Children’s Folklore Recent Titles in Greenwood Folklore Handbooks Myth: a handbook

PLAYGROUND PIONEERS
Iona and Peter Opie, who began their long and fruitful career as a husband-
and-wife research team with the publication of 
I Saw Esau: Traditional Rhymes 
of Youth
(1947), demonstrated the importance of studying children’s traditions 
through a dazzling array of publications. Their 
Oxford Dictionary of Nursery 
Rhymes
(1952) quickly became the canonical work on the subject of nursery lore. 
Seven years later, in 1959, their 
Lore and Language of Schoolchildren
presented 
jokes, riddles, jeers, customs, beliefs, narratives, and other kinds of folklore from 
5,000 children in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Immensely readable, 
erudite, and entertaining, this important book showed a large international audi-
ence the richness and variety of children’s traditions.
Although 
Th
e Lore and Language of Schoolchildren
is the Opies’ best-known 
work, their 
Children’s Games in Street and Playground
(1969) provides an invalu-
able classification and analysis of games. Among the game categories scrutinized 
in this detailed study are chasing, catching, hunting, seeking, racing, exerting, du-
eling, guessing, daring, acting, and pretending. Folklorists have benefited greatly 
from the wide range of descriptive, comparative, and analytical content of this 
important study. Similarly, 
Th
e Singing Game
(1985) presents texts and tunes of 
games of this genre in remarkable depth and detail.
Peter Opie passed away in 1982, but Iona Opie has continued to publish sig-
nificant works. Her book 
Th
e People in the Playground
(1993) chronicles weekly 

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104 Children’s 
Folklore
visits to a London playground, beginning in 1970. Her openness in portraying 
the children exactly as they are—as full-fledged people, not just schoolchildren—
makes this book a delight to read. She has also published other books for children 
and adults.
Brian Sutton-Smith, one of the most influential and dedicated scholars in the 
field of children’s folklore, began his career as a primary school teacher in Wel-
lington, New Zealand, in 1948. From 1949 to 1951, he gathered information 
about children’s play and games for his doctoral dissertation while visiting 35 
New Zealand schools. In his “Play Biography” (1997–98), Sutton-Smith explains 
that he did his research while “traveling free all over the country, up and down 
the mountains, due to the courtesy of school physical education specialists, and 
often sleeping overnight in their cars which were sometimes frosted over in the 
morning” (5). Compiling information from more than a thousand child and adult 
informants, he assembled a record of New Zealand play and games that eventu-
ally took the form of two books: 
Th
e Games of New Zealand Children
(1959) and 
A History of Children’s Play: Th
e New Zealand Playground
(1981).
During long periods of observation on New Zealand playgrounds, Sutton-Smith 
learned that each playground was “a place which mostly ran itself ” (“Play Biogra-
phy” 15). Social play and power relationships formed the crux of playground life, 
which needed very little intervention from adults. In somewhat different terms, 
Sutton-Smith observed that the playground was “something like a frontier society 
controlled from a distance by a lurking Sheriff/Teacher or two” (“Play Biogra-
phy” 16). With minimal adult intervention, children could keep order, handle bul-
lies, and take care of all but the most serious problems on their own.
Sutton-Smith’s many publications have contributed enormously to folklorists’ 
understanding of children’s play, games, and narratives. Among his most influ-
ential works are 
Th
e Folkgames of Children
(1972) and 
Th
e Folkstories of Children
(1981). His relatively recent book 
Th
e Ambiguity of Play
(1998) examines play 
theory from the standpoint of seven rhetorics: fate, power, communal identity, 
frivolity, progress, the imaginary, and the self. This exciting, innovative study sug-
gests possible directions for a new science of play for our current era.
One of the most important pioneers of children’s folklore study, Dorothy 
Howard, broke new ground in her doctoral research at New York University. 
When she chose children’s folklore as the subject of her 1938 dissertation “Folk 
Jingles of American Children,” she had to overcome opposition from the profes-
sors on her committee. Her focus on rhymes collected directly from children in-
fluenced the work of other folklorists, including Iona and Peter Opie, according 
to Jonathan Cott. Howard came to Australia in 1954 to study children’s games as 
a postdoctoral Fulbright scholar. Her articles on Australian children’s variants of 
Hopscotch, Knucklebones, ball-bouncing, marbles, and rhymes of various kinds 
give the reader an excellent sense of the games’ and rhymes’ complexity. When 

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Scholarship and Approaches 105
Howard was traveling across Australia to collect her material, families were strug-
gling to overcome the effects of World War II, and television had not yet arrived. 
Brian Sutton-Smith’s essay “Courage in the Playground: A Tribute to Dorothy 
Howard” emphasizes the originality and courage of Howard’s work. 
Child’s Play: 
Dorothy Howard and the Folklore of Australian Children
(2005), edited by Kate 
Darian-Smith and June Factor, explicates Howard’s contributions to children’s 
folklore in detail, with interesting photographs and diagrams.
Another innovative scholar, Nigel Kelsey, became interested in children’s folk-
lore while training to become a teacher during World War II. During his 30-year 
teaching career (1952–82), he worked as a primary-school teacher, deputy head 
teacher, and head teacher at several schools in London. In 1964 he began writ-
ing down and tape-recording rhymes and game descriptions. While doing re-
search on children’s speech and creative writing for the Diploma in the Education 
of Children at the University of London, Kelsey put children at ease by asking 
them for rhymes, jokes, riddles, tongue twisters, and games. His retirement in 
1982 gave him the chance to begin an ambitious collection of children’s folklore 
at 20 schools in the London area. According to Robin Wiltshire, this collection 
yielded more than 30 tape recordings that included numerous skipping, clapping, 
and ball-bouncing rhymes, as well as singing games, action and dance routines, 
song parodies, taunts, limericks, puzzles, riddles, and jokes.
Kelsey published a number of articles in prestigious folklore journals; his essay 
“Norman Douglas Revisited” (1983) points out relationships between games in 
his own inner-city London collection and games collected in London by Douglas 
in 1916. Kelsey did not publish his book manuscript, titled 
“Everybody Gather 
Round”: A Study of Inner London Children’s Folklore 1982–1984 (Plus Some Lore 
Collected from a Few Inner London Schools 1960–1981).
Professor J.D.A. Wid-
dowson, director of the Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language at 
the University of Sheffield, worked with Kelsey until his death in 1990 and agreed 
to edit the book. This important publication, titled 
Everybody Gather Round,
will 
include games, school rhymes and parodies, teases and taunts, superstitions, non-
sense rhymes, jokes, riddles, tongue twisters, limericks, puzzles, songs, chants, and 
other material from the treasure trove of inner-city London children’s folklore.