Ossian
Ossian is based on Oisín, son of Fionn mac Cumhaill (anglicised to Finn McCool),[2] a legendary bard in Irish mythology.
Contemporary critics were divided in their view of the work's authenticity, but the current consensus is that Macpherson largely composed the poems himself, drawing in part on traditional Gaelic poetry he had collected.
[3] The work was internationally popular, translated into all the literary languages of Europe, and was highly influential both in the development of the Romantic movement and the Gaelic revival.
W. P. Ker, in the Cambridge History of English Literature, observes that "all Macpherson's craft as a philological impostor would have been nothing without his literary skill.
"[4] In 1760, Macpherson published the English-language text Fragments of ancient poetry, collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and translated from the Gaelic or Erse language.
The main characters are Ossian himself, relating the stories when old and blind, his father Fingal (very loosely based on the Irish hero Fionn mac Cumhaill), his dead son Oscar (also with an Irish counterpart), and Oscar's lover Malvina (like Fiona a name invented by Macpherson), who looks after Ossian in his old age.
[9] Thomas Jefferson thought Ossian "the greatest poet that has ever existed",[10] and planned to learn Gaelic so as to read his poems in the original.
The Hungarian national poet Sándor Petőfi wrote a poem entitled Homer and Ossian, comparing the two authors, of which the first verse reads: Oh where are you Hellenes and Celts?
David Hume eventually withdrew his initial support of Macpherson and quipped that he could not accept the claimed authenticity of the poems even if "fifty bare-arsed Highlanders" vouched for it.
Samuel Johnson, English author, critic, and biographer, was convinced that Macpherson was "a mountebank, a liar, and a fraud, and that the poems were forgeries".
The work also had a timely resonance for those swept away by the emerging Romantic movement and the theory of the "noble savage", and it echoed the popularity of Burke's seminal A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757).
[17] In 1766, antiquarian and Celticist Charles O'Conor, a descendant of the Gaelic nobility of Ireland, dismissed Ossian's authenticity in a new chapter Remarks on Mr. Mac Pherson's translation of Fingal and Temora that he added to the second edition of his seminal history.
This text is a version of the Irish Longes mac n-Uislenn and offers a tale which bears some comparison to Macpherson's "Darthula", although it is radically different in many respects.
In the late 19th century, it was demonstrated that the only "original" Gaelic manuscripts that Macpherson produced for the poems were in fact translations of his work from English.
[21] In 1952, the Scottish literary scholar Derick Thomson investigated the sources for Macpherson's work and concluded that Macpherson had collected genuine Scottish Gaelic ballads, employing scribes to record those that were preserved orally and collating manuscripts, but, as a pioneer of mythopoeia, had adapted often contradictory accounts of the same legends into a coherent plotline by altering the original characters and ideas, and had also introduced a great deal of his own.
[22] According to historians Colin Kidd and James Coleman, Fingal (1761, dated 1762) was indebted to traditional Gaelic poetry composed in the 15th and 16th centuries, as well as to Macpherson's "own creativity and editorial laxity", while the second epic Temora (1763) was largely his own creation.
[24][25] Goethe's associate Johann Gottfried Herder wrote an essay titled Extract from a correspondence about Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples (1773) in the early days of the Sturm und Drang movement.
In Scandinavia and Germany, the Celtic nature of the setting was ignored or not understood; instead, Ossian was regarded as a Nordic or Germanic figure who became a symbol for nationalist aspirations.
Buchanan, taking the poems of Ossian to be authentic, was moved to revalue the genuine traditions and rich cultural heritage of the Gaels.
At around the same time, he wrote to Sir James Clerk of Penicuik, the leading antiquary of the movement, proposing that someone should travel to the isles and western coast of Scotland and collect the work of the ancient and modern bards, in which alone he could find the language in its purity.
These were by the Scottish painter Alexander Runciman but were lost when the house burnt down in 1899, though drawings and etchings survive, and two pamphlets describing them were published in the 18th century.
[33] The Danish painter Nicolai Abildgaard, director of the Copenhagen Academy from 1789, painted several scenes from Ossian, as did his pupils, including Asmus Jacob Carstens.
[35] Many other German works are recorded, some as late as the 1840s;[36] word of the British scepticism over the Ossian poems was slow to penetrate the continent, or considered irrelevant.
[38] The same year, Napoleon was planning the renovation of the Château de Malmaison as a summer palace, and, though he does not seem to have suggested Ossianic subjects for his painters, two large and significant works were among those painted for the reception hall, for which six artists had been commissioned.
[42] Girodet's painting (still at Malmaison; 192.5 × 184 cm) was a succès de scandale when exhibited in 1802, and remains a key work in the emergence of French Romantic painting, but the specific allusions to the political situation that he intended it to carry were largely lost on the public, and overtaken by the Peace of Amiens with Great Britain, signed in 1802 between the completion and exhibition of the work.
The collection was originally assembled by J. Norman Methven of Perth and includes different editions and translations of James Macpherson's epic poem 'Ossian', some with a map of the 'Kingdom of Connor'.
