Not just 'once' upon a time

As a researcher who focuses quite heavily upon narrative, I have read a lot about the importance of storytelling in human psychology and learning, and the evolved nature of language and narrative. Recent findings suggest that human beings can identify whether a song is a lullaby, dance or love song in any language through the rhythm and melody of the music. One topic that is not quite so well studied however, is how children have historically been the guardians of many of these narratives as they otherwise fade into history, and how lack of time to read and sing to children, and lack of time and space to play may be depriving us of this connection to our past.

For example, this rhyme has become familiar to generations of children:

I had a little nut tree

Nothing would it bear

But a silver nutmeg,

And a golden pear;

The King of Spain’s daughter

Came to visit me,

And all for the sake

Of my little nut tree

But how many parents singing this to their child know that ‘the King of Spain’s daughter’ it refers to was most likely Catherine of Aragon, who came to England in 1501 to marry the oldest son of King Henry VII, Prince Arthur? It is also of interest that there appears to be some quite bawdy imagery attached to this deceptively sweet little rhyme; meanings carried only to adults, in the same way that, for example, it is only adults who fully grasp the satirical nuances in the ‘arrival in Hollywood’ scene in Shrek. It would thus seem that Medieval adults were quite familiar with the process of 'double coding'- that is, a story that is narrated on different levels, carefully crafted for children of all ages and adults to enjoy by the extraction of different meanings. We see this all the time in our own ‘folk’ products, but do not tend to consider that it is an ancient human story telling device.

It is also fascinating to follow the development of a song or story as an historical artifact, for example John Tams’ development of the traditional song ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’ for the Sharpe television programme, where the original ‘Queen Anne commands and we obey’ becomes ‘the King commands and we obey’ to fit the Napoleonic wars depicted in the programme. And we know that the original was such a popular song in its day that it featured in a nursery rhyme:

Oh Tom, he was a piper's son,

He learned to play when he was young;

And the only tune that he could play

Was Over the Hills and Far Away.

Over the hills and a long way off

The wind shall blow my top-knot off

This rhyme is very familiar to me, as it was one that my mother frequently sung. Many years later, in carrying out my own research, I learned that both the song and the nursery rhyme originate in Norfolk, where my mother’s family also originated. And it seems that even though she was the third generation to be born in London, the rhyme passed down through the generations for over a century since the family’s relocation.

Sometimes, there are intriguing errors that occur when stories pass from one language to another. For example, there has been a long standing argument over whether Cinderella’s glass slipper- ‘verre’ in French- was a mistranslation of ‘vair’ (fur) as it moved into its English version. The jury is still out on this point, but yet more bawdy ‘double coding’ is suggested by Dundes (1989) who comments that ‘fur slipper’ has been purported to be a sly reference to female genitalia. More recently, it has been claimed that some well known fairy tales have been passed down generations for 6000 years.

The idea of childhood as of vital importance in the preservation of a rich folk history may be a novel concept in the internationally networked early 21^st century, but it would come as no surprise to mid-20^th century childhood researchers Peter and Iona Opie, who carried out an extensive study of children’s free play in streets and playgrounds during the 1950s and 60s, either interviewing or directly observing the play of some 10,000 children across England, Scotland and Wales. In 1969, they reported ‘there is no town or city known to us where street games do not flourish’ and further suggested that generations of playing children might be the guardians of many ancient oral traditions, proposing that:

 To understand the “wanton sports” of the Elizabethan day, and the horseplay of even earlier times is to watch the contemporary child engrossed in his traditional pursuits on the metalled floor of a twentieth-century city (Opie and Opie 1969, p.ix). 

The Opies reported that some of the terms their 1950s and 1960s child participants used in their outdoor free play could be directly related back to much earlier forms of spoken English. They discovered a range of terms that children used to call ‘truce’ on playfighting or chasing which were specific to their regional location, for example ‘fainites’ in Southern England, and ‘kings’, ‘crosses’, ‘keys’ or ‘barley’ across Northern England, Wales and Scotland. Children in the area around Cornwall used ‘bars’ which would seem more closely related to the Northern than the Southern terms, suggesting an aspect of Celtic similarity between these areas that is also found through the Gaelic languages of Cornwall, Wales and Scotland (Jarvis et al 2014).

The Opies recorded that J. R. R. Tolkien (of ‘Lord of the Rings’ fame, who was an English scholar in his professional life) described how, in the fourteenth century collection of published moral stories, the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer tells us that ‘lordes mowe nat been yfeyned’, in modern English translation: ‘lords’ orders must not be declined’. This indicates that ‘fainites’ has descended from ‘fains I’, in both cases meaning ‘I decline’. ‘Barley’ is also found in fourteenth century literature, in the poem ‘Gawayne and the Grene Knight’: ‘to dele him an other barley… and yet gif him respite’ (Opie and Opie 1959, p.148). This appears to be used in a similar frame to the term ‘parley’, (from the French ‘parlez’, to speak) which was used mainly in the English vernacular to mean a halt in a battle for peace talks. This would seem to have a clear similarity to pleading for a halt in a game or to miss a turn to take a rest, or to catch one’s breath before engaging once more with the (pretend) ‘enemy’ (Jarvis et al 2014).

However, the opportunities for such free play have declined in recent years, resulting in what Upstart Scotland refers to as ‘the silence of the weans’, asking:

When was the last time you heard the shouts, squeals and laughter of young children as they ran, jumped, climbed, built dens, made mixtures and played ‘Let’s Pretend’ in their local neighbourhood?

What impact will the lack of traditional songs, rhymes, stories and the time and space for free play within our contemporary culture have upon our cultural heritage? While this is not the question that is usually asked when the issue of what our busy lives, our accountability culture and our carelessness of children’s opportunities for free play are considered, it is one worth raising. The human being is above all, a storytelling animal. What price will we pay, then, for the loss of our ancestral narratives? What will be the outcome if the current generation of children do not grasp the concept of ‘once upon a time’ as deeply as previous generations? It is after all, not just a line in children’s story books, but an idea so powerful for human beings that it can be found in most of their languages. These are certainly questions worth considering now, before it is too late.

References

Dundes A (1989) Folklore Matters. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Jarvis, P., Newman, S. and George, J. (2014) Play, Learning for Life: in pursuit of well being through play, pp.270-298 in Avril Brock, Pam Jarvis and Yinka Olusoga (Eds) Perspectives on Play: Learning for Life. Abingdon, Routledge.

Opie, I. and Opie P. (1969) Children’s Games in Street and Playground, London, Oxford University Press.