The ultimate question, perhaps, is whether Lloyd's songs were "fakes." Well, no, they weren't. They are just not very typical and not very reliable sources of information about nineteenth-century song culture.

As somebody once asked ironically, "Are the Arabian Nights a fake?"

The question's relevance depends on what you want. What we call The Arabian Nights is a translation (or a modernization of a translation)of various translations of various dates from various cultures. ("Aladdin" is Chinese, and "Sindbad" doesn't even appear in the earliest editions.) That makes it a real problem for scholars studying the stories and the cultures, but not for anybody else.

And there's a time-related element as well. Take Lloyd's "Reynardine." We feel cheated and hoaxed to learn that Lloyd deliberately suggested that R. was a were-fox by slyly adding a detail about teeth that only the folklorically inclined would be likely to notice. But in a hundred years, their descendants may be fascinated by the idea that "horror films were so popular in the mid-twentieth century that even 'Reynardine' was turned into a were-fox."

Some of them will undoubtedly add, "by the folk."