In 1916 Norman Douglas published
London Street Games, which, according to one authority, is a "pioneer work
and social document of first importance .
London Street Games, which, according to one authority, is a "pioneer work
and social document of first importance .
Childens - Folklore
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. Speech Play: Research and Resources for the Study of Linguistic Cre-
ativity (1976), edited by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, is an extensive in-
vestigation of the application of linguistics to the study of children's verbal
lore.
In conclusion, we see that the field of children's folklore is interdisci-
plinary, depending heavily on cross-cultural, comparative systems that have
been worked out through generations of research. Folklorists have stayed
in the research forefront because their discipline is the best for documenta-
tion and analysis of traditional materials of all kinds. The triviality barrier
probably will be a continuing concern in the study of children's traditions,
z6 WHO ARE THE FOLKLORISTS OF CHILDHOOD?
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? ? at least for some segments of the academic community. Even so, folklorists
have not abdicated their responsibility to the enrichment of knowledge just
because the subject matter happens to concern children. Specialists through-
out the world are continuing to document and investigate the traditions of
childhood in an attempt to understand this integral aspect of our common
cultural heritage.
17
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? ?
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? ? SECTION I
OVERVIEW
HISTORY OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
Brian Sutton-Smith
This section continues to be centrally concerned with who the children in
children's folklore are. It approaches that question through two reviews of
the field of children's folklore. The first, by Zumwalt, is about the history
of the concept of the child; the second, by McDowell, is about the way in
which folklore gets transmitted.
In order to set these chapters in context some further remarks on the
history of childhood are needed. In recent scholarship the notion has become
widespread that childhood is a modern and invented concept. This brilliant
idea, attributed to Philippe Aries, has had a powerful impact on the recogni-
tion of how relative many of our current twentieth-century ideas about child-
hood are, although many historians have been dubious about the simplicity
of the picture that Aries has drawn (Wilson 1980). What does seem worth
stressing is that, with the industrial revolution, children became increasingly
separated from the work world and gradually accrued more and more mark-
ers as a distinctive subcultural group. Their acquisition of special clothes,
special literatures, and special toys, particularly in the late seventeenth cen-
tury, is taken by some historians as evidence of a change toward a special
status (L. J. Stone 1977). Over the next two hundred years a series of steps
brought this group into coordination with the rest of the sociopolitical sys-
tem. Universal schooling was introduced, and, in our own century, the ever-
increasing organization of children's recreational time, at first through games
and sports and subsequently through television and the mass marketing of
toys. Through these two hundred years children also organized themselves,
within a variety of subcultures of street and playground and neighborhood
(see chapters by Mechling, Mergen, and Beresin). As they became free from
apprenticeships in village and town, they roamed their neighborhoods and
streets, both exploring and engaging in the traditional pastimes, once shared
by all ages, related to the seasons and the festivals that characterized life in
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? ? the Middle Ages. Thus the children in children's folklore were a group dis-
enfranchised from the economic machine by the events of the industrial revo-
lution; they then reconstituted themselves as a distinct subculture, associat-
ing themselves with such leisure activities as had already been prevalent in
their own societies. They took upon themselves the traditional leisure-time
customs that they could reconstitute according to their own more elemen-
tary capacities, gradually honing them down to the kind of dimensions with
which we are now familiar. Complex adult sports, such as Prisoner's Base,
which is said to have been a popular adult game of the 1100s, were aban-
doned for the simpler versions, such as King on the Mountain; the more com-
plex linear forms of Nuts and May were given up for the simpler circular
pleasures of Farmer and the Dell (Sutton-Smith 1959b). For some hundred
or so years these traditions have persisted in childhood, while the adults of
modern society have gradually adopted the spectator activities and mass-
participation forms that have become the leisure culture of modern society
(R. Williams 1979). Children, still a distinctive group in most respects, de-
spite some claims to the contrary (Postman 1982) have increasingly found
an antithesis in mass cultural phenomena (parodies of commercials, distinc-
tive play with Barbie dolls, topical graffiti, rhymes, etc. ) and in persisting
earlier elements from adult expressive behavior (e. g. , hopscotch).
This brief description is a considerable over-simplification of the great
changes that have taken place in Western civilization and the distinctive role
of children in those changes. It may serve, however, as a corrective to the
notion that children's folklore has always been the same and is of a univer-
sal character. That is unqualifiedly not the case. The concept of childhood
varies not only historically but also anthropologically, and, as children's sta-
tus varies within different groups, so does their distinctive subcultural tra-
ditions. In most respects child subculture is not different from any other sub-
culture. A group that senses itself to be distinct usually develops character-
istic customs and ceremonies, many of which express opposition to those
of the hegemonious surrounding culture. In these terms children's folklore
is the product of a kind of generational subculture instigated by a society
that requires quasi-dependence and quasi-independence in the young.
But whatever the larger economic and sociological processes, philo-
sophical reactions to this process have led to many other and often contrary
descriptions of this novel subculture. Some descriptions attribute subordi-
nate qualities to the child group, such as primitive, prelogical, synaesthetic,
atavistic, irrational, and disenfranchised; these are characteristics that until
recently have been thought to be shared with savages and women. The same
condition has been romanticized by those who have spoken of "noble say-
2. 0 OVERVIEW: HISTORY OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
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? ? ages" and childhood as especially imaginative, idyllic, and innocent. Some-
times this innocence carries with it the moral power attributed to childhood
by Rousseau, and sometimes it carries the bowdlerized fancifulness so char-
acteristic of much twentieth-century children's literature. Childhood as dis-
continuous from adulthood comes to be used as a projective screen for ei-
ther aspiration or despair (Covenay 1957).
These issues are central to the chapter by Zumwalt, in which she con-
trasts some of these older views of children, as savage or innocent or simple,
with her own discoveries of their actual complexity. She contrasts the ideal
and the real behavior of girls who are on the one hand portraying themselves
in their play as obedient, domestic, and romantic and yet, at the same time,
often covertly, also portraying themselves as sexually provocative, manipu-
lative, scheming, and rebellious. She opens up the issue of what Fine (1980b)
has called Newall's paradox-how it is that children can have such a repu-
tation as creatures of tradition, as conservers of child culture, and at the same
time be known for their innovative fantasies and novel behaviors. Zumwalt's
emphasis on these complexities calls into question the more simplistic no-
tions of childhood that often prevail.
In Grider's earlier chapter we have already seen that some major schol-
ars have always seen children's folklore as a conservative event (Gomme, Opie)
whereas others have reckoned it an innovative (Douglas) or changing historical
series of events (Sutton-Smith 1981a). In his chapter John McDowell attempts
a reconciliation of these differences in terms of a modern "performance" theory
of cultural transmission. Children, he says, have reason for conserving some
folklore elements because they are partially appropriate to their needs or are
particularly satisfying aesthetically. Other elements, however, do not meet those
needs, or are changed because of childish perceptions, fantasies, ambivalences,
rebelliousness, misunderstanding, or creativity.
There is an interesting conceptual transition between chapters one and
three that is not unlike the transition that folklore has itself undergone in
this century. Grider expresses some of the traditional concerns of the field:
origins, cultural survivals, the tenacity of tradition on the one hand and lam-
entations over its disappearance on the other. Zumwalt advocates putting
aside these ideas, in which the child is compared with the savage, and sug-
gests instead a focus on the meaning of folklore to the children who engage
in it. Her concern is a combination of psychogenic functionalism
(Wolfenstein), sociogenic functionalism (Malinowski), linguistic structural-
ism (McDowell), and social structuralism (Goodwin after Goffman).
Whether this approach be described as anthropology, ethnography, or dis-
course analysis, it has been among the major "semantics" within which folk-
2I1
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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.
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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
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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. Speech Play: Research and Resources for the Study of Linguistic Cre-
ativity (1976), edited by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, is an extensive in-
vestigation of the application of linguistics to the study of children's verbal
lore.
In conclusion, we see that the field of children's folklore is interdisci-
plinary, depending heavily on cross-cultural, comparative systems that have
been worked out through generations of research. Folklorists have stayed
in the research forefront because their discipline is the best for documenta-
tion and analysis of traditional materials of all kinds. The triviality barrier
probably will be a continuing concern in the study of children's traditions,
z6 WHO ARE THE FOLKLORISTS OF CHILDHOOD?
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? ? at least for some segments of the academic community. Even so, folklorists
have not abdicated their responsibility to the enrichment of knowledge just
because the subject matter happens to concern children. Specialists through-
out the world are continuing to document and investigate the traditions of
childhood in an attempt to understand this integral aspect of our common
cultural heritage.
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? ?
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? ? SECTION I
OVERVIEW
HISTORY OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
Brian Sutton-Smith
This section continues to be centrally concerned with who the children in
children's folklore are. It approaches that question through two reviews of
the field of children's folklore. The first, by Zumwalt, is about the history
of the concept of the child; the second, by McDowell, is about the way in
which folklore gets transmitted.
In order to set these chapters in context some further remarks on the
history of childhood are needed. In recent scholarship the notion has become
widespread that childhood is a modern and invented concept. This brilliant
idea, attributed to Philippe Aries, has had a powerful impact on the recogni-
tion of how relative many of our current twentieth-century ideas about child-
hood are, although many historians have been dubious about the simplicity
of the picture that Aries has drawn (Wilson 1980). What does seem worth
stressing is that, with the industrial revolution, children became increasingly
separated from the work world and gradually accrued more and more mark-
ers as a distinctive subcultural group. Their acquisition of special clothes,
special literatures, and special toys, particularly in the late seventeenth cen-
tury, is taken by some historians as evidence of a change toward a special
status (L. J. Stone 1977). Over the next two hundred years a series of steps
brought this group into coordination with the rest of the sociopolitical sys-
tem. Universal schooling was introduced, and, in our own century, the ever-
increasing organization of children's recreational time, at first through games
and sports and subsequently through television and the mass marketing of
toys. Through these two hundred years children also organized themselves,
within a variety of subcultures of street and playground and neighborhood
(see chapters by Mechling, Mergen, and Beresin). As they became free from
apprenticeships in village and town, they roamed their neighborhoods and
streets, both exploring and engaging in the traditional pastimes, once shared
by all ages, related to the seasons and the festivals that characterized life in
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? ? the Middle Ages. Thus the children in children's folklore were a group dis-
enfranchised from the economic machine by the events of the industrial revo-
lution; they then reconstituted themselves as a distinct subculture, associat-
ing themselves with such leisure activities as had already been prevalent in
their own societies. They took upon themselves the traditional leisure-time
customs that they could reconstitute according to their own more elemen-
tary capacities, gradually honing them down to the kind of dimensions with
which we are now familiar. Complex adult sports, such as Prisoner's Base,
which is said to have been a popular adult game of the 1100s, were aban-
doned for the simpler versions, such as King on the Mountain; the more com-
plex linear forms of Nuts and May were given up for the simpler circular
pleasures of Farmer and the Dell (Sutton-Smith 1959b). For some hundred
or so years these traditions have persisted in childhood, while the adults of
modern society have gradually adopted the spectator activities and mass-
participation forms that have become the leisure culture of modern society
(R. Williams 1979). Children, still a distinctive group in most respects, de-
spite some claims to the contrary (Postman 1982) have increasingly found
an antithesis in mass cultural phenomena (parodies of commercials, distinc-
tive play with Barbie dolls, topical graffiti, rhymes, etc. ) and in persisting
earlier elements from adult expressive behavior (e. g. , hopscotch).
This brief description is a considerable over-simplification of the great
changes that have taken place in Western civilization and the distinctive role
of children in those changes. It may serve, however, as a corrective to the
notion that children's folklore has always been the same and is of a univer-
sal character. That is unqualifiedly not the case. The concept of childhood
varies not only historically but also anthropologically, and, as children's sta-
tus varies within different groups, so does their distinctive subcultural tra-
ditions. In most respects child subculture is not different from any other sub-
culture. A group that senses itself to be distinct usually develops character-
istic customs and ceremonies, many of which express opposition to those
of the hegemonious surrounding culture. In these terms children's folklore
is the product of a kind of generational subculture instigated by a society
that requires quasi-dependence and quasi-independence in the young.
But whatever the larger economic and sociological processes, philo-
sophical reactions to this process have led to many other and often contrary
descriptions of this novel subculture. Some descriptions attribute subordi-
nate qualities to the child group, such as primitive, prelogical, synaesthetic,
atavistic, irrational, and disenfranchised; these are characteristics that until
recently have been thought to be shared with savages and women. The same
condition has been romanticized by those who have spoken of "noble say-
2. 0 OVERVIEW: HISTORY OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
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? ? ages" and childhood as especially imaginative, idyllic, and innocent. Some-
times this innocence carries with it the moral power attributed to childhood
by Rousseau, and sometimes it carries the bowdlerized fancifulness so char-
acteristic of much twentieth-century children's literature. Childhood as dis-
continuous from adulthood comes to be used as a projective screen for ei-
ther aspiration or despair (Covenay 1957).
These issues are central to the chapter by Zumwalt, in which she con-
trasts some of these older views of children, as savage or innocent or simple,
with her own discoveries of their actual complexity. She contrasts the ideal
and the real behavior of girls who are on the one hand portraying themselves
in their play as obedient, domestic, and romantic and yet, at the same time,
often covertly, also portraying themselves as sexually provocative, manipu-
lative, scheming, and rebellious. She opens up the issue of what Fine (1980b)
has called Newall's paradox-how it is that children can have such a repu-
tation as creatures of tradition, as conservers of child culture, and at the same
time be known for their innovative fantasies and novel behaviors. Zumwalt's
emphasis on these complexities calls into question the more simplistic no-
tions of childhood that often prevail.
In Grider's earlier chapter we have already seen that some major schol-
ars have always seen children's folklore as a conservative event (Gomme, Opie)
whereas others have reckoned it an innovative (Douglas) or changing historical
series of events (Sutton-Smith 1981a). In his chapter John McDowell attempts
a reconciliation of these differences in terms of a modern "performance" theory
of cultural transmission. Children, he says, have reason for conserving some
folklore elements because they are partially appropriate to their needs or are
particularly satisfying aesthetically. Other elements, however, do not meet those
needs, or are changed because of childish perceptions, fantasies, ambivalences,
rebelliousness, misunderstanding, or creativity.
There is an interesting conceptual transition between chapters one and
three that is not unlike the transition that folklore has itself undergone in
this century. Grider expresses some of the traditional concerns of the field:
origins, cultural survivals, the tenacity of tradition on the one hand and lam-
entations over its disappearance on the other. Zumwalt advocates putting
aside these ideas, in which the child is compared with the savage, and sug-
gests instead a focus on the meaning of folklore to the children who engage
in it. Her concern is a combination of psychogenic functionalism
(Wolfenstein), sociogenic functionalism (Malinowski), linguistic structural-
ism (McDowell), and social structuralism (Goodwin after Goffman).
Whether this approach be described as anthropology, ethnography, or dis-
course analysis, it has been among the major "semantics" within which folk-
2I1
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