| Share page | Visit Us On FB |
|
MEMOIR ON THE STUDY OF CHILDREN'S GAMES
CHILDREN'S games have not hitherto been studied in the same way as customs and superstitions and folk-tales have been studied, namety, as a definite branch of folk-lore. It is well however, to bear in mind that they form a branch by themselves, and that, as such, they contribute to the results which folk-lore is daily producing towards elucidating many unrecorded facts in the early history of civilised man.
Although games have been used by Dr. Tylor and others as anthropological evidence, these authorities have mostly confined themselves to those games of skill or chance which happen to have parallels in savage life; and the particular point of their conclusions rests rather upon the parallels, than upon the substantive evidence of the games themselves.
I will first point out the nature of the material for the study. It will be seen that the greater number of games printed in these two volumes have been collected by myself and many kind correspondents, from children in the present day—games that these children have learned from other children or from their parents, and in no case, so far as I am aware, have they been learned from a printed source. To this collection I have added all printed versions of the traditional game, that is, versions of games written down by the collector of folk-lore and dialect—in some cases unconscious collectors of folk custom—from any available source. A distinctive feature of the collection is, therefore, that I have printed all versions of each game known to me which show
differences of words or methods of play. The importance of
458 |
||