According to Campbell, the tale was collected by Hector MacLean in Islay from an informant named Ann MacGilvray, a "Cowal woman".
The woman tells her that the crow flew over the hill of poison and she will need horseshoes to follow him, but if she dresses as a man and goes to a smithy, she will learn how to make them.
[5] The tale belongs to the cycle of the Animal as Bridegroom or The Search for the Lost Husband, which, in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index, falls under the more general type ATU 425.
[6] American folklorist D. L. Ashliman classified the story The Tale of the Hoodie (and its republication, The Hoodie-Crow) as type 425A, "The Animal (Monster) as Bridegroom".
[7] Conversely, scholar Jan-Öjvind Swahn [sv], in his monograph about Cupid and Psyche, classified the tale under the subsidiary type Aa 425X, a miscellaneous subtype that encompasses tales that do not fit under the more specific types Swahn adduced.
[8] The motif of the separation of the heroine from her children is located by scholarship across Celtic and Germanic speaking areas.