Abstract
The contribution deals with the overview of more significant literary-folkloristic studies that paid their attention to the analysis of prosaic folklore phenomena developed and/or spread during World War I both in the battlefields and in the hinterland zones. While some texts of folklore nature drew researchers' attention nearly immediately (prophecy, folk beliefs), the analyses of some others began several years later (demonogical legends, jokes, folk graffiti) - a part thereof came to a more thorough analysis only at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries (rumours and contemporary legends).
Within European folkloristics, World War I proves to be a period that drew researchers' attention mainly because of an unexpected increase in "irrationality" in both rural and urban environment. At that time, this phenomenon was most often interpreted as "tradition revival" and welcomed as a mean for revitalization and legitimacy of a discipline focused on the documentation of ostensibly disappearing folk culture associated with traditional rural areas.
Although this concerned quite isolated partial studies in the most cases, yet as a whole these helped increase the interest of European folkloristics in the texts circulating in the current oral tradition. The texts of that time devoted to the interpretation of World War I paved the way for the later researches into contemporary folklore to a certain extent.
This research direction was made more topical again at the end of the 20th century as it served as an inspiration for the contemporary study of the World War I folklore, which was based on the exploration of more types of source materials.