Like most ballads, "Sir Patrick Spens" and "The Great Silkie of Shule Skerrie" are not attributed to any one author. Medieval troubadours and common people passed such songs orally from generation to generation. Most of the ballads we know today were collected in the late nineteenth century from elderly women in rural areas. Many of these ballads were hundreds of years old, songs that mothers had sung to their children for centuries. Facts such as these led the English author Virginia Woolf to comment that "Anonymous was a woman."