They are consistent with each other and with accounts from other sources, which suggests that they reflect genuine community memory rather than individual invention.

The reliability of oral tradition is a subject that historians have debated extensively.

The specific traditions of any people are subject to the same processes that affect all human memory — embellishment over time, the mixing of different events, the influence of what people believe should have happened on what they remember as having happened.

These limitations are real and should be acknowledged.

But oral tradition also preserves information that written records do not.