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

Th
e Secret Garden
(1909), Mary Lennox, a fretful child whose 
parents have died in India, goes to England to live in her uncle’s mansion on a 
Yorkshire moor. After receiving a skipping rope from her nursery maid, Mary 
discovers the delights of outdoor play. She finds the key to an abandoned garden 
and learns how exciting it can be to bring a garden back to life. Her invalid cousin 
Colin joins her in the secret garden and eventually learns to walk there. Fresh 
air, healthful exercise, and rituals derived from Mary’s knowledge of East Indian 
fakirs give both children better health and hope for the future. 
Boy blows bubbles at a high school graduation party 
in the summer of 2007 in New York. Photograph by 
Geoffrey Gould.

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132 Children’s 
Folklore
In the 1930s, historical novels about pioneer families’ adventures became 
popular in the United States. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s 
Little House in the Big Woods
(1932) includes details of rural Wisconsin children’s amusements, such as a bal-
loon game played with the blown-up bladder of a slaughtered pig. 
Little House on 
the Prairie
(1935) explains how the children kept busy while their family traveled 
west to Kansas in a covered wagon. Similarly, Carol Ryrie Brink’s 
Caddie Wood-
lawn
(1935), based on a grandmother’s oral narratives about growing up on the 
Wisconsin frontier, describes traditional games, pastimes, and pranks.
Children’s traditions also appear in J.R.R. Tolkien’s 
Th
 e Hobbit
(1938). Bilbo 
Baggins, the book’s small, childlike hero, loves to eat and attend birthday par-
ties. Against his will, Bilbo joins a group of elves and dwarves on a quest to kill 
a dragon. He finds a ring that makes him invisible and uses the ring as the subject 
of a neck riddle, which saves him from being gobbled up by the evil Gollum. 
Other riddles posed by both Bilbo and Gollum give the reader a sense of the 
richness of British oral tradition.
In 1949, Brian Sutton-Smith published realistic fiction for children in New 
Zealand. Having grown up in the city of Wellington, Sutton-Smith knew that 
schoolchildren would respond well to descriptions of daily life similar to their 
own. He wrote about “the ordinary play and misdemeanors of four boys, sitting 
in the sun discussing their choices for play, or playing rugby and cricket in the 
street, hitting balls through windows and sneaking into the flicks (movies) for 
free, being carelessly destructive at birthday parties, digging to make underground 
forts and coming up with dog bones” (“Play Biography” 7). Sutton-Smith’s sto-
ries encouraged children to write essays of their own; they also made the author 
“think more extensively about [his] own childhood past” (11).
One of the most beloved American authors of realistic fiction for children 
is Beverly Cleary, whose books 
Henry Huggins
(1950) and 
Beezus and Ramona
(1955) depict children’s daily activities with gentle humor. Henry adopts a dog, 
raises gallons of guppies, and tries to save money. In 
Henry and the Clubhouse
(1962), Henry and his friends build a simple shelter, making rules about who 
can and cannot come in. Henry’s friend Beezus has a pesky but imaginative 
little sister, Ramona, whose shenanigans fill a series of books culminating in 
Ramona Forever
(1984). As a young child, Ramona walks on tin-can stilts and 
plays Brick Factory with her friend Howie. When she goes to school, she plays 
playground games and exchanges friendly insults with other children. Cleary’s 
books about Ramona, Beezus, and Henry still please children of the twenty-first 
century.
Children’s literature scholars tend to put realistic fiction and fantasy into sep-
arate categories, but many works of fantasy literature have a solid foundation 
in children’s play and playground hierarchies. In C. S. Lewis’s