1994). In the psychological literature, there is a rheto-
ric of children as relatively passive experimental subjects who become at-
tached to their parents, who begin to gain understanding of the world around
them, who progress through various steps in language development, in so-
cial development, and in moral development. They learn to relate to their
peers and to their teachers, and in due course they go through their physi-
cal, emotional, and intellectual growth and become adolescents. We hear
either of the extent to which their behavior is determined by patterns of child
rearing or sex-role stereotyping, or we hear about the inevitability of the
growth crises and growth sequences through which they pass.
What we do not hear about are the many ways in which they react
to or do not fit into these apparently normative schemes of socialization. It
is true that in this sober psychological literature the function of peer inter-
action and peer groups is said to be to socialize children into sex and ag-
gression. But we are not given any real sense of the antithetical character of
the events that such "socialization" might well and often does imply. It is
not that we are not given indications of extreme behavior such as child abuse,
infantile autism, and anorexia nervosa; it is just that these extremes are used,
if anything, to mark the regularity of normal and predictable patterns. By
emphasizing atypical extremes, the ordinary "extremities" of everyday life
4 INTRODUCTION
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? ? are overlooked in this psychological rhetoric. Given what Foucault has writ-
ten, even if perhaps exaggeratedly, about psychology and its use of clinical
and developmental information to empower its experts in the control of other
people's lives, it is hard to treat their doings as purely the science that they
think it is (Foucault 1973, 1987). It is hard not to agree that much of de-
velopmental and child psychology includes a set of political rhetorics about
childhood.
What the contents of this present Source Book seem to say, to the con-
trary of that psychological rhetoric of childhood, is that ordinary life is much
more marked by disruptive interest and reaction than the conventional psy-
chological or sociological story of child development usually brings to
our attention. Thus, the chapters that follow discuss the literature on ghosts,
verbal dueling, obscenity, graffiti, parties, levitation, slang, pranks, automo-
bile lore, autograph and yearbook verses, puns and parodies, special argots,
initiation rituals, folk speech, institutional legends, urine and excrement play,
toilet lore, panty raids, riots, fire play, food fights, recreational drug use,
jokes, insults, sex play, folk beliefs, skits, camp songs and verses, scoff lore,
hazing, rituals of separation and incorporation, school lore, types of play-
grounds, oral transmission, gaming rhetoric, forts, go-carts, toys, playthings,
empty lots, play equipment, oral legislation, wit and repartee, guile, riddles,
impropriety, nicknames, epithets, jeers and torments, half beliefs, calendrical
customs, fortune, partisanship, ambushes, telephone jokes, shockers, preju-
dice and scapegoating, fartlore, kissing games, superstitions, scaries, divina-
tion, mean play, Halloween and April Fool's Day, among many others. While
this miscellaneous list of items hardly adds up to an alternative rhetoric of
childhood, it does imply the need for a rhetoric that unites such Dionysian
or irrational elements with the Apollonian conventionalities of "normal"
childhood socialization theory (Spariosu 1989).
It is true that there are some modern psychologists who consider the
antithesis of the child and the aleatoric quality of life as important as the
predictability of growth and development, but they are by and large excep-
tional (Gergen 1982). Most social scientists of growth are caught into pre-
diction as the measure of their science, and therefore are not particularly
interested in, or tolerant of, the unpredictable waywardness of everyday child
behavior and the surreptitious antitheticality of child-instigated traditions
that are often the concern of the folklorist. What appears to have happened
is that the scientists of human development have taken an adult-centered view
of development within which they privilege the adult stages over the child-
hood ones. It is implicit in their writings that it is better to be at the moral
stage of conscience than at the earlier stage of fear of consequences; better
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? ? to have arrived at ego integrity than to be still concerned with ego autonomy;
better to be capable of adult genitality than of childhood latency. The "hero"
story they tell, however, is a story on behalf of adults. In its "scientific" char-
acter it does not acknowledge that this version of the classic Western "hero"
tale is a "vestige" of the theory of cultural evolution long rejected within
anthropology (see, for example, the chapter by Zumwalt in this volume).
It can be argued that the linear directionality in these theories of de-
velopment does disservice to our understanding of the gestaltlike character
and intrinsic qualities of each phase of child life. We constantly subsume
present activities to their utility for sober and sensible (hence conservative)
adult outcomes. By contrast, the present work pronounces so strongly that
what children find most enjoyable is often ecstatic or subversive: It is a rev-
elry of their own youthful actions that no longer seem profound or moving
to adults or it is an antithetical reaction to the institutional and everyday
hegemonies of the life about them.
RHETORICS OF PLAY
This brings us to the point where we acknowledge that children's folklore
is not only influenced by our underlying concepts of childhood, it is also
influenced by our underlying concepts of play, or some synthesis of the con-
cepts of childhood and those of play. More important, we must repeat that
we are not just dealing here with scientific concepts of two different kinds,
but rather with two rhetorics about how we should think about our schol-
arship. At this point it is useful to think of the possibility that large-scale,
historically derived attitudes and values can be seen as determiners of what
we think it is worthwhile to study and how we think we should go about
it. The rhetoric of developmental psychology, for example, seems to be the
familiar "rhetoric of progress" in the service of a conservative view of child
growth. It is a rhetoric highly influenced by the historical intellectual inher-
itance from the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and from the theory
of evolution in the nineteenth century.
The rhetoric of much of the chapters that follow with their celebra-
tion of childish culture, including childish protest, is as we have said, by
contrast, a rhetoric deriving from historical romanticism. We might call it a
rhetoric of play, as the imagination or as fancy. The faculty of the imagina-
tion, as Kant called it, however, has been tied too strongly to rationalistic
enterprises for explaining mental functions to be useful as a governing term.
We need some term that implies not only the creativity of the imagination
but also its irrational capacities. We are dealing not just with Shirley Temple
here, we are also dealing with Mad Magazine (Sutton-Smith 1988). Presum-
6 INTRODUCTION
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? ? ably some rhetorics of fancy underly not only folklore but are also influen-
tial throughout the arts and humanities in thought about play.
Elsewhere we have dealt with the two other rhetorics that seem to
share with these first two the larger part of the intellectual grasp of the world
of play; they have their impact in this volume also. These are the rhetoric
of power and the rhetoric of optimal experience. The first is a rhetoric of
play as power, contest, conflict, war, competition, hierarchy, hidden tran-
scripts, and so forth. It is a rhetoric that dominates the thinking about play
to be found in sport sociology, in mathematical game theory, and in anthro-
pology; in the present volume it is particularly apparent in the gaming analy-
ses of girls by Hughes. The second rhetoric is about the quality of optimal
experience (fun, flow, etc. ) in play; it is found in phenomenological writings
and in the leisure sciences. It has also become a popular way of thinking in
modern consumer culture where good experiences are said to be those that
allow for a choice, freedom, and fun, all of which are said to occur in play
(Sutton-Smith 1993).
The children in children's folklore as seen through the spectacles of
fancy or power are very different from children seen through the progress
rhetoric of psychology. In bringing them into view as we do in this work,
our own implicit rhetorical purpose is to ask our readers not to deny or re-
press this socially creative childhood that we have described. We ask them
to take fully the measure of the fact that if play is what is most important
to children, why is it we do so much to ignore that fact? Why is it we con-
tinue to combat in childhood that play that has become so central to the
childhood we have unwittingly created these past several hundred years?
This is not to say that the children's societies are not themselves of-
ten remarkably conservative, ritualistic, and governed by routine, as well as
manifesting moments of high fantasy and silly innovation (see McDowell,
below). Within their groups, children appear to be governed by a dialecti-
cal representation of the society of which they are a part (Zumwalt). They
capture its conservative organization and attitudes in their mimicry of moth-
ers and monsters, but at the same time they willfully caricature what they
thus represent. Both mimicry and mockery are the substance of child play
and children's folklore, at least as viewed through spectacles of a rhetoric
of fancy. Our rhetoric of children's folklore, then, is that it is a branch of
folklore characterized by that dialectical mimicry and mockery, performance
and parody, of which children seem to be especially capable, given their
adaptively neotonous and sociologically marginal characteristics.
Our rhetoric of children's folklore speaks also of their "own group
traditions," which raises the question, Just what are the folk groups to which
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? ? children belong? Folklorists have expanded considerably their definition of
the "folk group. " No longer reserving this term for isolated rural commu-
nity or urban enclave, most folklorists would agree with Alan Dundes's view
that a folk group consists of two or more people who share something in
common-language, occupation, religion, residence-and who share "tra-
ditions" that they consider important to their shared sense of identity
(Dundes 1965, 2). Folk groups should be small enough that each member
has, or could have, face-to-face interaction with every other member. That
means that folk groups could be fairly large, but the definition excludes
"groups" that are mere aggregations of individuals who share some element
but never interact so as to develop group traditions.
Children's folk groups, therefore, can be many and overlapping. The
smallest folk groups can be composed of playmates. These tiniest folk groups
often develop rich traditions of interaction (Oring 1986). The family sibling
group and the family itself are an important folk group, as folklorists are
coming to see (Sutton-Smith and Rosenberg 1970). Moving out in larger and
larger concentric circles, we see that the neighborhood, the street corner gang,
the play group, the school class, the Cub Scout den or Brownie troop, the
organized sports team, the "secret club," and so on are all likely folk groups
for the child and adolescent. And, as is true for adults, the child's constella-
tion of folk groups likely consists of a mix of the informal and the formal.
As several of the following chapters indicate, one feature of children's cul-
ture is the increasing organization of their folk groups and folk-group ac-
tivities by adults. And just as common is the child's resistance to that orga-
nization. The folklorist, for example, more readily assumes that he or she
will find a folk group at the "pickup" softball game at the neighborhood
sandlot than at the Little League stadium game. But, as Fine shows in his
work, the Little League team might constitute a folk group in spite of its
"artificial" formation by adults (1987). Indeed, kids often form folk groups
in such settings precisely because they want to assert their own group cul-
ture against the adults' definition of the group.
In other words, the apparent circularity of Dundes's definition-that
a folk group exists where there are folk traditions, and that folk traditions
are the expressive communications a group shares-is not meant to avoid
the need to define our domain.
Rather, the circularity tells the folklorists that
a folk culture is a dialectical process, the group and traditions defining one
another, and that it is always an empirical question whether a given group
is a folk group. The folklorist must look at the group, observe their culture,
and decide whether this is a folk group. To paraphrase the old joke, If it looks
like a folk group, acts like a folk group, smells like a folk group, and tastes
8 INTRODUCTION
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? ? like a folk group, it must be a folk group.
This dialectical process between group and tradition poses a pecu-
liar problem of organization for the editors of a sourcebook for children's
folklore. Most older textbooks in folklore and folklife organized the sub-
ject matter by genre, devoting individual chapters to songs, jokes, riddles,
dance, crafts, and so on. Toelken's textbook (1979) stands alone in its or-
ganization around contexts and folk groups. The editors of this Sourcebook
combined these approaches, commissioning some chapters on genres,
method, settings, or theory. This solution is no more completely satisfying
than the solitary genre or solitary contextual approach, but our aim is to
remind the reader of this underlying complexity of the folklorist's constantly
shifting perspective between group and tradition, between "context" and
"text. " Perhaps we can argue that our very diversity need not be seen as a
lack of coherence, but is rather emblematic of the ever-present multiplicity
that characterizes cultural events, especially in the post-modern view of schol-
arship.
In the rest of this section we turn to Grider to answer the question,
Who are the folklorists of children? What we print here are edited and re-
vised excerpts from an article in which she introduces a special issue of West-
ern Folklore in 1980 and celebrates the Year of the Child in 1979. We con-
clude our introduction with her reminder to the reader of the dialectical situ-
ation within which children live and that we are dealing with here:
Ladles and jellyspoons,
I come before you to stand behind you
To tell you something I know nothing about
The next Wednesday (being Good Friday)
There will be a mother's meeting
For Fathers only.
If you can come please stay at home.
Wear your best clothes
If you haven't any.
Admission free (pay at the door)
Take a seat but sit on the floor.
It makes no difference where you sit
The man in the gallery's sure to spit.
The next number will now be
The fourth corner of the round table.
We thank you
For your unkind attention.
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? ?
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? ? WHO ARE THE FOLKLORISTS
OF CHILDHOOD?
Sylvia Ann Grider
Most scholars date the serious study of children's folklore to two nineteenth-
century collections of children's games: The Traditional Games of England,
Scotland, and Ireland: Tunes, Singing-Rhymes and Methods of Playing Ac-
cording to the Variants Extant and Recorded in Different Parts of the King-
dom (1894-98) by Lady Alice Bertha Gomme and Games and Songs of
American Children (1883) by William Wells Newell, the first secretary of
the American Folklore Society.
Lady Alice was married to the distinguished British scholar Sir George
Laurence Gomme, and together they formed a successful research team.
Consistent with Victorian mores, she limited her studies almost exclusively
to children's games while her husband's interests ranged much more widely.
The two of them intended to edit a multivolume Dictionary of British Folk-
lore with Traditional Games as Part I, but the project was never completed.
The Gommes were part of the intellectual milieu that adhered to the theory
of cultural survivals, and Traditional Games reflects that discredited bias.
Lady Alice regarded the games in her vast collection as remnants from the
ancient past that reflected the ideas and practices of primitive peoples. She
arranged the games alphabetically, which, as one historian has pointed out,
"camouflaged Lady Gomme's primary intent, to reconstruct the evolution-
ary ladder of children's pastimes" (Dorson 1968, 27). For example, she de-
cided that the game of "Sally Water" originated as a pre-Celtic "marriage
ceremonial involving water worship," and that "London Bridge" echoed an
ancient foundation sacrifice. She gathered her data from a network of ret-
rospective adult correspondents rather than from direct fieldwork. Dorothy
Howard writes the following in her introduction to the 1963 edition:
The games in her Dictionary, it must therefore be inferred, are games
belonging to Lady Alice's childhood or earlier and not necessarily
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? ? current among children at her time of reporting; the descriptions came
from the memories (accurate or otherwise) of adults and not from
observation of children at play. The games reported represent the play
life (or part of the play life) of articulate, 'proper' Victorian adults
(of Queen Victoria's youth) reporting on 'proper' games. Lady Alice,
if she had any inkling of improper games lurking in the memories of
her literate adult informants, gave no hint of it. And she chose to ig-
nore the games of Dickens' illiterate back alleys and tenements though
she could hardly have been unaware that they existed. Since, accord-
ing to statistics, Dickens' children far outnumbered well-fed-and-
housed Victorian children and since psychological excavators have
dug up evidence to indicate that nice Victorian children were often
naughty, we can only conjecture that Lady Alice's Dictionary might
have run to twenty volumes, had she undertaken a different study with
a different point of view. (Howard 1964, viii)
Although Traditional Games is her most significant work, Lady Gomme
published other works on children's games, including Old English Singing
Games (1900); Children's Singing Games (1909-1912), a schoolbook co-
edited with the distinguished folksong collector and educator Cecil J. Sharp;
and British Folklore, Folk-Songs and Singing Games (1916), in which she
collaborated with her husband, Sir George.
Games and Songs of American Children was first published in 1883
by American folklorist William Wells Newell, eleven years before Lady Alice's
work in England; it was enlarged and reissued in 1903. As the preface to
the 1963 edition points out, "It was the first systematic large-scale gather-
ing and presentation of the games and game-songs of English-speaking chil-
dren. More important still, it was the first annotated, comparative study
which showed conclusively that these games and their texts were part of an
international body of data" (Withers 1963, v-vi). A literary scholar, poet,
and translator who was also the first editor of the Journal of American Folk-
lore, Newell "gathered the melodies, formulas, rules, and prescribed move-
ments of the games both from the memories of adults and by observing and
interviewing the children who played them. He set them down with tender-
ness and extraordinary sensitivity to the imaginative qualities of childhood
and with a surprising amount of surrounding social circumstance to illumi-
nate their use. . . . He accomplished his descriptions of children's pastimes
with many literary and other testimonies to the antiquity and tenacity of
childhood tradition. Since Newell believed-somewhat wrongly-that the
games were vanishing so rapidly in a general ruin of popular traditions that
12. WHO ARE THE FOLKLORISTS OF CHILDHOOD?
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? ? they would soon be wholly extinct, the book conveys an elegiac quality of
lament. " He categorized his games according to function, or how they were
used, instead of arbitrarily, as Lady Alice did later by alphabetizing hers; there
are few games in her collection that he had not already documented. Both
of these Victorian compendia are still valuable to students of childlore to-
day, in part because of the vast amount of well-documented raw data they
contain.
Although these two monumental studies are probably the most im-
portant studies of childlore, they were not the first. The predecessors included
Joseph Strutt, Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801); Rob-
ert Chambers, Popular Rhymes of Scotland (1826); James Halliwell, The
Nursery Rhymes of England (1842) and Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales
(1849); and G. E Northall, English Folk-Rhymes (1892). Consistent with the
late-Victorian interest in collecting and organizing novelties was the 1897
publication of Golspie: Contributions to Its Folklore by Edward W. B.
Nicholson, librarian of the Bodleian at Oxford. Nicholson asked Scottish
schoolchildren to write down descriptions of their traditional lore and
awarded prizes for the best essays. These essays are the basis of the book,
and the names of the seven young prizewinners are listed as coauthors. The
subject matter ranged from legends and ghost stories to songs, rhymes,
games, and superstitions. [In 1952-53, Golspie Scottish schoolchildren filled
out a special questionnaire for the Opies based on the items in the books,
and thus provided some valuable comparative data (Opie and Opie 1959).
The results predictably indicate considerable stability of these traditions over
time. ]
By World War I, interest in children's folklore became more and more
diversified. Researchers sought more than conventional and socially accept-
able games and nursery rhymes. Various journals on both sides of the At-
lantic featured a spectrum of articles. In 1916 Norman Douglas published
London Street Games, which, according to one authority, is a "pioneer work
and social document of first importance . . . . Written by a fastidious liter-
ary craftsman, and based on genuine research amongst young cockneys, it
records the secret joys of the gutter in a finely printed limited edition for
the bibliophile. Even so, the book might have been a success if it had not
been almost incomprehensible to anyone but a street arab. It is a skillful
prose-poem fashioned out of the sayings and terminology of Douglas's ur-
chin friends" (Opie and Opie 1959, v). Like Newell before him, he wrongly
believed that all of the games he recorded were on the verge of extinction
and so he wanted to preserve an accurate account of them-whether his read-
ing audience could understand the esoteric argot or not.
13
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? ? A radical change in the approach to collecting, interpreting, and pub-
lishing children's folklore came about in the 1950s with the work of the
English husband-and-wife team of Peter and Iona Opie, who were greatly
influenced by the pioneering work of the American Dorothy Howard (Cott
1983). Two decades earlier, Howard successfully experimented with collect-
ing traditional materials directly from children without the filter of adult
memory (1937, 1938). Unlike the Opies, however, her work never reached
a wide international lay and professional audience (1937, 1938). Howard's
approach was also paralleled by the work of Brian Sutton-Smith, who used
this direct technique in his fieldwork in New Zealand in 1949-51 (1954),
although his direct approach was influenced by current trends in cultural
anthropology (Beaglehole 1946). He says that he remembers meeting Peter
Opie in a London pub in 1952 after his own thesis on games was complete.
At that time the Opies had just completed their work on nursery rhymes
(1952).
The Opies are recognized today as the world's foremost authorities
on the traditions associated with childhood. Their works are consulted by
specialists from museums, libraries, and universities regarding details about
children's books, toys, games, and beliefs. The Opie home, not far from
London, is a veritable museum and library of childhood. Their first major
book, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, was published in 1952
and has been reprinted eleven times. The Dictionary led to The Lore and
Language of Schoolchildren in 1959, Children's Games in Street and Play-
ground in 1969, and The Singing Game in 1985. As one reviewer stated,
"The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren for the first time, uncovered and
thoroughly explored 'the curious lore passing between children aged about
6-14, which. . ,. continues to be almost unnoticed by the other six-sevenths
of the population. Based on the contributions of five thousand children at-
tending seventy schools in parts of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland,
the Opies' book presents the riddles, epithets, jokes, quips, jeers, pranks, sig-
nificant calls, truce terms, codes, superstitions, strange beliefs, and rites of
the modern schoolchild, examining and commenting on them with fascinat-
ing historical annotation and comparative material that suggest the extraor-
dinary continuity of the beliefs and customs of the tribe of children" (Cott
1983, 54).
The Opies were leaders in refuting the premise that literacy and the
pervasive mass media are destroying the traditions of children, and of course
we know today that the media even help to diffuse many traditions (Grider
1976, 1981). As they remark in the preface to Lore and Language, "The
modern schoolchild, when out of sight and on his own, appears to be rich
14 WHO ARE THE FOLKLORISTS OF CHILDHOOD?
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? ? in language, well-versed in custom, a respecter of the details of his own code
and a practising authority on self-amusements. And a generation which cares
for the traditions and entertainments which have been passed down to it is
not one which is less good than its predecessors" (Opie and Opie 1959, ix).
The Opies speak of the continuity of children's traditions:
No matter how uncouth schoolchildren may outwardly appear, they
remain tradition's warmest friends. Like the savage, they are respect-
ers, even venerators, of custom. And in their self-contained commu-
nity their basic lore and language seems scarcely to alter from gen-
eration to generation. Boys continue to crack jokes that Swift collected
from his friends in Queen Anne's time; they play tricks which lads
used to play on each other in the heyday of Beau Brummel; they ask
riddles that were posed when Henry VIII was a boy. Young girls con-
tinue to perform a major feat of body raising (levitation) of which
Pepys heard tell. . . , they hoard bus tickets and milk-bottle tops in
distant memory of a love-lorn girl held ransom by a tyrannical fa-
ther; they learn to cure warts (and are successful in curing them) af-
ter the manner in which Francis Bacon learnt when he was young.
They call after the tearful the same jeer Charles Lamb recollected; they
cry "Halves! " for something found as Stuart children were accus-
tomed to do; and they rebuke one of their number who seeks back a
gift with a couplet used in Shakespeare's day. They attempt, too, to
learn their fortune from snails, nuts, and apple parings-divinations
which the poet Gay described nearly two and a half centuries ago;
they span wrists to know if someone loves them in the way that
Southey used at school to tell if a boy was a bastard; and when they
confide to each other that the Lord's Prayer said backwards will make
Lucifer appear, they are perpetuating a story which was gossip in
Elizabethan times. "(Opie and Opie 1959, 2)
Other folklorists, of course, were turning their sophisticated attention to-
ward children's lore in the 1950s, leading to a major assault on the "trivial-
ity barrier" (Sutton-Smith 1970a). In 1953 the influential American Non-
Singing Games by Paul Brewster was published. Then in 1959, the same year
as The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, the University of California
published the first major work by Brian Sutton-Smith, The Games of New
Zealand Children. According to Dorothy Howard, "Dr. Sutton-Smith, work-
ing in a folklorist's paradise (two small isolated islands with a total popula-
tion of two million people) spent two years (1949 and 1950) in the equable
I5
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? ? climate traveling, sleeping in a sleeping bag, watching children play and re-
cording what he saw and heard. The study is a unique gem" (Howard 1964,
vii). In the twenty years or so since the Opies popularized the trend, innu-
merable studies of children's lore have been published, including a popular
American analog to The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren entitled One
Potato, Two Potato: The Secret Education of American Children by the
husband-and-wife team Herbert and Mary Knapp (1976). The subtitle of
the book was changed in later editions to The Folklore of American Chil-
dren. The most recent significant contribution to the field is the extensive
and thoroughly annotated collection of children's folklore compiled and
edited by Simon J. Bronner and aptly entitled American Children's Folklore:
A Book of Rhymes, Games, Jokes, Stories, Secret Languages, Beliefs and
Camp Legends for Parents, Grandparents, Teachers, Counselors and All
Adults Who Were Once Children (1988).
In general, contemporary international scholarship dealing with
children's folklore tends toward limited, specialized case studies based on
meticulous ethnographic fieldwork. Significant work is being done through-
out Scandinavia, Germany, and Australia. Two important reference books,
Jump-Rope Rhymes: A Dictionary (1969) and Counting-Out Rhymes: A
Dictionary (1980), have been edited by the American folklorist Roger D.
Abrahams. Scholars also finally are investigating previously taboo topics such
as children's use of obscenity and scatalogical materials. Graduate students
at major universities throughout the country have written dissertations deal-
ing with children's folklore. Brian Sutton-Smith, long an international leader
in the field, has focused his work primarily on games and play behavior. In
1975 he helped organize The Association for the Anthropological Study of
Play (TAASP) in order to facilitate communication among researchers. His
most recent work in children's folklore, The Folkstories of Children (1981b),
however, departs from games and play and turns instead to narrative, using
a phenomenological approach radically different from that of previous stud-
ies.
