Unrecorded before the 19th century, the earliest known version was "A Legend of Knockmany" in the 1845 "Tales and Sketches .. of the Irish Peasantry" by William Carleton. Variants were published in Patrick Kennedy's "Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts" (1866), and republished and brought to a larger audience by W.B. Yeats in "Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry" (1888), followed by numerous adaptions and variant, many uncredited. The work was included in later collections of 'folk tales' by other editors such as Joseph Jacobs in his "Celtic Fairy Tales" (1891).