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For nearly forty years Iona Opie worked with her late husband Peter on a notable series of books on the traditional lore of childhood. As part of the fieldwork from 1970 onwards, she visited the local school playground every week. The children accepted Mrs Opie as a regular feature of the playground, a harmless collector of jokes and games. Her aim, however, was to provide the living context of school-lore, rather than the lore itself. She achieved this by writing down events exactly as they happened, and conversationsexactly as they were spoken. The result is a startlingly honest portrait of children at play, at once charming and hilarious, alarming and poignant, and full of infectious vita...
A colletion of favorite rhymes found in folk literature and lesser known rhymes passed down in regional or family traditions.
First published in 1959, Iona and Peter Opie's The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren is a pathbreaking work of scholarship that is also a splendid and enduring work of literature. Going outside the nursery, with its assortment of parent-approved entertainments, to observe and investigate the day-to-day creative intelligence and activities of children, the Opies bring to life the rites and rhymes, jokes and jeers, laws, games, and secret spells of what has been called "the greatest of savage tribes, and the only one which shows no signs of dying out."
A collection of rhymes that have been chanted by children for generations including rhymes of insult and retaliation, of teasing and repartee, rhymes for skipping and for counting out, riddles, tongue-twisters, narratives and nonsense.
An account of the games which children between the ages of six and twelve invent or perform out-of-doors for their own enjoyment
This is a story-book, universal in its appeal and representative of a literary tradition from Chaucer to Auden. Its tales are of various kinds - romantic, humorous, ghostly, and gory, written over the past six hundred years.Here will be found Pope's 'Rape of the Lock' and Coleridge's 'Ancient Mariner'; the tale of John Gilpin and of the Idiot Boy; 'The Lady of Shalott', 'The Pied Piper', and Lewis Carroll's 'The Hunting of the Snark'. In the twentieth century the narrative tradition is exemplified by Chesterton andMasefield, Charles Causley and C. Day-Lewis, amongst others.Most of the fifty-nine poems in this collection are given in their entirety, but abridgements and extracts from book-length narratives such as 'The Faerie Queene' and 'Paradise Lost' add to the richness and variety.
Traces the histories of singing games such as ring a ring o' roses, oranges and lemons and others, and is an exposition both of the workings of folklore, and of the perennial ways of young children when left to play on their own. Each of the 150 games is described in historical detail.
SUMMARY: Presents the texts of twenty-four well-known fairy tales as they were first printed in English and summarizes the history of each title, especially from the textual point of view.
Iona and Peter Opie were twentieth-century pioneers. Their research and writing focused on the folklore of British children – their games, rhymes, riddles, secret languages and every variety of the traditions and inventions of the children’s collective physical and verbal play. Such closely observed, respectful, good-humoured and historically attuned writing about the traditions of childhood was a revelation to English-language readers around the world. Their numerous books were a rare phenomenon: they attracted a popular readership far beyond the professional and academic communities. For those who work with children, their collaborative research was a powerful influence in confirming t...