Quote Originally Posted by oudysseos View Post
...Homer was around for more than a thousand years before the very earliest recorded references to episodes from the Tain, and chariot-driving heroes figure prominently in the Iliad. If even only the story of Achilles dragging Hector by the heels reached Ireland as a travellers tail, a monk hunched over his desk in some damp, cold scriptorium might have thrown a chariot or two into the folk-tale he was recording just to enlighten the tedium. Or maybe the clan chief who commissioned the bards recitation wanted chariots.
This is one theory I've heard before and it seems a rather weak one. A monk might insert a few lines about some hero in a chariot, but there is an extensive collection of chariot related words in the Táin and other sources - it stretches credibility to suggest they are all just nonsense words made up by a monk to make things more Homeric.