Good afternoon everyone,

This week Margo sent me a bear meme, and it prompted the realisation that I don't remember, any more, how the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears ends. The bits I remember are:

1. Goldilocks gains entry to house in the woods, samples porridge and variety of furnishings before settling in a bed
2. Narrative focus shifts to the occupants of the house, who we discover are bears* and understandably angry at the incursion into their home and pantry
3. Goldilocks wakes and finds herself entirely surrounded by bears

Then what happens? I've done some informal polling, and the answers vary from "Goldilocks runs away screaming" (respondent born after 1980) to "Goldilocks eaten by bears" (respondent born before 1980) to "dance off" (I don't think this is a serious answer). Anyway, if you want to let me know what you think happens, I'd be interested.

These thoughts of childhood stories brought me naturally to the incredible work of Iona Opie, who as part of a husband and wife team documented British childhood… things. Nursery rhymes and games and little bits of childhood folklore.

Let's start with her obituary and this beautiful quotation:

Their first publication was I Saw Esau (1947), a slim precursor of the wide spines of The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1951) and The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book (1955). The Opies applied years of rigour to an oral culture too commonplace to have received attention before: their scholarship, informally communicated, was important to the postwar discovery of the words of ordinary people. “It took 50 generations to make up Mother Goose,” Iona said. “Nursery rhymes are the smallest great poems of the world’s literature.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/oct/25/iona-opie-obituary

The British Library has recordings of her research, you can listen to this today! There's loads of it too, although you probably need to go to the BL for most of it:

Their audio archive consists of 85 open reel and cassette tapes recorded by Iona during research for The Singing Game (1985) and deposited with the British Library in 1998.

https://sounds.bl.uk/Oral-history/Opie-collection-of-children-s-games-and-songs-

Finally, Open Library has a whole book:

Pursuers are supplied with a guide, although an abtruse one.

https://archive.org/stream/childrensgamesin0000opie

Have a lovely weekend, everyone,

Alex.

*perhaps we knew already that they were bears but some tension here would be a nice addition