James Macpherson's Ossian poems, oral traditions, and the invention of voice

Abstract

When James Macpherson's Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and Translated from the Galic or Erse Language appeared in 1760, it was greeted with widespread approval. Macpherson's collection purported to translate the work of Ossian, a semi-mythical third-century C. E. Scottish bard in the mold of Homer, who preserved his culture's traditions in song. The claim that this collection was the "genuine remains of ancient Scottish poetry" attracted passionate adherents (Macpherson 1966:A2). For nationalistic Scots, Ossian provided a tantalizing image of an advanced culture comparable to and contemporaneous with those of classical Greece and Rome. For many English authors, Ossian served as an example of native British creativity that superseded the neoclassicism of the early eighteenth century.1 Thomas Gray declared, for example, that he was in "extasie" after reading the Ossian poems and characterized Macpherson as a thrilling "demon" of poetry (Gray 1935:ii, 680). This "extasie" partly inspired Gray to compose his own imitations of Norse and Celtic folktales. Ossian's popularity traveled widely outside of Great Britain; prominent literary and political figures, including the German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Jefferson, and Napoleon Bonaparte offered enthusiastic assessments of the sentimentality and humanity that they saw in the poems. ; Issue title: Sound Effects.