Insight

By Phil Miller

THEY were Scottish stories which transfixed the western world, a literary sensation telling tales of an epic, misty heroic past that became one of the greatest controversies of their age.

The Ossian tales, published by schoolmaster James Macpherson in the 1760s, were bestsellers, and gripped European culture in a way few stories from Scotland have done before of since.

But after years of controversy, is it time for Scotland to stop being defensive about Ossian?

In their time, Macpherson’s works were a sensation. Napoleon slept, it is said, with a version of the “Celtic Homer” under his pillow as he fought his campaigns in Egypt, and the German literary giant Goethe was famously inspired by the tales of the blind, third-century bard Ossian, and the adventures of Fingal and Oscar, Malvina and King Swaran.

Indeed, Macpherson’s writings – fragments, he contended, of ancient Gaelic stories, tales and songs that he had collected, translated and heard – inspired composers, poets, politicians and artists across Europe. In Britain alone, the works of the man from Ruthven, Badenoch, influenced Burns and Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott and Byron.

However, the Ossian tales as told by Macpherson in a series of publications starting with Fragments Of Ancient Poetry in 1760 – largely gloomy stories of wars and loss, tumultuous epic landscapes roiling with storms and conflict – were publicly savaged by critics, most notably Samuel Johnson, one of the most famous men of letters of his day.

Johnson said the Ossian tales as presented by Macpherson were “as gross an imposition ever the world was troubled with”. The charge was that Macpherson was a fraud, and had essentially written the works himself.

The controversy was huge at the time: Macpherson defended his work, if not as robustly as an author may do in these more media-savvy times – one account notes that he challenged Johnson to a duel – and the Highland Society of Scotland launched an official investigation, which found, albeit not until 1805, that he had used genuine material in his work.

Some 250 years later, Macpherson’s works are little known, and have not benefited from a renaissance in their audience through radio, television or film: Ossian is not a name (yet) that creates many ripples in popular culture.

However, a major new show at Scotland’s National Museum – Wild and Majestic: Romantic Visions of Scotland, which opens this week – hopes to shine a new light on the Ossian controversy. It shows the Ossian tales as crucial to the development of Romantic thought and literature in the late 18th century, and states clearly, and provides evidence, that Macpherson based his work on authentic texts.

Scholars, too, see the whole controversy at the crux of a tension between industrialised central Scotland and the rapidly changing Highlands, and between Scottish culture and the burgeoning idea of British Empire and the dominance of obviously “English” culture.

Johnson’s ridiculing of Macpherson was much more than a literary argument: the cultural and political undercurrents of the controversy are unmistakable.

The new show’s text says that amid the “sensation” of Ossian, “Highlanders recognised that James Macpherson’s Ossianic epics drew upon medieval heroic ballads still recited in their communities – albeit blended with tragic, passionate themes borrowed from contemporary love songs”.

The exhibition includes one of Macpherson’s sources, the Red Book of Clanranald. It adds: “James Macpherson maintained that his translations of the Ossian cycle were based on authentic Gaelic verse, ballads and songs, collected during his travels in the Scottish Highlands ... Macpherson consulted and collected original Gaelic manuscripts belonging to numerous Highland families.

“These included the Red Book of Clanranald, a volume containing the history and lore of Clan Donald, which was compiled by a member of the MacMhuirich family of bards.”

The curator of the show, Dr Patrick Watt, said that Macpherson was “scholarly and rigorous” in his research.

He said: “Macpherson definitely made use of old manuscript sources, we have that one in our show. It’s very interesting to see how he approached his task – he had evidence. These are real things, whether he actually changed them or not, we are almost past that now.

“I think when you look at it for what it is – a lasting interpretation of the remnants of Gaelic poetry – then it is fantastic. If you read them, they are incredibly interesting, the characters that are portrayed are fascinating ... the thing that really hit me was that you have a man who goes for himself to investigate these documents. Why did he do this? I doubt it was because he thought it was going to be a best seller.”

One of the contributors to the show, Dr Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart of Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, believes it is high time for Scotland to move beyond the debate over the “authenticity” of Macpherson’s Ossian tales.

He said: “You could talk about it for hours, it is an under-researched part of our own history, which at long last, we can stop being embarrassed about. Put to one side questions of authenticity, and think about how it was put together. It was not just a work of literature, it was seen as a historical document when it was first being produced. It was first produced with footnotes.

“Macpherson ushered in an age of romantic nationalism which is still with us. We have never really left that age, and by looking at Macpherson we can fruitfully compare him with other national myths, national epics that were being created, or shall we say recreated, in the 18th and 19th centuries, including JRR Tolkien’s own attempts to provide the English with national myth in the form of Lord of the Rings.”

Of the controversy, he added: “Is Macpherson a fraud and a faker – or is he perhaps trying to do something possibly a bit more interesting with his own native culture? There is absolutely no doubt, first of all, that he made stuff up.

“At the same time, and we should say that very quickly indeed, he was drawing upon an existing culture of Gaelic, heroic ballads common to both Scotland and Ireland, they date from the middle ages, and they are about Fionn mac Cumhaill and his heroic band, and the defender of Ulster, Cúchulainn.”

Macpherson was a clever author, he says, taking together two strands of literature, and making something new. “On the one hand, he has these heroic ballads, that date back thousands of years, supposedly, according to Macpherson, to the third century AD, taking us back well beyond written history. But what he is cleverly doing is mixing this genuinely old material in with a contemporary street ballad and love song.

“The lovely thing is, and he’s very clever about this, is that he is offering the contemporary society, a society that is just about to start a massive series of wars against France [and Napoleon], a picture of heroic, valorous deeds, and also a mirror in which they can see their own sensitive emotions reflected back at them. It’s this hybrid which really sparks off the Romantic movement.”

Professor Nigel Leask, Regius Chair of English language and literature at the University of Glasgow, says that scholarship suggests Macpherson drew upon about 17 traditional Fenian ballads – that is, medieval and post-medieval heroic ballads in Gaelic relating the feats of Fionn mac Cumhaill and his warrior band the Fianna – working from notes of transcriptions made from oral performances and some old Gaelic manuscripts.

He added: “But there was a lot of ‘padding’, and his most ambitious long poems Fingal and Temora presented the ballads in the form of epics, modelled on the 18th century’s understanding of Homer’s Iliad and modern sentimental poetry.”

Professor Tom Devine, the distinguished historian, has another view of the Macpherson controversy. He notes the tension between the myth that Macpherson was writing, and the reality of Scotland – and indeed Britain – in the late 18th century.

The stormy epic, godless but noble and ancient, contrasted with a country rapidly gearing up to the Industrial Revolution and, in the Highlands, the Clearances.

Devine said: “The impact of Ossian in Europe was quite extraordinary. It’s difficult now, in the cold light of the 21st-century day, to think of how the celebrati in Europe were seduced by him. The other aspect is you are dealing with two parallel universes at this time – at the same time as this almost fictionalised Highland Scotland was being projected, the break-up of the real traditional society was accelerating rapidly.

“Ossian was having an impact from the 1760s. And that is the decade when you are beginning to see the rapid commercialisation of Highland society. The 1760s are a real break point in the journey towards modernity in Scotland ... we see the first signs of emigration on a major scale, and the first removals from land at a significant level. So at the same time as a romanticisation is going on, a quite different narrative is occurring at the same time.”

Devine added that the way Macpherson wrote in the tales suggested – sometimes explicitly – that Highlanders of the late 18th century were “the antique past, living in the present, in a way which did not exist anywhere else in Britain”, a seductive idea because of the “sheer pace of advancing modernity” in the UK.

The works, too, Leask notes, “gave new dignity to Gaelic culture and language that had been crushed in the aftermath of Culloden [in 1746]” and, in a way still seen in modern marketing images for Scottish tourism, “cast a romantic light on the rugged mountain landscape, and even turned terrible weather – mist and rain – into a sublime Ossianic experience, encouraging huge number of tourists to visit the region in the romantic period”.

Watt notes that the debate over Macpherson and what was authentic and what was his own invention may carry on for many years yet.

Stiùbhart added: “You can spend your entire time knocking your head against a wall, playing ‘spot the genuine verse’ in Ossian. I am not saying we should move on from that, but I think a more fruitful line of enquiry would be to try to examine and analyse what Macpherson was up to, and beyond that, why at this particular juncture this should be such an attractive literary production, not just for people in Scotland but across the world.

“I think the first thing to say about Macpherson is that he didn’t work alone. He was the poster boy of a coterie of Scottish enlightenment figures who were interested in Scotland’s past and what that past might tell us about the development of society. So, OK, he was creating literature, but he was also bringing to light these incredibly valuable documents, which illustrated what life might have been like in Scotland, 1,500 years before.”

Macpherson, who died in 1796, perhaps did not help himself.

Leask says his original inspiration was existing traditional Scottish and Irish ballads about Fionn mac Cumhaill with which he had been familiar since boyhood in the ceilidh houses of Badenoch, as well as further material he collected in the Highlands and Islands in 1760-01.

He added: “[The verses] were only ‘authentic’ in the sense that he had freely adapted traditional Gaelic Fenian poetry – it would have been better if he had admitted as much. He was a difficult and curmudgeonly personality, but made a lot of money from his successful literary career.”

The Ossian texts are available in current publishing such as Blind Ossian’s Fingal, published by Luath Press of Edinburgh.

Watt says that if a filmmaker adapted the works for the screen, the current general lack of knowledge of Macpherson’s works would quickly be overturned. In the meantime, the texts are still available to read – Leask says it’s best to “try reading it loud, taking long breaths, to capture the flavour of the original”.

Stiùbhart added, of reading the often “gloomy and morbid” works: “You’ve got to let yourself go, plunge in, and live in the moment. Some if it is unreadable, some it isn’t. Some of it echoes or gives a foretaste of what other romantic writers, with better reputations, would write over the next two generations.

“It’s always worth having a go with Ossian, and see what you think.”

Wild and Majestic: Romantic Visions of Scotland, National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, runs from June 26 until November 10.