Literary historians do not find it difficult to explain the European-wide interest in James Macpherson's 'translations' from the Gaelic of the ancient bard, Ossian. The Enlightenment, still very interested in the classical world, did not want to be confined to it. Non-classical cultures offered varieties of literary diet and alternative insights into human nature and society: they were part of the expanding consciousness of the age. Primitive cultures appeared to have most to offer, with their imagination and feeling uninhibited by belief in rationality as the essence of humanity, and by classical rules of composition. One of the most influential works taking this viewpoint was Thomas Blackwell's An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735). Blackwell lectured at Marischal College, Aberdeen, where Macpherson studied. The question of the relationship between primitive society and genius was one of those discussed at meetings of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, founded in 1758.

The germination of these theories in Macpherson's mind led him to the belief that in his native Highlands there had existed such a primitive society. Could it have produced a poet of Homeric quality? In 1755, the headmaster of Dunkeld Academy, Jerome Stone, wrote to the Scots Magazine to arouse the interest of its readers in the great number of poems which he claimed were available in Gaelic, 'some of them of great antiquity.' To his communication he added as an example a translation of one poem. After Stone's death Macpherson gained access to some of his manuscripts, and also to the Dean of Lismore's collection, in which several of the poems are headed, 'Auctor hujus Ossin.' This was that Ossian whom Macpherson later was to claim flourished in the third century A.D.

Edinburgh Enlightenment circles were aware of the primitivist theories of Blackwell and his followers, but Highland Gaelic culture was a closed book to them. John Home, the minister-playwright, had his interest aroused when he was a prisoner of the Jacobite army after the Battle of Falkirk in 1746. Through a fellow-prisoner, an English officer with whom he became friendly, he later met William Collins. Their reminiscences of the Jacobite Highlanders inspired Collins to write his 'Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland,' which was an admonition to Home to leave the metropolitan literary world and delve more deeply into Gaelic culture. Knowing Home's interest, Adam Ferguson, the only Gaelic speaker in Enlightenment circles, gave Macpherson a letter of introduction to him.

Travelling as tutor to a gentleman's son, Macpherson caught up with Home at Moffat, Dumfries, which was then a spa. He had copies of the poems in his possession, which he translated for Home, who was impressed. Alexander Carlyle, who was introduced to Macpherson on the Moffat bowling green a few days later, was 'perfectly astonished at the poetical genius displayed' in the translations. Next to be contacted was the Rev. Hugh Blair, who was just about to become Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the University of Edinburgh. Blair found himself in the rare and advantageous situation of being able to announce the discovery of a literature hitherto unknown to the civilized world. Most astonishing of all was that it had been found, not in remotest Tahiti or Ceylon, but almost on Edinburgh's doorstep. The Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland was published in 1760, and in the preface Macpherson claimed that the poems were probably part of an epic. Blair organised a subscription to finance an expedition to the Highlands by Macpherson to search for the epic, which was found and published as Fingal (1761). A second expedition, on which Home accompanied Macpherson, was partly financed by the Earl of Bute, the King's favourite, who was shortly to become Prime Minister. This resulted in the discovery of another epic, Temora, published in 1763.

Translations into Italian, German, French, and other languages excited even greater interest in Ossian in Europe than in Britain, and inspired the recovery and dissemination of other national literatures. Artists and composers throughout the Continent created visual and musical equivalents of ideas and emotions released by reading Ossian, of which Mendelssohn's 'Fingal's Cave' is only the best known. Nationalism, as an ideology, owes much to Macpherson. The great philosopher of nationalism, J. G. Herder, collaborated with Goethe on a work entitled Von Deutscher Art und Kunst (1773), to which he contributed an essay, 'On Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples.' This, and another essay on Shakespeare in the same volume, are described by a recent editor as displaying 'a degree of imaginative historical understanding hitherto unprecedented in the German Enlightenment.' It was that expansion of historical understanding, and the new appreciation of non-classical cultures that resulted from it, that marked the success of Ossian.

When the particular effect of Ossian on the appreciation of Gaelic literary culture is studied, however, the story is a different one. Samuel Johnson, who appears to have been immune to the vogue for the primitive, regarded Ossian from the start as a forgery. The Highlanders, as a mainly illiterate people, were, he believed, incapable of an epic, or, indeed, of any worthwhile poetry. They were even incapable of remembering anything:

In an unwritten speech, nothing that is not very short is transmitted from one generation to another. Few have opportunities of hearing a long composition often enough to learn it, or have inclination to repeat it so often as is necessary to retain it; and what is once forgotten is lost forever.

But most preferred to believe Hugh Blair, whose A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal, often reprinted with the poems, guaranteed both the authenticity of Ossian and the superlative moral and aesthetic qualities of primitive Highland society. Critical Observations on the Poems of Ossian by another formidable scholar, Lord Kames, added weight to the cause. When pressed to show his originals, Macpherson said that they had already been displayed in his publisher's window, but his critics had not bothered to look there. After his death, the Highland Society of Scotland set up a Committee of Inquiry into Ossian. After eight years of investigation, the committee reported in 1805 that Ossianic poetry existed in the Highlands in great abundance; that Macpherson had added and suppressed passages and changed the general tone; and that it was unable to find any one poem 'the same in title and tenor with the poems published by him.' Stated thus baldly, these conclusions sound damning, but in the body of the report, hedged about with qualifications, and preceded by the evidence of witnesses who believed in Macpherson's authenticity, they appear much less emphatic. During his lifetime, Highlanders in the service of the East India Company raised a thousand pounds to publish the original Gaelic poems of Ossian. Such a gesture by well-wishers could not be rejected, and Macpherson himself wrote that no excuse, 'but want of leisure,' could prevent him from commencing the work in 'a very few months.' That was in 1784.

At the time of his death in 1796, the supposed preparation of the originals was still incomplete, but in 1805 the Highland Society of London was able to publish the Gaelic Ossian in three volumes, with a Latin translation on facing pages. This helped to bolster Macpherson's reputation in the nineteenth century, but modern scholarship has demonstrated that the Gaelic is a translation of Macpherson's English Ossian.

The appearance of the 'Gaelic' Ossian was the finishing touch to an episode that must be regarded as the most successful forgery in literary history. Macpherson's audacious mode of operation was to take poems which he sometimes imperfectly understood, and alter them radically in 'translations' tailored to meet the demands of those eager to read the compositions of a bard of ancient times. When the originals, which he himself had used, were presented as evidence of his inaccuracy, he denounced them as spurious fifteenth-century Irish versions of his third-century poems. A minister in Argyll and Mull, the Rev. Archibald MacArthur, stopped collecting Gaelic poems because he came to believe that those he was finding were of the kind Macpherson had denounced as spurious. Even before the publication of Macpherson's Fragments, Archibald Fletcher of Glenorchy, who was illiterate, had recited Ossianic poems to neighbours, who wrote them down. The manuscript eventually found its way to the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh, where the cover was marked 'Corrupt copies'—corrupt because they did not tally with Macpherson's versions! It took John Francis Campbell, the great nineteenth-century collector of folklore, thirty years to convince himself that Macpherson was a forger. His Leabhar na Feinne (1872) printed all known Ossianic poems in Gaelic, but included nothing by Macpherson. Macpherson's supporters—and he still had many—ignored Campbell's work. Others had become so sceptical that any Ossianic poetry was associated with the bogus, and, like the work of another famous Scot, Leabhar na Feinne fell still-born from the press. Because of lack of interest the second volume, which was to have given the English translations, was never published.

Some of the texts Campbell used were from Ireland, the original homeland of Gaelic culture, and one of these was Charlotte Brooke's Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789). Aware of the controversy surrounding Macpherson, Miss Brooke was careful to give the sources of her translations. A later development in Ireland was the bringing together of a small group of Gaelic scholars between 1834 and 1837 to work on the historical and topographical aspects of the Irish Ordnance Survey. One of them, Eugene or Eoin O'Curry, devoted the rest of his life to the listing and study of ancient Irish manuscripts both literary and historical, some of which had been discovered during the survey. An Irish Ossianic Society was founded in Dublin in 1853 to publish these manuscripts, but the language was often so archaic that many words and even sentences could not be understood. Enough, however, was revealed to inspire the Irish Literary Renaissance at the turn of the century. W. B. Yeats and the other writers involved used Standish James O'Grady's History of Ireland, published between 1878 and 1880. As his title implies, O'Grady believed that the literature was recounting historical facts. Because his sources were still fragmentary, he made major additions and revisions, but at least he knew that the Ossianic and Ulster epic cycles, which Macpherson had confused, were different.

The breakthrough which enabled the old manuscripts to be understood and assessed came neither in Scotland nor in Ireland. A German philologist, Johann Caspar Zeuss, was looking at some early medieval Irish manuscripts in the monastery of Würzburg when he was struck by the number of root-words similar to some in Sanskrit, and by the archaic nature of the language. He decided to study old Gaelic and the result was the publication in 1853 of Grammatica Celtica, a landmark in Indo-European philology. He was followed by several generations of scholars who had come to the conclusion that the language was Western Europe's oldest vernacular. One of them, Kuno Meyer, asked himself, if the language were so archaic, would not the literature be so, too? In the introduction to his Selections from Ancient Irish Poetry (1911) he wrote:

Slowly … the fact is becoming recognised … that the vernacular literature of ancient Ireland is the most primitive … among the literatures of Western Europe … its importance as the earliest voice from the dawn of West European civilisation cannot be denied.

This point was taken up by Kenneth Jackson when he delivered a public lecture in Cambridge in 1964 on the earlier of the two Gaelic epic cycles, the Táin Bó Cuailnge ('The Cattle Raid of Cooley') to which he gave the subtitle, 'A Window on the Iron Age'. His point was that the Táin, believed by some scholars to date as far back as the first century B.C., is our only literary evidence for the culture of Iron Age Europe, which is otherwise known only from archaeology. Publication in 1969 of an English translation of the Táin by Thomas Kinsella has demonstrated to the world that it is also great literature. These developments, from Zeuss to Kinsella, have passed Scotland by. Apart from a handful of Celtic scholars, everyone's vision is still blinkered by Macpherson. In a work entitled History of Scottish Literature, which typically ignores any Gaelic writing, Maurice Lindsay says, 'No amount of high-toned purist condemnation gets over the fact that Macpherson's influence in Europe was immense.' There is no mention that the same Macpherson frustrated for nearly 150 years the recovery of an indigenous literary culture of greater antiquity and quality than even he had claimed! If, as his nineteenth-century biographer, Bailey Saunders [in The Life and Letters of James Macpherson], 1894 and the more recent writer, Richard Sher [in Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment, 1985], have claimed, Macpherson was led into the path of deception by the demands of the Edinburgh literati of the time, the failure is as much theirs as his.