112 Children’s
Folklore
with junk by a local authority, the corners of recreation grounds stocked with
swings and slides” (12). With unerring wisdom, the Opies recognize children’s pref-
erence for playing in streets, woods, empty lots, and other
areas that are free from
adult supervision. They quote a letter written by an 11-year-old British boy in
1955: “In my neighbourhood the sites of Hitler’s bombs are many, and the big-
ger sites with a certain amount of rubble provide very good grounds for Hide
and Seek and Tin Can Tommy” (15). Places devastated by war can be especially
significant play spaces, as they give children the chance to take creative control of
an area marred by destruction and loss of life.
Bernard Mergen’s essay “Children’s Lore in Schools and Playgrounds” offers
an excellent overview of children’s play spaces since the mid-nineteenth century,
as well as insights into transformation of physical space through play.
Mergen
makes the important point that “for children, play space is a continuum” (230).
Between home and school, many areas serve as play spaces. Mergen cites Roger
Hart’s innovational study
Children’s Experience of Place,
which explores parents’
decisions to give their offspring certain levels of freedom and children’s prefer-
ences to visit certain kinds of spaces. His summary of changes in playground
design, location, and size provides a helpful resource for researchers (238– 49).
Marc Armitage’s “The Ins and Outs of School Playground Play: Children’s Use
of ‘Play Places’ ” analyzes children’s use of playground space at primary schools
in the United Kingdom. The
primary-school playground, Armitage observes, is
“full of imagination, fantasy and mystery; friendship groups; organized and highly
structured games; quiet, reflective play; and noise and movement” (37). The typi-
cal primary-school playground, an undifferentiated rectangle or square, leaves
children free to choose areas for different kinds of play unless teachers intervene.
At
some schools, players of football (known as soccer in the United States) have
taken so much playground space that teachers have had to limit the space avail-
able for it. L- or U-shaped playgrounds accommodate different games more eas-
ily, so they generate less conflict.
An especially interesting aspect of Armitage’s study is his observation of
children’s creativity in choosing spaces for certain games and imaginative play.
On many playgrounds, metal drain covers become boards for games of marbles;
some drain covers become known as very challenging surfaces for such games.
Metal fences and vertical metal bars become playground “jails,” where prisoners
in the game Cops and Robbers get locked up. Some of the youngest children
play imaginative games involving witches and monsters, which may necessitate
making “cauldrons” (holes
in the ground or in bench tops, logs, or tables) near
the area known as the witch’s home. Sometimes a metal door becomes known as
the witch’s “furnace,” where bad children get incinerated (46–54).
Folklorists also learn about children’s awareness of space by analyzing narra-
tives. In my essay “Concepts of Space in Children’s Narratives,” I examine folktales
Scholarship and Approaches 113
told by preadolescent girls in the 1970s. Stories from girls of that age group re-
veal “a predilection for space that is vertical or horizontal, heavily shadowed or
brightly lighted, extremely dangerous or comfortably benign” (19). Because safe
areas are clearly differentiated from dangerous ones in these stories,
the young
narrators can feel secure as they tell and listen to scary stories. The typical set-
ting for preadolescent girls’ tales is a family’s house with at least two floors, as
well as a basement and an attic. Like a castle, which Max Lüthi identifies as the
folktale’s central image, this multilevel family home becomes a dominant spatial
framework in preadolescents’ tales (Lüthi 166). Within that house, the central
character hears ghostlike noises and goes upstairs or downstairs to confront the
ghostly presence. Sometimes the ghost comes upstairs to pursue the hapless child:
not rapidly,
but with slow, measured steps. Adolescents tell stories about dangers
encountered in lover’s lanes and a variety of other settings, but for preadolescents,
space within the house matters most. This house is “the child’s castle, the shelter-
ing but threatening structure where fear must be mastered before she ventures
forth into the outside world” (24).
Sylvia Grider’s essay “The Haunted House in Literature, Popular Culture, and
Tradition” (1999) clarifies the significance of haunted houses for children and
adults. Grider explains how Lüthi’s enchanted castle differs from the haunted house:
“The enchanted castle is bright and shining; the haunted
house is dark and brood-
ing. The enchanted castle is filled with music and laughter; the haunted house
contains evil and frightening, mysterious noises. The lines of the enchanted castle
are geometrically precise and the perspective is reliable; the haunted house is
skewed and out of focus” (175). While the enchanted castle has been a promi-
nent folktale feature for many centuries, the haunted house can be traced back
to dark, mysterious
castles of gothic novels; in the United States, abandoned or
seldom-used mansions built in the Gilded Age inspire narratives about haunting.
Since some of these mansions have become funeral homes, their connection to
ghost stories makes perfect sense (176–80). In ghost stories told by children, the
attics and basements of haunted houses provide settings for ghosts’ appearances.
Since the basement is “below the ground, in contact with the forces of the under-
world,” it has more potential to frighten children than the attic does (190).
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