Founded in 1914, the Norwegian Folklore Archives has served as a national archive of cultural-historical texts and source materials. The archives are located at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages (IKOS) at the University of Oslo.

Throughout its history, NFS has been a unique national archive that has striven to collect, preserve, and present traditional texts and source materials – what is often called our cultural heritage.This corpus has been at the heart of research on Norwegian folklore and cultural history since its foundation, and it has also been an important source for research on dialects and language history.

The material largely concerns written records of orally transmitted forms of popular poetry, such as folktales, legends, and ballads, collected during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A catchall term for such materials is folklore records.

The material has been systematically organized into various categories such as ballads, folktales, legends, customs, and beliefs. For each category there is a corresponding topographical registry of those who collected the material for the NFS.