Ossian

by James MacPherson

First published in the 1760s and purporting to be authentic translations 'from the Gaelic or Erse language' of works by an ancient poet called Ossian, James Macpherson's Fingal and Temora were greeted with scepticism by Dr. Johnson, but with the greatest enthusiasm by a wide popular readership.After his death. Macpherson's 'translations' were shown to be almost entirely the original work of this accomplished man of letters who had reinvented the Finn mac Cumaill of Irish heroic tradition as his Scottish Tingal' and Finn's son Oisin as the Gaelic bard 'Ossian', but the scholarly revelation came too late to hold back a vogue for all things Tingalian' which infused the nineteenth-century Celtic revival and has left its indelible imprint on the cultural landscape of Scotland today.

180 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1997

About the author

James Macpherson (Gaelic: Seumas Mac a' Phearsain) was a Scottish writer, poet, literary collector and politician, known as the "translator" of the Ossian cycle of epic poems.

It was in 1761 that Macpherson claimed to have found an epic on the subject of the hero Fingal, written by Ossian. The name Fingal or Fionnghall means "white stranger". His publisher, claiming that there was no market for these works except in English, required that they be translated. He published translations of it during the next few years, culminating in a collected edition, The Works of Ossian, in 1765. The most famous of these poems was Fingal.

The poems achieved international success (Napoleon and Thomas Jefferson were great fans) and were proclaimed as a Celtic equivalent of the Classical writers such as Homer. Many writers were influenced by the works, including the young Walter Scott. In the German-speaking states Michael Denis made the first full translation in 1768, inspiring the proto-nationalist poets Klopstock and Goethe, whose own German translation of a portion of Macpherson's work figures prominently in a climactic scene of The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774).

The poem was as much admired in Hungary as in France and Germany; Hungarian János Arany wrote Homer and Ossian in response, and several other Hungarian writers Baróti Szabó, Csokonai, Sándor Kisfaludy, Kazinczy, Kölcsey, Ferenc Toldy, and Ágost Greguss, were also influenced by it.

Reviews

[Douglas Murphy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Absolutely nuts. To think that these texts were once compared to Homer as great ancient literature is mind-boggling. Ostentatiously faked 'translations' of Gaelic epic poetry, they take ancient saga-type writing and remove any continuity, instead becoming a foggy, unconnected set of fragments about how shiny every man's sword is and how white the bosom of every woman is… it really does feel like pure, concentrated romanticism, and it's strange to think the impact it's had on the self perception of the Scots. hmmm.