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James
MacPherson
"The
public may depend on the following fragments as genuine remains of ancient
Scottish poetry. The date of their composition cannot be exactly ascertained.
Tradition in the country where they were written, refers them to an era of the
most remote antiquity: and this tradition is supported by the spirit and strain
of the poems themselves; which abound with those ideas, and paint those manners,
that belong to the most early state of society."
James
Macpherson, Preface to Fragments of Ancient poetry, Collected in
the Highlands of Scotland, and Translated from the Galic or Erse Language
(1760)
 James
Macpherson (1736-96) is best remembered for an eighteenth century literary hoax.
At this time people were becoming obsessed with the Highlands of Scotland.
Macpherson, a Highlander from Newtonmore, was sent by Hugh Blair, chair of
Rhetoric at the University of Edinburgh on a tour of the Highlands and Islands
to see what he could find in the way of ancient manuscripts. Macpherson returned
with his Fragments of Ancient Poetry. He claimed that these were
translations from Gaelic manuscripts written by Ossian, son of Fingal, a bard of
the third century AD who in old age had related the heroic exploits of his youth
and lamented the changes wrought by the passage of time.
What is certain is that
Macpherson never found ancient manuscripts and his 'translations' in that
respect are a fraud. However, the reader has to understand where Macpherson was
coming from. He was a Highlander living in the post-Jacobite era where the
wearing of kilts and the bearing of arms had been proscribed and he deeply
resented the Union of 1707. Gaelic traditions were belittled and Gaelic speakers
held up as illiterate bumpkins. He seized the opportunity to 'prove' that there
had been a highly literate Gaelic civilisation. In fact his 'translations' were
based on medieval ballads and the fragments do contain genuine pieces which
existed in the oral traditions of his time, but they were heavily altered by him
and were connected by his own compositions.
A taste of Ossian:
from Fragment VIII
"By the side of a
rock on the hill, beneath the aged trees, old Oscian sat on the moss; the last
of the race of Fingal. Sightless are his aged eyes; his beard is waving in the
wind. Dull through the leafless trees he heard the voice of the North. Sorrow
revived in his soul: he began and lamented the dead..."
For further reading see
John MacQueen (Ed.) Poems of Ossian (Mercat Press, Edinburgh 1971).
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