"Fowler,"
Attempting to claim, or even suggest origins of ballads whose motifs pre-date Christianity is like setting up a company to mine pots of gold at the end of rainbows
There are no answers available and there never will be
Harker takes it on himself to demand that 'folk song' collectors should have done what was not within their remit
Whether he and his disciples like it or not, those who actually spent time in contact with the singers who were pert of the preservation of these 'folk songs' were far closer to being qualified to come to an informed estimation of the significance of folk song than any desk-bound purveyor of impenetrable long words will ever be - as far away from a definitive answer as they/we may have been
I believe I learned far more about the oral tradition from an evening with Mikeen McCarthy, Tom Lenihan, Mary Delaney.'Pop's' Johnny Connors oor Walter Pardon, than I would have from a lifetime of reading books/articles written by someone who wouldn't know a folk/traditional/sean nós singer if one regaled them with a twenty-verse ballad
Much of what is being quoted here makes me relieved that I never became involved in folk-freemasonry
It seems to deliberately unnecessarily complicate an extremely fundamental human act

We once recorded Tom Lenihan singing the epic, 'Farmer Michael Hayes' to explain the song to us - his reply was "I just have"   
Jim Carroll