Cat's Cradle Game History

Included are directions for four classic string games.

Cat's cradle game history. 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. Cats Cradle has moved a few times in its 50 years including to locations on Franklin and Rosemary streets in Chapel Hill. In a literal sense a cats cradle is a game played with string in which each player must maneuver their fingers to create different images one of which is the cats cradle.

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. According to Edward Tregear in The Maori race 1904 the Cats Cradle whai huhi or maui was known to the Maoris as to almost all the inhabitants of the Malay Archipelago and South SeasIt was played with the two hands and a piece of string assuming very complicated forms. It is probably one of the oldest games.

String games such as Cats Cradle have been played around the world for thousands if not millions of years. Our Cats Cradle and Other String Games uses the Haddon and Rivers terminology for defining the strings on the fingers and features jumbo yarn. Included are directions for four classic string games.

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. 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.

Cup and Saucer The Witchs Broom Cats Cradle and Jacobs Ladder as well as a brief history of string games. Its origin is unknown and it has been found in wildly diverse indigenous cultures from the Arctic to Europe to Indonesia. The question of who first played cats cradle the childrens game in which two players alternately take from each others fingers an intertwined cord so as always to produce a symmetrical figure is almost as contentious as the origin of its name.

Cup and Saucer The Witchs Broom Cats Cradle and Jacobs Ladder as well as a brief history of string games. It is thought that this particular game traveled to Europe in the early seventeenth century with the tea trade from Asia. Cats Cradle String Games by Camilla Gryski 1983.