Peter and Iona Opie

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Peter and Iona (Archibald) Opie were a husband-and-wife team of folklorists, who applied modern techniques to children's literature, summarized in their studies, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1952) and The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959) Their collection of some 1200 titles of children's books has been donated to the Bodleian Library, Oxford University.

In pursuing the folklore of contemporary childhood they have directly recorded rhymes and games as they were currently being played.

[edit] Some works

• Peter Opie, author, 1946. The Case of Being a Young Man, a 'discursion' (Chosen Books, competition prize winnner)
• Iona and Peter Opie, collectors and editors, 1947. I Saw Esau: Traditional Rhymes of Youth (Williams & Norgate Ltd)
• Iona and Peter Opie, editors, 1952. The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford University Press)
• Iona and Peter Opie, editors. 1974. The Classic Fairy tales (Oxford University Press). Presents the texts of twenty-four familiar fairy tales as they were first published in English; summarizes the history of each tale, especially from the textual point of view.
• Iona and Peter Opie, Maurice Sendak illustrations, 1992. I Saw Esau: The Schoolchild's Pocket Book (Walker Books, London)
• Iona Opie, 1996. My Very First Mother Goose (Cambridge, Mass:Candlewick)
• Iona Opie, 1999. Here Comes Mother Goose (Cambridge, Mass:Candlewick)
• Iona and Peter Opie,, 2000. I Saw Esau: The Schoolchild's Pocket Book (Cambridge, Mass:Candlewick)

• • more than two dozen additional titles

[edit] References

• Gillian Avery and Julia Briggs, editors. 1989. Children and Their Books: A Celebration of the Work of Iona and Peter Opie Essays by twenty leading scholars on a wide range of topics from the behavior of children in early modern England and the development of French fairy tales and nursery rhymes, to the work of classic authors such as Lewis Carroll, Kenneth Grahame, Beatrix Potter, and J.R.R. Tolkien.
• The Peter & Iona Opie Collection of Folklore and Related Topics