FOLKLORE TRADITIONS IN WALTER SCOTT'S POETRY: NATIONAL, STYLISTIC AND CROSS-CULTURAL DIMENSIONS

Oral folk poetry is one of the most precious spiritual heritages of every nation, shaped across centuries of collective creativity. The present article examines how Walter Scott (1771–1832), one of the foremost representatives of English Romanticism, drew on national folklore as the principal aesthetic and ideological foundation of his verse poetry. The study applies a combination of close textual analysis and comparative-typological methodology to The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Marmion (1808), and The Lady of the Lake (1810). Analysis reveals four principal mechanisms of folkloric integration in Scott's verse: deployment of the minstrel frame narrative, systematic linguistic archaization, oral-formulaic diction, and the structural use of supernatural motifs. It is argued that Scott's folkloric poetics constitutes a deliberate program of cultural preservation and national identity construction. Comparative analysis, drawing on Russian and Uzbek scholarly traditions, identifies structural parallels between Scott's methods and those of Central Asian oral epic transformation. The findings contribute to comparative folklore studies, Romantic literary history, and cross-cultural literary methodology.