Cat's Cradle Game History

It is well known in China Korea Japan the Philippines and Borneo.

Cat's cradle game history. Along with its cousins -- Jacobs ladder cup and saucer crows feet -- it is played by schoolchildren everywhere. Included are directions for four classic string games. Our Cats Cradle and Other String Games uses the Haddon and Rivers terminology for defining the strings on the fingers and features jumbo yarn.

The best guess of most historians is that Cats Cradle got its start in a rudimentary form somewhere in Southeast Asia near China and Korea where the game is still played today. That certainly sounds far-fetched today but it was a commonly held superstition back in the 1600s and 1700s. Cats Cradle String Games by Camilla Gryski 1983.

Hoenikker reportedly played it on the day the atomic bomb was droppedas opposed to expressing emotion about all of the people his invention had just killed. Some sources say that children played Cats Cradle in England as early as 1782. Cup and Saucer The Witchs Broom Cats Cradle and Jacobs Ladder as well as a brief history of string games.

The use of cats in the cradle to describe something dangerous appears to come from an old wives tale that if allowed into its crib a cat would kill an infant by sucking out its breath. Im one of those people who like to have something to fiddle with in their hands and it was easy to carry a loop of string in my pocket. In the mid-80s David and the Penleys passed the torch to Frank HeathAs we all realized during two weekends of anniversary shows in December and January the rest is history.

Cats Cradlegets its name from the childrens game. It is thought that this particular game traveled to Europe in the early seventeenth century with the tea trade from Asia. It has also spread to some extent among the Asiatic islands.

Variations of the game have been found in cultures across the world including Eastern Asia Africa the Americas and even the Arctic giving the game a significant amount of interest among anthropologists and ethnologists. As Vonnegut says For maybe a hundred thousand years or more grownups have been waving tangles of string in their childrens faces to form nothing but a bunch of Xs between somebodys hands 165-166. In the American colonies Cats Cradle or Cratch Cradle was one of the earliest and most popular of all known string games.