No More Learning

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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? ? lore has been construed in the past fifty years. McDowell on the other hand,
with his focus on the child player as a performer constantly generating his
play material as an emergent function of his own limitations, perceptions,
and strengths; his ambivalences, phonic subversions and parodies; as a func-
tion of the utility and aesthetic value of the material to the performer as well
as a function of his response to the group; is highlighting concepts about
folklore as performance, as contingent "activation," which have had more
appeal in recent theorizing. There is in McDowell, however, as much of a
romantic attachment to the generating power of the young performers as
there is in, say, the Opies to the constancy of their texts and the continuity
of historical materials. They seek the universal and the constant; he seeks
the specific and the emergent. McDowell gives sufficient examples to set the
stage for a study that will seek to distinguish the genres of the durable from
those that are ephemeral, and to seek accounts of those differences in terms
of place, historical circumstances, and the special character of the players.
While this is undoubtedly a valid quest, in recent play studies by
Meckley it has been discovered that among preschoolers the two phases are
virtually indistinguishable (1994). Studying and video-taping the play behav-
ior of twelve four-year-old children over a six-month period, she discovered
that while some children were more innovative than others, whatever they
invented immediately became a tradition for all of the children in the group-
not just the ones that had initiated the play. So that when a group of chil-
dren played what had been the game of another group, they always repeated
it largely in the way it was done before. What was amazing was how much
shared knowledge there was across this group of children of the play forms
of all the other children.
Admittedly, just as only a minority were strong innovators, there was
also a minority who seldom knew what was going on. This led to the gen-
eralization that as innovation hit the ground it immediately crystallized so
that everyone knew how to continue it. That is, play no sooner appeared in
their group life than it was ritualized so that all could participate. Play and
ritual were, at this embryonic stage of play development at least, a biphasic
phenomenon.
What is also particularly appealing in McDowell's account is the way
in which he shows us that children sometimes go well beyond the antith-
eses (real-ideal, mimicry-mockery, conservative-innovative, play-ritual), for
example, when they engage in flights of playfulness that are a cascade of
nonsense or silliness. The playful idiosyncratic content is often so bizarre it
could never be conserved even if the performance of being bizarre does it-
self become a ritualized kind of nonsense within the playing group.
22 OVERVIEW: HISTORY OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
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? ? 2 THE COMPLEXITY
OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
Rosemary Livy Zumwalt
When I first started work in children's folklore, I dutifully asked my five,
six-, and seven-year-old informants all the prescribed questions: Where did
you learn that? Why do you think it's funny? What do you call it? They
would, after the weeks passed, bear this with strained patience. With their
heads cocked to one side and their eyes narrowed, they would answer, "I
didn't learn it from anybody. I made it up! " "Can't you see why it's funny?
It's funny, that's all! " I would persist and get the answers I needed for my
collection.
Now, years later, as I look back at this initial study of children's folk-
lore (Zumwalt 1972, 1976), I am struck with the richness the children were
offering me. At the time, the rhythm, the lyrics, and the image captivated
me. I focused on symbol, the ideal little girl in folklore. And I emphasized
tradition, the creation and continuity of this image. I likened it to the for-
mation of stalactites, the concentrated accretion over centuries, a drop at a
time, forming a multifaceted image. The ideal little girl in folklore could,
according to the refraction of light from her crystalline image, shine with
innocence, glitter with enticement, or gleam with lust.
The ideal little girl was present in the folklore, and she was impor-
tant. Yet, coupled with this ideal little girl portrayed in the texts was the real
little girl who performed the jump-rope songs:
I am a Pretty Little Dutch Girl
All dressed in blue.
And these are the things
I like to do:
Salute to the captain.
Curtsey to the king.
And show my pants to the U. S. Marines!
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? ? This was the same little girl who would throw down her jump rope and run
to the baseball diamond to play what she classified as a boy's game.
The children in my early folklore study were presenting me with the
complexity of their lives. That I chose to study one aspect, the image as re-
vealed in the text, is understandable. Part of the leverage one needs to launch
an undertaking is just such a focus. That I now recognize the text and con-
text, the ideal and the real, the conservative and the innovation, adds to my
wonder of the child's world of folklore.
I would like to reflect on what I see as the complexity of children's
folklore, a complexity that has sometimes been overlooked for a simpler
view. An approach that was predicted on the simple nature of the child was
nineteenth-century cultural evolutionary theory. In this framework, the child
was equated with the savage. In much twentieth-century literature on
children's folklore, the equation remains. For an understanding of cultural
evolutionary theory as it pertains to children, we must turn to the works of
Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Edward Burnett Tylor.
Charles Darwin, in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to
Sex (1871), extended the evolutionary theory developed in On the Origin
of Species (1859)-one focused primarily on natural selection-to the evo-
lution of the sexes and of social behavior. ' In Darwin's framework, the male
and female child are equal, mentally and physically. At puberty, the inequality
between the sexes begins to develop. The male grows to full intellectual and
physical capacity. The female, retaining aspects of the child, is arrested in
development between the child and the adult male. This was attributed to
the evolution of the species and the sexual maturation of the individual.
Of the "Mental Powers of Man and Woman," Darwin concluded,
"man has ultimately become superior to woman" (Darwin 1871, 2:382).
During "primeval times," men had to compete with rivals for "the posses-
sion of the females. " This competition led to "the greater intellectual vigor
and power of invention" in man (Darwin 1871, 2:382). It also led to "the
greater size, strength, courage, pugnacity, and . . . energy of man in com-
parison with the same qualities in woman. . . " (Darwin 1871, 2:382).
Coupled with the results of an evolutionary selection for a male of
superior strength and intellect were the effects of sexual maturation of the
individual organisms. In childhood, the male and the female are equal in
intellectual capacity. At puberty, there is differential development of the in-
tellect according to sex. In support of his position, Darwin notes "that eu-
nuchs remain throughout life inferior in" mental faculties (Darwin 1871, 2:
328-29). This disparity in intellectual capacity between the sexes has been
mitigated by "the law of equal transmission of characters to both sexes"
2,4 THE COMPLEXITY OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
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? ? (Darwin 1871, 2: 329). Without this law, Darwin says, "it is probable that
man would have become as superior in mental endowment to woman, as
the peacock is in ornamental plumage to the peahen" (Darwin 1871, 2: 329).
Herbert Spencer-a man who influenced Darwin and was influenced
by him-discussed the evolution of mental complexity in The Comparative
Psychology of Man, an address delivered to the Royal Anthropological In-
stitute. Spencer endeavored to establish the evolution of the intellect and to
link it with the development of mankind from savagery to civilization. To
establish the degrees of intellectual capacity, Spencer compared the child's
mind with the adult's. This contrast, between the child and the adult mind,
is analogous, Spencer said, to that between "the minds of savage and civi-
lized" (Spencer 1977 [1876], 9). To support his position Spencer notes that
"the sudden gusts of feeling which men of inferior types display" are like
"the passions of childhood" (Spencer 1977 [1876], 12).
Following the evolutionary scheme of Darwin and Spencer, man,
woman, and child could be arranged hierarchically: Man is rational, physi-
cally and emotionally strong, civilized. Woman is irrational, physically and
emotionally weak, and childlike. The child is weak and unformed, with a
need to be emotionally nurtured by the mother and physically strengthened
by the father. The child, then, is the living link with the savage past.
Edward Burnett Tylor continued in Darwin's theoretical footsteps. For
Tylor, folklore was the remnant of the intellectual past, just as the fossil was
the remnant of the physical past. The survival of the primitive was preserved
in children's folklore. Rhymes, songs, games, and toys of children "repro-
duce, in what are at once sports and little children's lessons, early stages in
the history of childlike tribes of mankind" (Tylor 1929 [1871], 1: 74).
Cultural evolutionary theory in the nineteenth century was, in the lit-
eral sense of the word, progressive. It was predicated on the notion of
progress, of development from the simple stages of savagism to barbarism
and to civilization. It was also progressive in terms of its representation of
human potential, that moving toward increasing complexity. Within each
individual infant and each infant race, there is a potential to develop out of
the state of savagism. Certain savage races might need the assistance of the
civilized races to speed up the evolutionary process. Again, there is the par-
allel between the child and the race. Just as the child is raised by the parent,
so can the savage be pulled out of the primitive state by the representatives
of the civilized nations. 2
In this theoretical framework, the child recapitulates the development
of the race. As Alexander Chamberlain says in The Child and Childhood in
Folk- Thought: "Ethnology, with its broad sweep over ages and races of man,
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? ? its searchings into the origins of nations and of civilizations, illumined by
the light of Evolution, suggests that in the growth of the child from helpless
infancy to adolescence, and through the strong and trying development of
manhood to the idyosyncracies of disease and senescence, we have an
epitome in miniature of the life of the race . . . " (Chamberlain 1896, 3).
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown in The Andaman Islanders draws the same
parallel between the development of the individual and the development of
the race. As he explains, the primary task of the child is to bring order to
his social world. The same process is at work in primitive society where,
Radcliffe-Brown says, "the supreme need" requires that the primitive bring
order to the world around him. "Just as the child organises and develops
his experience by treating inanimate objects as if they were persons . . . , so
primitive man, in exactly the same way, organises and develops his social
experience by conceiving the whole universe as if it were the interaction of
personal forces" (Radcliffe-Brown 1948 [1922]: 380).
Born in a state of nature, naked and vulnerable, the infant gradually
is tamed, grows to manhood, acquires the manners of the civilized. If the
child grows to womanhood, she never thoroughly outgrows the child. It re-
mains within her, part of her essence, her childlike nature. Thus these three
categories-man, woman, and child-reflected the hierarchical division of
culture into civilized, barbaric, and savage:
man = civilized
woman = barbaric
child = savage
Cultural evolutionary theory did not just overlook the complexities
inherent in children's folklore, it denied them. Children's folklore was simple;
it was a direct link to the lower-and therefore simpler-stages of cultural
evolution. In this vein, Karl Pearson reasoned, children's delight in nursery
tales "arises from an unconscious sympathy between the child and the
thought and customs of the childhood of civilization" (Bett 1924, 1-2; quot-
ing Pearson). 3
Following this approach, since the child is linked through an uncon-
scious sympathy to the lower stages of evolution, it is understandable that
we would find aspects of the savage and the barbaric in children's folklore.
In Counting-Out Rhymes of Children, Walter Gregor remarks, "It is now
an acknowledged fact that some of the games of children are survivals of
2. 6 THE COMPLEXITY OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
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? ? what was once the occupation of men in less advanced stages of civilization
. . " (Gregor 1973 [1891], 9). Henry Bett, in Nursery Rhymes and Tales;
Their Origin and History, points to the element of cannibalism in "our
children's tales. "
Fee fi fo fum I smell the blood of an Englishman!
Be he alive or be he dead,
I'll grind his bones to make my bread! (Bett 1924, 31)
This, Bett said, was "simply a remembrance of times when primitive men were
cannibals and ate their enemies, as some savages do today" (Bett 1924, 30).
Alice Bertha Gomme, the grand lady of nineteenth-century childlore
studies, worked within this cultural evolutionary framework. 4 According to
Lady Alice, children's games are "some of the oldest historical documents
belonging to our race"; they show "man's progress from savagery to civili-
zation" (Gomme 1964 [1898], 2: 461). In Lady Alice's work, this progress
from savagery to civilization does not entail a movement from simple to
complex. Though she was evolutionary in her approach to folklore, she was
also ritualistic in her interpretation. Accordingly, children's games originated
from complex traditions. As Lady Alice says, "If [children] saw a custom
periodically and often practised with some degree of ceremonial importance,
they would in their own way act in play what their elders do seriously"
(Gomme 1964 [1898], 2: 142).
Such was the case in the game "Round and Round the Village. " The
children in their play retained the ancient custom of "the perambulation of
boundaries, often associated with festive dances, courtship, and marriage"
(Gomme 1964 [1898], 2: 142). s As evidence of this early origin, Lady Alice
refers to the ritual in southeast Russia. On the eve of her wedding, the bride
goes round the village and kneels before the head of each household. In In-
dia, the bride and groom are both transported round the village (Gomme
1964 [1898], 2: 143). Lady Alice concludes that "the Indo-European mar-
riage-rite contained just such features as are represented in this game"
(Gomme 1964 [1898], 2: 143). Further, she says, "the changes from rite to
popular customs, from popular custom to children's game" show the use-
fulness of folklore study.
To her credit, Lady Alice did not reduce children's folklore to a single
theoretical approach. The games were not merely a survival from a past age.
Nor were the games simply a key to past rituals.