Byron’s Reworking of Ossian’s Fingal in The Death of Calmar and Orla

Abstract

This article examines how Byron creatively adopts Ossian’s Fingal (1762) into his early work The Death of Calmar and Orla (1807), in terms of his persistent concern with human mortality, the main characters’ attitudes toward it, their recognition of undying friendship and fame, and finally the role of a bard to sing their imperishable spirit. Byron, who recreated so many precedent literary sources throughout his literary career, transfused into his work the recurring motif of the boundary of human life and man’s defiant reaction to the irreducible territory of one’s fatality. While searching for Byron’s adaptative deployment of Fingal, this paper investigates the author’s elaborate formation of structural rearrangement, intensive characterization, and manifold imagistic embodiment. Byron’s reshaping of Fingal foreshadows the underlying concept of the downfall of his subsequent works, where main figures show vibrant and consolidated reactions to the moment of their imminent death and the time of complete loss of their public fame.