Huizinga’s Homo ludens

Abstract

When I was honoured by the invitation to share in this tribute to a great and noble historian of culture I had no doubt in my mind as to the aspect of his rich and varied oeuvre I most wanted to examine and discuss. Like all of us who are interested in cultural history I have had frequent occasion to remember that inspired coinage of Huizinga’s who matched the idea of homo faber with that of homo ludens. Long ago I wrote a little essay entitled Meditations on a Hobby Horse or The Roots of Artistic Form which developed into a book entitled Art and Illusion largely concerned with that most elusive of mental states, that of fiction. Later, when I studied the idea of personification of such entities as Fama or Fortuna¹ I remembered the pregnant pages Huizinga devoted to this strange twilight of ideas between mythology and abstraction in his study of Alanus de Insulis and again in Homo ludens. Now I am once more in the orbit of his problems in a study on which I am engaged that is to deal with decoration, ornament and the grotesque.

To the memory of Rosalie L. Colie (1925–1972)