Why is the oral tradition...

Sometimes oral traditions have some sort of support, and sometimes those traditions contradict everything that is known about the subject. And then there's the whole question of what is meant by "accurate", I've heard some BS stories spun that were provably false and yet their claims still took on a life of their own.

There's a story I heard growing up, it was told in such a way that it sounded as if the events were farther back in history than they actually were. The story goes that a relative of mine who couldn't read and was generally regarded as a bit stupid managed to build a airplane by looking at pictures in a book. Most of the details of that "tradition" are false, I would have to say the tradition wasn't "accurate" at all. The reason I can say that is because a few years ago my sister was researching the family tree and encountered a whole different version of the story, a version that is backed up by newspaper articles from the time and area he lived in. Apparently my distant uncle did build an aircraft and managed to fly it. A few years later he went to work in a research lab working on helicopter design so he must not have been the idiot I had heard he was.

Druids in Ireland had an oral tradition. It took people about 30 years to become a druid after they had learned to recite everything accurately. So I have heard anyway.

Not sure that any oral tradition is considered actually accurate, but often it's all we have.

It just requires more copies than the written word to be credible