This volume, based on thirty years of collecting and research by two pioneers in the field of children's lore and language, presents hundreds of singing and clapping games popular with children since the Middle Ages, including such favorites as "Pop Goes the Weasel," "Lazy Mary Will You Get Up?," "Skip to My Lou," "The Muffin Man," and "Ring a Ring o' Roses." Serving as an exposition of both the workings of folklore and the perennial ways of young children left to play on their own, The Singing Game categorizes over 150 of these games into groups such as "Matchmaking," "Wedding Rings," "Cushion Dances," "Witch Dances," "Calls of Friendship," "Eccentric Circles," "Buffoonery," and "Clapping." The Opies provide a detailed, historical description of each game, as well as a vivid, firsthand account from one of its most recent practitioners on the playgrounds and backstreets throughout England. Demonstrating how the games have evolved over the years, and how they vary from country to country, this book offers a comprehensive, authoritative history of a universal folk genre. Beautifully illustrated throughout, it contains photographs, lithographs, and prints; the words to each game as well as the music for many of them; footnotes; a bibliography; a general index; and an index of songs, games, and dances.

The Singing Game

Politics & Social Sciences

Opie, Iona

Opie, the late Peter

Social Sciences

Oxford University Press

Presents reproductions of a variety of early 19th-century children's books including rhymed alphabets, nursery rhymes, a pictorial grammar, limericks, and nonsense rhymes.

A Nursery Companion

Children's Books

Iona Opie and the late Peter Opie have devoted their lives to the study of children. Now comes the final volume of their acclaimed trilogy on children's games. Together with Children's Games in Street &amp; Playground (1969) and The Singing Game (1985), this volume completes the most comprehensive study this century. Based on thirty years of research, this intriguing volume focuses on games that use equipment of one kind or another--marbles, jump rope, balls--describing in colorful detail the objects used, the rules of play, and the accompanying rhymes and chants. The Opies examine the history of the games from their earliest appearance and they consider the wider social context, tracing the varying attitudes towards them over the past three hundred years, from pedagogical disapproval, to legal suppression, to the sentimental nostalgia of the present. Here then is the world of play, the imaginary space into which our young ones escape each day. Children's Games With Things is an evocation of this imaginary world as well as a reminder of our own past.

Children's Games with Things: Marbles, Fivestones, Throwing and Catching, Gambling, Hopscotch, Chucking and Pitching, Ball-Bouncing, Skipping, Tops and Tipcat

Sports & Outdoors

An account of the games which children between the ages of six and twelve invent or perform out-of-doors for their own enjoyment

Children's Games in Street and Playground: Chasing, Catching, Seeking, Hunting, Racing, Dueling, Exerting, Daring, Guessing, Acting, and Pretending. (Oxford Paperbacks)

In 1959, Iona and Peter Opie published the first of their major studies of the games and customs of children. The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, the first book to uncover and thoroughly explore "the curious lore passing between children between 6-14," was based on contributions by 5,000 children from different parts of England, Scotland, and Wales. A delightful collection of the riddles, epithets, jokes, quips, jeers, pranks, codes, superstitions, beliefs, and rites of schoolchildren, it also includes fascinating historical annotation and comparative material, by which the Opies illuminate the extraordinary continuity of children's beliefs and customs.

The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (Oxford Paperbacks)

Reference

The Singing Game (Oxford Paperbacks)

This volume contains twenty-four of the best known fairy tales in the English language, presented here in the exact words of their first English publication or of the earliest surviving text. Including "Sleeping Beauty," "Bluebeard," "Cinderella," "Thumbelina," and "Hansel and Gretel," as well as many others, this collection provides a historical introduction for each tale and a general Introduction which traces the history of fairy tales collected in Asia and Europe long before they appeared in English.

The Classic Fairy Tales

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

This record of children's outdoor games played in the street, park, playground, or wasteland is drawn from the contributions of 10,000 children in England, Scotland and Wales. It reveals that the games children take pleasure in when out on their own are usually those learnt from each other - not from adults. They are games in which children may deliberately scare each other, ritually hurt each other, take foolish risks, play ten against one, and yet in which they consistenly observe their own sense of fair play. This volume explains in detail how a large number of street games are played, and gives the rhymes and sayings children repeat while playing them, together with their different regional names. It also contains notes on their individual histories, and compares apparently recently invented games with amusements in Elizabethan, medieval and even classical times, while numerous analogues from other countries indicate the extent of their distribution. Iona and Peter Opie have also written "The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes", "The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book", "The Oxford Book of Children's Verse", "The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren", "Classic Fairy Tales", "A Nursery Companion" and "The Oxford Book of Narrative Verse". Iona Opie is also the author of "The Singing Game" and "People in the Playground".

Children's Games in Street and Playground: Chasing, Catching, Seeking, Hunting, Racing, Dueling, Exerting, Daring, Guessing, Acting, and Pretending.

467p hardback with grey and red illustrated dustjacket, spine of jacket sunned and slightly chipped to head, otherwise very well preserved, first edition

The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes

Baby games, lullabies, rhymes, street cries and folk ballads comprise these selections from the British oral tradition

The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Opie, the late Peter. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Opie, the late Peter