Most of the credit for the independence of literary folkloristics belongs to experts from the Nordic countries. The desired goal of the diachronic "Finnish school" (Krohn), i.e., classical "folkloristic working methods" (Oslo, 1926), were studies on the origin, spread and transformation of folklore motifs in the largest possible temporal and spatial dimensions, with as much comparative material as possible. Immediately behind it, structuralist debates (Propp, Jolles, Bogatyrev and Jakobson et al.), which were synchronistically conceived, are connected by a striving for the independence and equivalence of the system, which, in contrast to the system of literature, is here called literary folklore. Čistov significantly supplemented it with the theory of communication, Lihačov, Mukařovski, Lotman provided it with a place in aesthetics with the poetics of the artistic time, the categories of aesthetic value, aesthetic norm, aesthetic function and the aesthetics of opposition cultivated by literature, as opposed to the aesthetics of similarity contained in folklore. The present work examines the outlined elements on Slovenian material by presenting each literary period or its current with at least one chapter, thereby inviting consideration of a revaluation of literary folklore as a branch of verbal art that has accompanied man since the beginning of language.

After the invention of writing, it became the art of dialects and spoken language up to the present day, in both rural and urban environments. At least it is no longer possible to disguise what fertile earth it has been for the development of Slovenian literature since its inception.