Fool's Gold

James MacPherson was once a famous man, famous for translating Ossian's poems. If he is remembered now, it is for forging the Ossian with the emphasis on the forgery rather than the poetry; but mostly he is hardly remembered at all. If literary memory is founded on quality, then the turgid prose of these poems, with its thick syntax and grand, vague gestures, certainly encourages forgetfulness. But if we think of him as a literary event, as a writer who generated a great deal of interest (regardless of the source of that interest), then he seems more deserving of attention. The Ossian books figure in the education of all major writers through about 1830, most often as a fond memory of youth (just as Walter Scott's novels will for the later nineteenth century); Ossian gave to these youths that adventure, mystery and romance that is still, to some extent, the clearest association of the Scottish Highlands. To the literary scholar MacPherson offers an interesting example of the literary criminal, a kind of malefactor whose faults are at best vaguely defined. In MacPherson's case the difficulties are exacerbated by the genuine complexity of the facts, the source of the surprising duration and interest of the Ossianic Controversy, which lasted for almost fifty years. The definition of MacPherson's crime, and the delineation of the attractive (to the eighteenth century) qualities of the poems themselves, are parallel problems that lead to the same problematic place: the mysterious, unavailable Highlands, source of treasure and terror. To talk about the Ossian one must start by sorting through the odd collection of Highland materials that the poems bring with them, and then turn to the poetry itself

Adventure · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Literature · Poetry · Romance · Treasure · Historical Studies of British Isles · History · Irish and British Studies · Philosophy · Scottish History and National Identity