Although they are known today from these written sources, the dindsenchas are clearly a product of oral literature and are structured so as to be a mnemonic aid as well as a form of entertainment. They are far from an accurate history of how places came to be named. Many of the explanations given are made to fit the name and not the other way around, especially in the many cases where a place was much older than the Middle Irish spoken at the time of the poems' composition. In other cases, the dindsenchas poets may have invented names for places when the name of a place, if it had one, was not known to them. A detailed analysis points to a pre-Christian origin for most of the tales. For example, many placenames appear which had fallen out of use by the 5th century A.D., when Irish written records began to appear in quantity. Furthermore County Clare is given as part of Connaught suggesting a date before ~610 AD and the Battle of Knocklong. Christian references, and the Graeco-Roman myths and tales of Pagan atrocity associated with that influence are also mostly absent.
