I know little of Ossian, however its just sounds like another Colonial thread that runs through our history. All these so called experts denigrating our culture. Apparently it’s most important that we don’t celebrate our culture.
Thanks. You can get the poems on your phone for free if you use ibooks or st like that. I’d actually also recommend the show at the Storytelling Centre in Ed and then around the country - it’s fun
Thanks Jackie , I love Burns and the Scots poems , there are some great Scots words that I often heard in my childhood, try to pass them on to grandwanes
Went down the JSTOR rabbit hole, this article by Moulton on the work’s musical influence is very interesting.
Moulton, P. F. (2009). A Controversy Discarded and “Ossian” Revealed: An Argument for a Renewed Consideration of “The Poems of Ossian.” College Music Symposium, 49/50, 392–401. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41225266
This is a great piece. Thank you for writing it. I’m glad you seem to have enjoyed the show but I was incensed that after all this time and multiple scholars making the case that MacPherson was compiling a living oral tradition that this show calls it a ‘hoax’. MacPherson was both an Enlightenment and a proto-Romantic figure. As an educated man during the Enlightenment era that was obsessed with written evidence and close textual analysis, he became aware of a living Gaelic oral tradition which he recognised as having similarity to the ancient Greek epics of hero tales. He began collecting and compiling these fragments and may even have heard about Farquarson’s earlier collection. He was ahead of his time. The 19th century was an age when fields such as ethnography and ethnology acquired merit as serious academic study and methodologies evolved. Oral history is now a recognised field.
There are many medieval manuscripts in Gaelic at the National Library of Scotland which remain untranslated because no-one alive today has the language skills to translate them, extraordinary as that may seem! So it’s faintly possible a manuscript may yet be found and translated that mentions Ossian.
It really disgusts and sickens me that we seem unable to remove the stains that English cultural colonialism (let’s call it bluntly what it is) has put on us so that MacPherson is still cited as a hoax in a National Theatre production in 2025. I despair. When are we going to shake off this self-mockery and remove the lies of the past?
Thanks. I know what you mean. The first time I read the James Browne chapter on Ossian about a year ago or more, I felt really angry. Because all I knew about Ossian was that it was a hoax! I just read the intro to Fragments of Ancient Poetry and Macpherson says in that that the dates of the poems cannot be ascertained! When I was in Finland earlier this year I read a History of Finland and was amazed to find the central place ascribed to Lonnrot. Again I felt quite sad that we didn’t defend Macpherson - as you say he quite clearly was an ethnographer who substantially altered the work. Some of it was pretty racy in the original for example.
Book recommendation. Natasha Sumner's, Heroes of the Gael: A History of Fionn & the Fianna. Is a literary history published earlier this year by Princeton Uni Press, in which a third of the narrative, part II, provides a detailed chronology of events players impacts, academic & political, over the century the controversy ran & considers its lingering influence. Well worth its place on my shelf for this element of the book alone & therefore recommended for those with an interest in the Ossianic theme or Fenian Cycle more generally, it's a big subject better discussed over a pint or several fireside after dinner drams. I've no connection to author publisher et al.
Yes - it’s a massive subject. We used to have a history festival in Edinburgh. This would be a good one for that - need to see if we can get that going again
A good plan. In the meantime I could point you to a poem recital of Sorley MacLean's mid 1930's poem, Coin is Madaidhean-allaidh/Dogs & Wolves, that I found on youtube recited by Gilleasbuig Ferguson in both Gàidhlig & English, this is his new English translation which can be compared directly with MacLean's own, also available on youtube, as the first poem discussed & recited in the 2nd link at 1.23m.
The poem uses heroic Gàidhlig hunting motifs common to both Fenian & heroic lore more generally. While MacLean's translation, he freely admits at interview that he doesn't put that much effort in to his English translations, isn't that far from Ferguson's reworking it serves to illustrate the difficulty in translation from Gàidhlig to English, while attempting to maintain a sense of theme in a medium that doesn't directly translate. Viewed through such a lens & applying a little objectivity, it's hard to be too critical of McPherson. Given the pressure of the era to find the pure Homeric drop then thought to exist in the oral traditions of European/Gàidhlig peasantry. The same criticism could be levelled at Homer if we were daft enough to take his literary legacy as historic narrative relayed verbatim from oral sources.
I know little of Ossian, however its just sounds like another Colonial thread that runs through our history. All these so called experts denigrating our culture. Apparently it’s most important that we don’t celebrate our culture.
Thanks. You can get the poems on your phone for free if you use ibooks or st like that. I’d actually also recommend the show at the Storytelling Centre in Ed and then around the country - it’s fun
Thanks Jackie , I love Burns and the Scots poems , there are some great Scots words that I often heard in my childhood, try to pass them on to grandwanes
I saw this show in Oban last year and loved it. I had a go at posting on Ossian here,
https://macualraig.substack.com/p/burns-and-the-gaelic
Excellent research and a fascinating read.
Thank you - that means a lot
Went down the JSTOR rabbit hole, this article by Moulton on the work’s musical influence is very interesting.
Moulton, P. F. (2009). A Controversy Discarded and “Ossian” Revealed: An Argument for a Renewed Consideration of “The Poems of Ossian.” College Music Symposium, 49/50, 392–401. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41225266
Thanks. I just read that, nice reference cheers
I picked up my copy in a Leith bookshop when I was at the Nautical college in the early ‘80s, for £15, you’ve inspired me to read it again.
Nice - lovely to have a version like that. First editions go for a lot of money now - obviously yours probably is not one of those
I was lucky, I went in for a copy of Barrie’s History of Orkney, and these two volumes were on the shelf.
Yes that was lucky, how cool
This was a really interesting read! I'm embarrassed how little I knew about this topic and I'm keen to learn more. Thank you!
It is a fascinating subject - the play is a good intro if you happen to be in Edinburgh. it is also touring
Samuel Johnson, the original shitposter.
Fascinating and poignant. Thank you for educating me about the so-called hoax over Ossian.
Thanks
This is a great piece. Thank you for writing it. I’m glad you seem to have enjoyed the show but I was incensed that after all this time and multiple scholars making the case that MacPherson was compiling a living oral tradition that this show calls it a ‘hoax’. MacPherson was both an Enlightenment and a proto-Romantic figure. As an educated man during the Enlightenment era that was obsessed with written evidence and close textual analysis, he became aware of a living Gaelic oral tradition which he recognised as having similarity to the ancient Greek epics of hero tales. He began collecting and compiling these fragments and may even have heard about Farquarson’s earlier collection. He was ahead of his time. The 19th century was an age when fields such as ethnography and ethnology acquired merit as serious academic study and methodologies evolved. Oral history is now a recognised field.
There are many medieval manuscripts in Gaelic at the National Library of Scotland which remain untranslated because no-one alive today has the language skills to translate them, extraordinary as that may seem! So it’s faintly possible a manuscript may yet be found and translated that mentions Ossian.
It really disgusts and sickens me that we seem unable to remove the stains that English cultural colonialism (let’s call it bluntly what it is) has put on us so that MacPherson is still cited as a hoax in a National Theatre production in 2025. I despair. When are we going to shake off this self-mockery and remove the lies of the past?
Thanks. I know what you mean. The first time I read the James Browne chapter on Ossian about a year ago or more, I felt really angry. Because all I knew about Ossian was that it was a hoax! I just read the intro to Fragments of Ancient Poetry and Macpherson says in that that the dates of the poems cannot be ascertained! When I was in Finland earlier this year I read a History of Finland and was amazed to find the central place ascribed to Lonnrot. Again I felt quite sad that we didn’t defend Macpherson - as you say he quite clearly was an ethnographer who substantially altered the work. Some of it was pretty racy in the original for example.
Good post & on point with my current musings.
Book recommendation. Natasha Sumner's, Heroes of the Gael: A History of Fionn & the Fianna. Is a literary history published earlier this year by Princeton Uni Press, in which a third of the narrative, part II, provides a detailed chronology of events players impacts, academic & political, over the century the controversy ran & considers its lingering influence. Well worth its place on my shelf for this element of the book alone & therefore recommended for those with an interest in the Ossianic theme or Fenian Cycle more generally, it's a big subject better discussed over a pint or several fireside after dinner drams. I've no connection to author publisher et al.
Yes - it’s a massive subject. We used to have a history festival in Edinburgh. This would be a good one for that - need to see if we can get that going again
A good plan. In the meantime I could point you to a poem recital of Sorley MacLean's mid 1930's poem, Coin is Madaidhean-allaidh/Dogs & Wolves, that I found on youtube recited by Gilleasbuig Ferguson in both Gàidhlig & English, this is his new English translation which can be compared directly with MacLean's own, also available on youtube, as the first poem discussed & recited in the 2nd link at 1.23m.
The poem uses heroic Gàidhlig hunting motifs common to both Fenian & heroic lore more generally. While MacLean's translation, he freely admits at interview that he doesn't put that much effort in to his English translations, isn't that far from Ferguson's reworking it serves to illustrate the difficulty in translation from Gàidhlig to English, while attempting to maintain a sense of theme in a medium that doesn't directly translate. Viewed through such a lens & applying a little objectivity, it's hard to be too critical of McPherson. Given the pressure of the era to find the pure Homeric drop then thought to exist in the oral traditions of European/Gàidhlig peasantry. The same criticism could be levelled at Homer if we were daft enough to take his literary legacy as historic narrative relayed verbatim from oral sources.
Gilleasbaig
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDzQYf5pGIY
Sorley
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Mi9wDZq-wk
Thanks for the ref, I’ll suggest it to the NLS as they don’t always get US books
Might it be worth following up some of the comments here on orality with the work done by the late Douglas Young of St Andrews
Young, Douglas. “Never Blotted a Line? Formula and Premeditation in Homer and Hesiod.” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 6, no. 3 (1967): 279–324. http://www.jstor.org.divinity.idm.oclc.org/stable/20163080.
Ossian material on p.284 ff.
Thank you very much, I’ll look that up