The articles in this volume stem from the 5th International Folklore Fellow's Summer School, a forum for the global evaluation of folklore methodology, held in Turku in August 1999. 'Thick Corpus', 'organic variation' and 'textuality' are new keywords in folklore theory. They signal a shift of paradigm between the intercultural study of variation. The modern scholar focuses on intensive fieldwork on living systems of tradition, trying to create thick corpora of material reflecting the organic variation of folklore in context.