This is the collection's belletristic layer — literature for pleasure, the closest this archive comes to storytelling for its own sake. The catalogue splits it as Folk Tale (63%) and Secular Literary Work (37%), and the titles bear both out.
On one side, the folk romances and tales: Khun Sam Lo, the great northern love-tragedy; Cao saeng moeng; Suwattang khanthang; the nithan of the Himavanta forest (Tamnan nitan pa mai himapan) with its mythical beasts. On the other, the sung-verse forms that are the native vehicle of Lanna literature — the khao and the kham khap (Kam khap, Kam khap ka long, Khao doi …), poetry meant to be performed aloud, not silently read. The corpus is also porous in a way the learned genres are not: a khao retelling of Vessantara (Kam len khao wetsantala) turns scripture into entertainment, and a copy of Phra Aphai Mani shows Central Thai literature travelling north into Lanna hands.
For the wider project this is the living vernacular voice — the register where the tradition entertained itself, where oral performance met the page, and the one that connects most directly to still-living Lanna storytelling and its documented folklore.
Two features set this genre apart from the learned corpora. First, it is the latest- dating genre in the collection: no witness is older than 1836, and the bulk is 20th century — vernacular literature was written down only recently, long after the scripture and the grammars. Second, its support and geography break the canonical mould — paper runs to 21% (against the 3–9% of the scholastic genres), and it is not a Wat Sung Men tradition at all: Phayao and Nan lead, Phrae trails, and Tai Lue temples like Wat Nong Bua figure. The folk literature lived away from the great scholastic library.