People in recent years tend to assume that it was written by several authors or a group, and hypotheses have been advanced such as the one by Motoo ABE that Yoshimichi HATANO handed some of the tale down; or the one by Tamiki HARAMIZU and Hiroshi SUNAGAWA, which asserts that some people around FUJIWARA no Tadazane and Yorinaga (a father and a son) wrote it.
近年では、その制作にかかわって、複数の人、ないしは集団を想定する説が多くなっており、波多野義通を物語のいくつかの伝承者とする安部元雄の説、藤原忠実・頼長父子周辺の人物を想定する原水民樹・砂川博などの説が提出されている。