Iona Margaret Balfour Opie, CBE, FBA (13 October 1923 – 23 October 2017)[1] and Peter Mason Opie (25 November 1918 – 5 February 1982) were an English married team of folklorists who applied modern techniques to understanding children's literature and play, in studies such as The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1951) and The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959).
In pursuing the folklore of contemporary childhood they directly recorded rhymes and games in real time as they were being sung, chanted, or played.
Peter Opie was born in 1918 in Cairo in the war-time British Protectorate or Sultanate of Egypt and was educated at Eton College.
[4] He began a career as a writer and was joint winner of the £1,000 Chosen Books competition, with his autobiographical discursion The Case of Being a Young Man (published in paperback, 1946).
[8] By the time of the publication of The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959), they had received contributions from about five thousand children (at seventy state schools).
[8] Over the following decades, the number of contributors grew: Iona Opie believing the final total to be close to twenty thousand.
[9] The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren was meant to counter the argument that mass media and the entertainment industry had ruined childhood traditions.
[2] Speaking in 2010, Iona spoke of working with her husband as being "like two of us in a very small boat and each had an oar and we were trying to row across the Atlantic" and that "[W]e would never discuss ideas verbally except very late at night".
[3] In 1960, the Opies were jointly awarded the Coote Lake Medal, the highest honour of The Folklore Society, "for outstanding research and scholarship".
[6] In 1970, the Opies were awarded the Chicago Prize of the American Folklore Society for their book, Children's Games in Street and Playground.
[22] The collaboration is called Childhoods and Play: The Iona and Peter Opie Archive and is a British Academy Research Project.