I liked Ebbie's tongue-in-cheek comment about Shakespeare.
Scholarship is a different field to collecting and singing. I drank deeply of the traddy balleds at one time, but reading is a tedious way to learn, compared with listening to them, so good for him, it takes all sorts to make a world.
Anyway, if a historian writes of something that occurred more than a generation ago, should we denegrate his work too? S/He didn't take part in it, swing a sword, fire a bundook, carry a message.