ABSTRACT
Childlore is a contradictory, magpie culture. The picture that emerged from the work of British folklorists Iona and Peter Opie testifies to this (Opie and Opie 1959, 1985). The integrity and attention to detail of their research compels them both to celebrate the continuity of tradition, and to reveal the hybridity of cultural influences which children draw on to compose, adapt and ceaselessly transform the games, songs, rhymes and rituals they perform. The concept of ‘childlore’ is effectively a fusing of folklore with childhood, and it implies the passing on of a corpus of folkloric material through forms of oral transmission. However, when it becomes clear, as it did to the Opies, that this body of material draws as much on children’s media cultures as on traditional games and songs, then notions of tradition and lore become problematic. Furthermore, the collection of this material has tended to privilege language: the words of the games, songs, chants and jokes. This is partly for practical reasons: the Opies began by noting down the words, and only later moved on to transcribe melodies of songs. It is partly also because of a linguistic approach to folklore, however, which seeks to establish the progress of tradition through historical comparison of textual variants. However, the culture of play and playgrounds combines many elements to make new meanings out of old resources: words, melody, gesture, dance, objects and artefacts both found and manufactured, and the built and natural environment. This complex mix of the intangible legacies of word, song and game structure with the tangible assets of the immediate context is what constitutes the cultural moment for the child.
