Matija Valjavec (1831—1897), Slovenian poet, Croatian scholar and linguist, a member ol the Yugoslav Academy of Arts and Sciences who lived in Zagreb from 1876. to the end of his life, came to Varaždin, Croatia in 1850 as a local high school teacher. While he lived in Varaždin he started to collect, in Croatia and Slovenia, the folk songs and folk tales which he published dm 1858 as Folk Tales and in 1890 'under a slightly different title as Polk Stories. These books kept their value up to now because of Val.javec’s meticulousness, his ear for the language and the style in which they are written and which was characteristic for Valjavec already as a schoolboy to his notes about Slovenian folk treasure of his native village and its surroundings. His book of folks tales from 1858 was already highly praised by Fran Miklošić, a well-known Slovenian scholar. The newspaper Slovenec said the following in the obituary for Valjavec: »Valjavec was a writer and a scholar who are fewer and fewer today ... He worked far the Slovenes and Croatians and thus showed our brotherhood.«
