The Collection of Hungarian Traditional Games

Abstract

In the first half of the twentieth century, the collection of Hungarian traditional games was housed in the archives of the department of folk music of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Folk music researchers published the first volume of the Corpus Musicae Popularis Hungaricae I, with the title Children’s Games, containing 1,162 songs from traditional games. As Zoltán Kodály, world-famous folk musicologist, wrote in the preface of the volume, the publication of the volume marked the beginning of the work, not the end of it. Further work has verified this. The type system of traditional games was completed in the 1980s, and contained all kinds of games. It was developed on the basis of Hungarian traditional games although it is also suitable for systematising the traditional games of other European peoples. The article exemplifies a decades-long journey of a collection from an analogue format to a database.