Ossian
Ossian is the narrator and purported author of a cycle of epic poems published by the Scottish poet James Macpherson, originally as Fingal and Temora, and later combined under the title The Poems of Ossian. Macpherson claimed to have collected word-of-mouth material in Scottish Gaelic, said to be from ancient sources, and that the work was his translation of that material. Ossian is based on Oisín, son of Fionn mac Cumhaill, 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.
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. Macpherson's fame was crowned by his burial among the literary giants in Westminster Abbey. 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."
Poems
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. Later that year, he claimed to have obtained further manuscripts and in 1761 he claimed to have found an epic on the subject of the hero Fingal, written by Ossian. According to Macpherson's prefatory material, his publisher, claiming that there was no market for these works except in English, required that they be translated. Macpherson published these alleged translations during the next few years, culminating in a collected edition, The Works of Ossian, in 1765. The most famous of these Ossianic poems was Fingal, written in 1761 and dated 1762.The supposed original poems are translated into poetic prose, with short and simple sentences. The mood is epic, but there is no single narrative, although the same characters reappear. The main characters are Ossian himself, relating the stories when old and blind, his father Fingal, his dead son Oscar, and Oscar's lover Malvina, who looks after Ossian in his old age. Though the stories "are of endless battles and unhappy loves", the enemies and causes of strife are given little explanation and context.
Characters are given to killing loved ones by mistake, and dying of grief, or of joy. There is very little information given on the religion, culture or society of the characters, and buildings are hardly mentioned. The landscape "is more real than the people who inhabit it. Drowned in eternal mist, illuminated by a decrepit sun or by ephemeral meteors, it is a world of greyness." Fingal is king of a region of south-west Scotland perhaps similar to the historical kingdom of Dál Riata and the poems appear to be set around the 3rd century, with the "king of the world" mentioned being the Roman Emperor; Macpherson and his supporters detected references to Caracalla and Carausius.
Reception and influence
The poems achieved international success. Napoleon and Diderot were prominent admirers, and Voltaire was known to have written parodies of them. Thomas Jefferson thought Ossian "the greatest poet that has ever existed", and planned to learn Gaelic so as to read his poems in the original. They were proclaimed as a Celtic equivalent of the Classical writers such as Homer. "The genuine remains of Ossian ... are in many respects of the same stamp as the Iliad", was Thoreau's opinion. Many writers were influenced by the works, including Walter Scott, and painters and composers chose Ossianic subjects.The Hungarian national poet Sándor Petőfi wrote a poem entitled Homer and Ossian, comparing the two authors, of which the first verse reads:
Despite its doubtful authenticity, the Ossian cycle popularized Celtic mythology across Europe, and became one of the earliest and most popular texts that inspired romantic nationalism over the following century. European historians agree that the Ossian poems and their vision of mythical Scotland spurred the emergence of enlightened patriotism on the continent and played a foundational role in the making of modern European nationalism.
The cycle had less impact in the British Isles. Samuel Johnson held it up as "another proof of Scotch conspiracy in national falsehood", while the Irish objected to what they saw as Macpherson's misappropriation of the Fenian Cycle of Irish mythology. 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. By the early 19th century, the cycle came to play a limited role in Scottish patriotic rhetoric.
Authenticity debate
There were immediate disputes of Macpherson's claims on both literary and political grounds. Macpherson promoted a Scottish origin for the material, and was hotly opposed by Irish historians who felt that their heritage was being appropriated. However, both Scotland and Ireland shared a common Gaelic culture during the period in which the poems are set, and some Fenian literature common in both countries was composed in Scotland.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". Johnson also dismissed the poems' quality. Upon being asked, "But Doctor Johnson, do you really believe that any man today could write such poetry?" he famously replied, "Yes. Many men. Many women. And many children." Johnson is cited as calling the story of Ossian "as gross an imposition as ever the world was troubled with". In support of his claim, Johnson also called Gaelic the rude speech of a barbarous people, and said there were no manuscripts in it more than 100 years old. In reply, it was proved that the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh contained Gaelic manuscripts 500 years old, and one of even greater antiquity.
In response, as his words were spoken during the 18th-century golden age of Scottish Gaelic literature, Dr Johnson swiftly found himself reviled in Gaelic satirical poetry by, among many others, James MacIntyre, the Clan MacIntyre Tacksman of Glen Noe near Ben Cruachan, in. Raonuill Dubh MacDhòmhnuill, the eldest son of Gaelic national poet Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair and Clanranald tacksman of Laig, included MacIntyre's satire in the Gaelic poetry anthology called The Eigg Collection, which was published at Edinburgh in 1776.
Scottish author Hugh Blair's 1763 A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian upheld the work's authenticity against Johnson's scathing criticism and from 1765 was included in every edition of Ossian to lend the work credibility. 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.
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. In 1775, he expanded his criticism in a new book, Dissertation on the origin and antiquities of the antient Scots.
File:Ossian's Cave front, The Hermitage.JPG|left|thumb|upright=1.2|Ossian's Cave at The Hermitage in Dunkeld, Scotland
Faced with the controversy, the Committee of the Highland Society enquired after the authenticity of Macpherson's supposed original. It was because of these circumstances that the so-called Glenmasan manuscript came to light in the late 18th century, a compilation which contains the tale Oided mac n-Uisnig. 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. Donald Smith cited it in his report for the committee.
The controversy raged on into the early years of the 19th century, with disputes as to whether the poems were based on Irish sources, on sources in English, on Gaelic fragments woven into his own composition as Johnson concluded, or largely on Scots Gaelic oral traditions and manuscripts as Macpherson claimed. 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. During the same period, Peter Hately Waddell defended the authenticity of the poems, arguing in Ossian and the Clyde that the poems contained topographical references that could not have been known to Macpherson.
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.
According to historians Colin Kidd and James Coleman, Fingal 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 was largely his own creation.
Nowadays, the work is considered a classic of found manuscript trope.
Translations and adaptations
One poem was translated into French in 1762; by 1777, the whole corpus was translated. In the German-speaking states, Michael Denis made the first full translation in 1768–1769, 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. Goethe's associate Johann Gottfried Herder wrote an essay titled Extract from a correspondence about Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples in the early days of the Sturm und Drang movement.Complete Danish translations were made in 1790, and Swedish ones in 1794–1800. 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. In 1799, the French general Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte named his only son Oscar after the character from Ossian, at the suggestion of Napoleon, the child's godfather and an admirer of Ossian. Bernadotte later was made King of Sweden and Norway. In 1844, his son became King Oscar I of Sweden and Norway, who was, in turn, succeeded by his sons Charles XV and Oscar II. "Oscar" being a royal name led to its becoming also a common male first name, especially in Scandinavia but also in other European countries.
Melchiore Cesarotti was an Italian clergyman whose translation into Italian is said by many to improve on the original, and was a tireless promoter of the poems, in Vienna and Warsaw as well as Italy. It was his translation that Napoleon especially admired, and among others it influenced Ugo Foscolo, who was Cesarotti's pupil in the University of Padua.
File:Musée Ingres-Bourdelle - Le songe d'Ossian, 1813 - Ingres - Joconde06070001439.jpg|thumb|right|The Dream of Ossian, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, 1813
British composer Harriet Wainwright premiered her opera Comala, based on text by Ossian, in London in 1792.
The first partial Polish translation of Ossian was made by Ignacy Krasicki in 1793. The complete translation appeared in 1838 by Seweryn Goszczyński.
By 1800, Ossian was translated into Spanish and Russian, with Dutch following in 1805, and Polish, Czech and Hungarian in 1827–1833. The poems were 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.
The opera Ossian, ou Les bardes by Jean-François Le Sueur was a sell-out at the Paris Opera in 1804, and transformed the composer's career. The poems also exerted an influence on the burgeoning of Romantic music, and Franz Schubert in particular composed Lieder setting many of Ossian's poems. In 1829 Felix Mendelssohn was inspired to visit the Hebrides and composed the Hebrides Overture, also known as Fingal's Cave. His friend Niels Gade devoted his first published work, the concert overture Efterklange af Ossian written in 1840, to the same subject.