Fite folk fable, as a form of oral artistic communication, transforms, in a fantastic fashion, the archaic, lived, cultural, political, religious or some other reality into art, condensing the inexhaustible richness or beliefs, experience# and wisdom of different peoples. Using comparative-contrastive analysis, the author examines the variegated world of miraculous fable motifs on an established corpus of representative Austrian and Yugoslav folk fables. It is established that two neighbouring people who in the past shared a common socio-political and cultural destiny, have a large number of common and similar motifs (magical implements, animal helpers, animal bridegrooms, animal brides, metamorphoses, water or life, magical birth, mute tongue), while the dissimilar motifs (in Austrian fables: the grateful dead, helping the father, quarrels over dead animals; in Yugoslav fables: healing grass, »outer souls«, fairies, the writing of the »book«, curses) make up a smaller segment of the investigated material. Relying on recent insights from the research of fables, the author tries to account for the choice of elements of single motifs by each nation using the ethnological, sociological and psychological points of view.
