Ossian, a largely invented ancient bard, captivated Napoleon and Jefferson
In the 1760s a Scottish poet named James Macpherson announced he had translated the lost epics of a third-century Gaelic bard. Europe went wild: Napoleon adored them, Jefferson wanted to learn Gaelic to read them, and the Swedish royal family owes a king's name to them. Most of the poetry turned out to be Macpherson's own.
Macpherson first published Fragments of ancient poetry in 1760, then Fingal, dated 1762, and Temora in 1763, all supposedly rendered from Gaelic material gathered in the Highlands. His narrator Ossian, old and blind, recalls his father Fingal, a king loosely modelled on the Irish hero Fionn mac Cumhaill, and his dead son Oscar. The stories offer endless battles and doomed loves in a misty, grey landscape, where heroes accidentally slay those they love and perish from sorrow, or sometimes from happiness. Macpherson also coined the name Malvina.
Across the Continent the effect was enormous. Translations reached every major literary language; Goethe worked a passage into a climactic scene of The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Melchiore Cesarotti's Italian version, which some rated above the original, was Napoleon's favourite. Historians credit the poems with feeding Romanticism and the romantic nationalism of the following century. In 1799 Napoleon suggested that his godson, son of the French general Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, be named Oscar; Bernadotte later became king of Sweden and Norway, the boy reigned as Oscar I from 1844, and the name spread across Scandinavia.
Britain was more sceptical. Samuel Johnson called Macpherson a fraud, and asked whether any living person could write such verse, answered that many men, many women and many children could. He claimed no Gaelic manuscript was older than a century, only for the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh to produce ones 500 years old. David Hume withdrew his early support, and Irish scholars such as Charles O'Conor objected that their Fenian legends had been taken over.
In the late 19th century it emerged that the only Gaelic originals Macpherson ever produced were translations of his own English. Derick Thomson concluded in 1952 that he had collected genuine ballads but reshaped them heavily and added much of his own. Historians now judge Fingal to owe a real debt to 15th- and 16th-century Gaelic verse, while Temora was mostly invented.
Source: Ossian
