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 semimythical 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 For many English authors, Ossian served as an example of native British creativity that superseded the neoclassicism of the early eighteenth century.1 Thomas Gray declared, for example, that he was in “extasie” after reading the Ossian poems and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. The fervor of such readers was met with equally forceful skepticism. Many critics suggested that Macpherson fabricated Ossian and forged his poems to succeed in a literary marketplace that had largely ignored his earlier publications.2 Samuel Johnson unequivocally asserted that the poems cannot be “genuine remains” because, he believed, it was impossible for oral transmission to preserve poetry of any considerable length or cultural traditions of any complexity (Johnson and Boswell 1984:113-14). He argued that they were “too long to have been remembered” by an ancient people who, he thought, had not developed writing and therefore must have been uncivilized (Johnson 2000:637-38). He insinuated that the Scots’ desire Oral Tradition, 24/2 (2009): 393-414