⁴Hutton, Ronald. The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy. Oxford, UK: B. Blackwell, 1991, pp. 147-48.

Hutton explains that the stories "...were transcribed by Christian monks who may not merely have been hostile to the earlier paganism but actually ignorant of it...The authors could remember where the great pagan centres had been, but turned them into royal halls filled with warrior aristocrats instead of showing them as the complex ceremonial sites which they were. The heroes in the tales fight with swords from the Viking age, not the Iron Age. They ride in chariots, which are well attested in the early Christian centuries but not from those before."

The earliest version of the Dindshenehas Erenn collection of medieval legends is found in the Book of Leinster (c. 1160 CE). In that text Tara is the subject of five poems and three prose accounts. (Newman, Conor. Tara: An Archaeological Survey. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy for the Discovery Programme, 1997, p. 2.)