Introduction

Editing the special issue of the International Journal of Play in 2014 was both an honour and a journey of discovery. Iona and Peter Opie, who it seems never travelled beyond the UK, are known wherever English is read and there are readers fascinated by the verbal and kinetic play cultures of childhood. For scholars of childhood in particular, the Opies’ historically meticulous, detailed and eloquent books on the folklore of and for children provide access to an immense archive quarried from one nation, with trails reaching back to antiquity and out into the wider world. Beginning with I Saw Esau: Traditional Rhymes of Youth in 1947, and finishing with Children’s Games with Things in 1997, this remarkable husband-and-wife team dedicated their adult lives to a subject largely ignored, or at best regarded as a minor amusement of no significance to anyone but the young and ignorant.