⁹Denman, Peter. Samuel Ferguson: The Literary Achievement. Savage, MD: Barnes & Noble, 1990. 93-94.
Author and folklore scholar Ron James writes (in a personal email 7/20/2012) "[Ferguson] creates a tradition, which was a perfectly acceptable practice in nineteenth-century Romanticism...So much of real, honest folklore was inspired by the written word, just as folklore inspires literature. It has been a fluid back and forth since writing was invented, and that is a healthy process. Nineteenth-century Romantic nationalists felt they were fully justified in creating traditions where existing ones might be a little thin. And for a poet to find artistic if not spiritual inspiration when gazing on a megalith ruin, creating a tradition out of that inspiration where no folk tradition might exist, was perfectly in keeping with the time."