The Finnish Literature Society is proud to publish some of the key articles written by the grand old man of Finnish folkoristics Matti Kuusi. His folkloristic achievements can be characterised as a giant feat of memory in areas in which the human brain functions better than any computer. Kuusi is a scholar of the Finnish school in his striving for completeness of materials, and he has demonstrated that the strength and riches of folkloristic study lies in its basic materials and their painstaking treatment often with the help of quantitative analysis. Kuusi's unusual intellectual capacity and his unusual ability to handle wide entities have resulted in scientific results that, with the passage of decades, has proved itself to be unusually long-lasting.