These songs were published in a collection that also had four additional songs from the collection that is now grouped together as 20 Irish Songs , and written at the same time as the songs in the collection of 25 Scottish Songs. As in all of these folk-song arrangements, the texts have little to nothing authentic about them, and the melodies are of almost equally questionable authenticity, but nonetheless for their intended audience they provided the desired folk flavor, ease of playing, and adaptability to the available number of players and singers.

Musicologists often criticize these songs for being both easy and superficial, and yet this criticism is often unfair. The Return to Ulster, for example, is deeply intense, even tragic in tone, and at first hearing seems more complicated than any of the individual components actually are. Beethoven here was able to use fairly simple tools to create a dramatic mood, one as striking as many of his more "artistic" lieder. The violin obbligato The Massacre of Glencoe is not used in a particularly sophisticated fashion, and yet it creates the mournful impression quite effectively.

Some of the songs from this collection have become quite popular, such as the plaintive They bid me slight my Dermot dear, championed by no lesser an artist than Victoria de los Angeles, and it's quite possible that both tune and text of A wand'ring gypsey, Sirs, am I (or its imitators) might have influenced a few of Gilbert and Sullivan's songs, such as A wand'ring minstrel I from The Mikado or Buttercup's song from Pinafore.

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