The traditional Irish tales, which appear in medieval manuscripts, were preserved from generation to generation by several orders of Druids. These sagas served 'oral scriptures' for the Pre-Celtic and later pre-Christian Celts of Ireland. Blessings were tellings, but we have an indication that the greatest care was taken to ensure the integrity of that tradition. In the colophon to Táin Bó Cuailnge the greatest.

Of all sagas in the twelfth century Christian manuscript The book of Leinster it is written:
"A blessing on all those who memorise The Táin with fidelity in this form and do not put any other form to it."

However in a second colophon written in Latin (therefore more influenced by Christianity) we read as stern warning against taking its contents too seriously:
"But I who have written this history, or rather story, do not give faith to many of the things in this history or story. For some things therein are delusions of demons some are poetic figments, some are truth, some not, and some are for the amusement of fools."

Even when the Christian scribes tried to impose a Christian order and appearance on the original texts by inserting certain lines and passages the interpolations were so easy to detect that, as Douglas Hyde remarks:
"The pieces came away quite separate in the hands of even the least skilled analyser and the pagan substratum stands forth entirely from the Christian accretion." Were it not for these dedicated Christian Scribes, however, little or nothing would remain today of our earliest and greatest sagas, for the Irish narrative tradition was essentially oral until the middle of the seventh century. Had our great manuscripts been preserved as a body, and not decimated by the Viking plunderers and English puritans we would today have the most remarkable corpus of primitive myth and saga in the world. One weeps for what has been lost but rejoices in what remains, remarkable as it is for its great quantity and quality.