[In the following essay, Gunderloch examines the manner in which Macpherson, under the guise of Ossian, approached and appropriated Scottish oral traditions, and explores the tension that exists between the genuine Scottish oral materials and Macpherson's literary treatment of them.]

The Gaelic literary tradition which flourished in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland in the second half of the eighteenth century was almost exclusively oral in character and only a small amount of this material is extant in the shape of manuscripts which contain texts taken down from the recitation of the bearers of oral tradition. One example of these survives in the intriguing collection of Gaelic heroic ballands made by the Rev. Alexander Camp-bell of Portree, a minor figure in the infamous Ossianic Controversy. Born in the Isle of Skye in 1770, Campbell became minister of Portree in 1799 and remained in this post until his death in 1811. His entry for the parish of Portree in the Old Statistical Account of Scotland reflects his interest in oral tradition and matters Ossianic:¹ in the section Hills, Woods, Lakes, and Rivers Campbell refers to a certain hill which is "called Ait Suidhe Thuin [recte Ait' Suidhe Finn], or Fingal's sitting place, because on the top of it is a green hillock, on which, says tradition, Fingal was wont to sit in state, point out the different courses, and survey his heroes pursuing the chace [sic]." Two points are of interest here. One is that the peripatetic figure of Fionn mac Cumhaill, although located primarily in Ireland, is shown by tradition to be associated with Scotland as well but his Irish links are usually strongly emphasized at the same time: the place-name and the associated reference to a hunting context are therefore in keeping with existing tradition. The other point is that the tone of Campbell's snippet of information, as well as his use of the personal name Fingal, suggests that he was familiar with James Macpherson's work.

Campbell compiled his collection of Gaelic heroic ballads from oral tradition around 1797 while he was in touch with large numbers of parishioners in his capacity as catechist.² In his subsequent treatment of the texts he collected he followed in the footsteps of James Mac-pherson whose "Ossian" drew its initial inspiration from the popular and prestigious genre of heroic ballads. As the comparison of passages of poetry from an oral context with both Macpherson's and Campbell's adapted or invented ones shows, a tension between oral and literary material becomes obvious which reflects the difference in nature between the fluid oral texts both men used for their work and the fixed texts their literate and literary treatment of their sources resulted in.

When James Macpherson, a hitherto unknown but aspiring young man from Badenoch, unleashed his epic works Fingal and Temora on the unsuspecting literary world of the early 1760s he brought Gaelic oral literature into the limelight of English language literary interest for the first time ever. At the time, the Highlanders of Scotland were regarded with a great deal of prejudice if not ignorance, in the Lowlands as much as south of the Border, and the memory of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745-46 was still fresh enough to keep the view of Highlanders as uncouth, uncivilized, and uncultured savages very much alive. As a Gaelic speaker himself, Macpherson must have been acutely aware of this situation and part of his complex motivation for his foray into the world of literature may well have been a desire to set the record straight by presenting a particularly prestigious part of the Gaelic literary tradition to an English-speaking audience.³ A similar attitude is present in a comment made by his friend Lachlan Macpherson of Strathmashie in a letter, dated 22 October 1763, to Hugh Blair:⁴

Permit me, Sir, as a Highlander, to make use of this opportunity to thank you, for the pains you have taken to illustrate the beauties, and establish the reputation, of the poems of Ossian, which do so much honour to the ancient genius of our country.

Macpherson succeeded, for a time at least, in giving Scotland her own national epic, thus filling what was perceived as a great lack in Scottish literature.⁵ It has to be noted that Macpherson's works were immensely successful right from the publication, in 1760, of the Fragments of Ancient Poetry, collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and translated from the Galic or Erse Language;⁶ his first major work, Fingal, in six volumes, appeared in 1762 and the eight volumes of Temora were published in 1763. Together, they form what is known as Macpherson's "Ossian" which was widely translated into every major European language and which was greatly admired throughout Europe by Napoleon, Goethe and Herder among others. James Macpherson also went down in the history of literature as the fraudster and fabricator who misled the entire literary establishment of Europe by passing off his own work as the poetry of the ancient bard Ossian. The truth of the matter is far more complicated than this damning indictment implies although there is a tension evident in his work which was created by Macpherson's following a conceptually oral approach using means and techniques that were medially literary when he adapted his conceptually and medially oral source texts for publication and as a result produced material which diverged widely from the Gaelic sources.

Macpherson was able to approach his source material with so much freedom for the simple reason that he did not have any models to follow. Translations of Gaelic texts for literary purposes were quite simply not available, with one significant exception. In 1756, the Scots Magazine printed a translation of the Gaelic ballad Laoidh Fhraoich (The Lay of Fraoch) by the Dunkeld schoolmaster Jerome Stone.⁷ The title in the Scots Magazine is given as "Albin and the Daughter of Mey." The change of name from "Fraoch" to "Albin" is inexplicable unless Stone had aesthetic reasons in mind: "Albin" is easier to pronounce for the non-Gael than "Fraoch" and could easily be thought of as more poetic in sound. The entire translation follows eighteenth-century poetic conventions far more strictly than it follows the Gaelic text. Stone's accompanying letter draws attention to the similarity the ballad bears to the Greek story of Bellerophon as told by Homer, the greatest exponent of ancient heroic poetry of all. Since Macpherson was a contributor to the Scots Magazine himself,⁸ it is likely that he was familiar with Stone's text and translation. This would have provided a model for him to follow, not only regarding translating techniques, but also concerning the concepts of antiquity and of heroic poetry. Macpherson clearly saw in Ossian a figure comparable to Homer, and in poetry attributed to Ossian material that was comparable to ancient Greek epic. This is not inappropriate in the sense that Homer's works, albeit extant only in literate form, originated in an oral context and therefore share certain formal and compositional characteristics with the Gaelic ballads.⁹ Homer's epic format, however, is not shared by the ballads.

When Macpherson published the Fragments and Fingal, he claimed that they were translated from the original works of the third century Scottish Gaelic bard Ossian which he, Macpherson, had collected in fragments, in the Gaelic language, and put together in order to recover the lost Scottish epic of Fingal. This extraordinary claim deserves a closer look. It starts out quite innocuously with the third century date for Ossian's supposed floruit which is commensurate with the traditional view held since the Middle Ages in both Ireland and Scotland among the members of the Gaelic-speaking learned classes. However, historical accounts of this early period are the result of the attempts of mediaeval scholars to bring their history into line with the history of the rest of the civilized world, that is, Greece, Rome, and—most importantly—the Bible. The resulting synthetic history of early Ireland thus combines historical, pseudo-historical and downright mythological personages and Ossian is most comfortably placed into the pseudo-historical category. It has to be admitted that Macpherson was probably not in a position to know this, and indeed some mid-nineteenth century Irish sources are in no doubt as to the historicity of Ossian and his contemporaries, as were the bearers of Scottish oral tradition in the Highlands at the same period.

Not being an historical figure, Ossian could obviously not have produced any "original works" for Macpherson to collect, in fragments or otherwise, but ascriptions of Gaelic ballads to the prestigious figure of Ossian are plentiful and Macpherson is not alone in mistaking a commonplace literary convention for actual fact. Many later reciters of ballads had as little doubt of Ossian's actual authorship as Macpherson appears to have had. Ossian's Scottish nationality, however, would have surprised a great many of those familiar with the ballads since tradition is quite unequivocal about Ossian's Irish origin. On the other hand, traditional Gaelic learning in Scotland was in a rather weakened position due to the decline of the learned classes and with that corrective force gone, mistakes began to creep into texts which were now the almost exclusive property of the bearers of oral tradition. Macpherson may quite simply have come across a source which erroneously made Ossian—or his father Fionn—a Scottish Gael and, finding this to be an attractive concept for his own purposes, he stuck with this view.

The "lost Scottish epic of Fingal" appears to be initially a result of Macpherson's leaping to conclusions without analyzing the material available to him in sufficient detail. Fingal, or to give him his correct name, Fionn mac Cumhaill, was as unequivocally Irish as his son Ossian, and the "lost epic" never existed in the first place. An initial look at Gaelic ballads may have suggested to Macpherson that they were fragments of a bigger whole.¹⁰ In fact, most ballads represent complete, self-contained units belonging to the context of Fionn mac Cumhaill and Ossian, with occasional references to other ballads from the same context. Macpherson attempted to reconstruct a full-scale epic on the internal evidence of the ballads. He may even have believed initially that he was indeed in the process of recovering the constituent parts of genuine ancient epic. He traveled twice to the Highlands and Outer Hebrides in 1760 and 1761 in order to collect further material.¹¹ During both journeys, he made a point of seeking out members of the local gentry with an interest in the Gaelic tradition who in turn put him in touch with those who had the most knowledge of the oral tradition current in the area. Macpherson was thus able to gain insight into the variety and richness of the oral tradition of the districts he visited and the fluid nature of the texts he encountered in recitation must have been obvious to him. Despite the fact that his collecting tours had failed to furnish the missing parts of his epic he went on with his task and let his own imagination supply what was wanting in both Fingal and Temora, with progressively less and less recourse to oral tradition. Thus, what we have in Macpherson's "Ossian" is the mid-18th century view of the characteristics of ancient epic literature, and Macpherson's ideas of what third-century pagan Scottish Gaels were like.¹² The obvious models for ancient epic were of course Homer and Virgil, not forgetting the Bible, and Macpherson published his own translation of Homer's Iliad in 1773.¹³

No texts collected by Macpherson from current oral tradition appear to be extant at the present time; however, Macpherson was very successful in the acquisition of manuscripts which otherwise would no longer be extant. The most important of the manuscripts thus preserved by Macpherson is an anthology of Gaelic poetry, containing an important corpus of ballad texts amongst many other poems, dating to the first half of the 16th century and known as the Book of the Dean of Lismore. Whether Macpherson was actually able to read the late mediaeval script and highly idiosyncratic orthography of this manuscript—or indeed any manuscript in Irish script—is open to question.¹⁴ He did not set out to be a Gaelic scholar, whether from the antiquarian point of view or indebted to the oral tradition of Gaeldom, and indeed his education does not appear to have enabled him to read and write Gaelic with ease as he employed others to take texts down from recitation during the course of his collecting tours. On the other hand, he was conversant with contemporary ideas about ancient epic literature and the success of his writings proves that he had an intimate knowledge of the literary tastes of his time:¹⁵ his orientation lay towards the literary circles of Edinburgh and London, not the world of the Highland tradition bearer.

Macpherson's methodology is best described as eclectic. Whatever fitted into his epic scheme, he adopted and adapted; whatever was contrary to his perceptions he discarded or removed with great thoroughness and care, regarding certain features of the ballads as late accretions and not Ossian's original work. A roughly contemporary source sums up his working methods as follows:¹⁶

But the Committee [of the Highland Society of Scotland] has not been able to obtain any one poem the same in title and tenor with the poems published by him [i.e. Macpherson]. It is inclined to believe that he was in use to supply chasms, and to give connections, by inserting passages which he did not find, and to add what he conceived to be dignity and delicacy to the language, in short by changing what he considered as too simple or too rude for a modern ear, and elevating what in his opinion was below the standard of good poetry.

In other words, Macpherson consciously adapted his material to be acceptable to a critical literate audience with certain expectations concerning a poetic standard. This standard was of course that of the printed or at least written word and therefore very different from any oral material.

A good example for the deletion of unwelcome features is the conspicuous absence of any mention of St. Patrick who is present either as audience or dialogue partner in a large number of ballads. At the same time, Ossian is preserved as the ancient bard who has survived into later times but these times are still decidedly pagan, lacking the artistic tension between pagan and Christian values present in a number of ballads which involve both Patrick and Ossian. Any element of humor was likewise exorcised from his material so that anything humorous in Macpherson's work is to be attributed to the irreverence of the latter-day reader rather than the original intention of the author. Where Macpherson can be observed as the actual translator, his renderings into English are very far removed from the Gaelic source and thus can be assumed to aim at providing a text that satisfies a reader in touch with contemporary fashions regarding literature. At the same time, the tension between the medially and conceptually oral starting point and Macpherson's resulting text, still conceptually oral but medially literary, becomes obvious.

The following passage from the first book of Temora illustrates Macpherson's technique of "translate-and-adapt" quite clearly:¹⁷

Cairbar shrinks before Oscar's sword; and creeps in darkness behind his stone. He lifted the spear in secret and pierced my Oscar's side. He falls forward on his shield: his knee sustains the chief. But still his spear is in his hand. See gloomy Cairbar falls! The steel pierced his forehead, and divided his red hair behind.

A comparison of this with the corresponding section found in the ballad The Death of Osgar, of which texts collected from oral tradition are extant, illustrates the tension between Macpherson's style and the ballad version. The passage quoted here uses the versions collected by Jerome Stone and Donald MacNicol respectively which slightly pre-date Macpherson but at the same time are representative of the type of version Macpherson would have had access to. ¹⁸

Nuair a chonnairc an Cairbre ruadhOsgar a snaidhe an t sluaighAn t-sleagh nimhe bha na LaimhGo ndo leig e sin na chomhail.
Thuit Osgar air a ghlun deasSa n tsleagh nimhe roimh a chneasGo n chuir e sleagh na naodh siongMa chumadh fhuilt agus eidin.

[When the red Cairbre saw Oscar cutting up the host, he hurled at him the poisoned spear which he had in his hand.

Oscar fell on his right knee, with the poisoned spear piercing his skin (but) he planted the spear of the nine rivets in the meeting of his hair and his face (i.e. in his forehead).]

On a formal level, the style employed by the ballad passage is rich in formulaic material which is a hallmark of an oral text while Macpherson's style attempts a literary interpretation and perhaps imitation of such material.¹⁹ Regarding contents, the oral passage does not imply cowardice in Cairbre's actions as Macpherson's text does. Action taking place at night, as Macpherson implies by the phrase "in darkness," is likewise his own contribution in order to create the desired atmosphere as all the extant oral versions of this ballad give a daytime setting to the battle, thus aiming to create an impression of historical authenticity and realism. The only criticism one might have concerning the shield in Macpherson's passage is that it does not feature in the Gaelic text; however, tradition equips the hero with a shield on a regular basis so that Macpherson is at least drawing on existing oral literary convention in the ballads. The ballad extract is as clear and straightforward an account of two heroes killing each other in single combat by means of their spears as one is likely to get in the ballads. Macpherson's literary adaptation of a typically oral mode of expression is obvious, for instance, in the phrase "my Oscar" in which the narrator Ossian intrudes into the account of his son's death. The phrase "his knee sustains the chief is also typical of Macpherson's style but not a close and literal translation, in contrast to "Oscar fell on his right knee." Macpherson appears to rely on the "novelty value" of this rather labored expression while the ballad clearly aims at giving a description which provokes visualization of this critical scene in the ballad. The phrase "See gloomy Cairbar falls!" has to be seen in a similar light. Not paralleled by any line or phrase in the ballad extract, this is Macpherson speaking, using one of his favorite words, "gloomy," and using the exclamation mark as a visual sign to his reading public in order to underline the importance of the event and draw attention to it. Interestingly, he appears to acknowledge the visual quality of the ballads by using the imperative "see," however, what he invites his readers to visualize is not the same as in the ballads since he imposes the mood prevalent throughout his work upon the event to be visualized by following the invitation to visualize with the suggestive rather than descriptive adjective "gloomy."

The fact that Macpherson did not work in the original language of his source material but used primarily the medium of English adds a different kind of tension to the one already present in his literary treatment of oral material. His points of reference belong predominantly to contemporary literature in the English language so that any changes he made regarding his oral source material follow above all the literary, stylistic and cultural conventions of English literature. Contrary to his assertions and his attempts to present his material in a conceptually oral style, his work is not in tune with existing Gaelic oral tradition; in fact, in many instances material taken from oral tradition has been changed to such an extent that it is barely recognizable as being derived from the ballads. That these changes were deliberate can be demonstrated by looking at certain passages in Macpherson's work where he actually quoted short excerpts from genuine ballads only in order to denounce them as spurious. The true merit of Macpherson's "Ossian" as a piece of literature is to be found when considering his epic in the light of its undoubted influence on contemporary English and even European literature. However, the tension inherent in Macpherson's works did not go unnoticed since critics appeared on the literary scene almost immediately and the ensuing controversy regarding the authenticity or otherwise of Ossian kept the literary circles busy for quite a while.

Meanwhile, in the Highlands, tradition bearers were quite unperturbed by all this and went on to sing and recite their ballads much as their predecessors had done. Macpherson's works sparked off a great deal of interest in Ossian in the minds of a number of educated Gaelic speakers, more often than not ministers or students of divinity, who collected ballads from the oral tradition of their districts. The results of their labors were compiled in two important anthologies in the nineteenth century: John Francis Campbell's Leabhar na Féinne and the Rev. Alexander Cameron's Reliquiae Celticae.²⁰ The Rev. Alexander Campbell of Portree was one of these collectors and he entered the Ossianic Controversy at a relatively late date when he tried to sell his collection of ballads to the Highland Society of Scotland about the year 1807. When that learned body showed a distinct lack of interest in buying the collection he even started legal proceedings about it. This somewhat unsavory episode only ended with the minister's death.

The Highland Society of Scotland had already instigated an inquiry into the authenticity of "Ossian". Its findings were published in the Report of the Committee of the Highland Society of Scotland in 1805 and the conclusion was that Macpherson's work was for the most part of his own invention while at the same time containing passages taken from genuine Gaelic ballad texts.

The Highland Society inquiry, quite sensibly, had targeted those who were in a position to know the relevant facts, i.e. educated Highlanders who in turn contacted tradition bearers and questioned them about the authenticity of Ossian. The wealth of a lively oral tradition of ballads was thus revealed for the first time, as the Report relates, stating that ballad poetry was "common, general, and in great abundance; that it was of a most impressive and striking sort, in a high degree eloquent, tender, and sublime."²¹ While "tender" and "sublime" are easily identified as literary catchwords of the time the rest of the Report's statement is an appropriate and accurate description of the ballad tradition in the second half of the 18th century.

Campbell had access to the oral tradition of his native Skye and he went to great lengths to emphasize the authenticity of his collection. Very nearly every item in his manuscripts is signed by him and a certain James Macleod JP in support of its authenticity and affidavits by tradition bearers consulted by Campbell testifying to the authenticity of the collection survive.²² Neither appears to have convinced the Highland Society and their skepticism was not without reason considering the mixture of recognizably oral material and texts adapted or written especially to resemble the style of James Macpherson that is contained in the collection.

In the introduction to the collection in Reliquiae Celticae the editor, the Rev. Alexander Cameron, refers to "remarks by some purist" made on an incomplete table of contents that post-dates Campbell. The unidentified purist denounces four of the seven items in his list as "not genuine" and only grudgingly accords the verdict "pretty correct" to one ballad; the remaining two items escape comment but have to be classed as not drawn from oral tradition. A copy of Reliquiae Celticae in the Celtic Library of Edinburgh University has the following note on Cameron's purist in the hand of W. J. Watson, second professor of Celtic there:²³ "The 'purist' is right". Other comments in the same hand range from corrections of wrongly transcribed words to references to other collections and the occasional indignant remark about the quality of certain items.

A brief investigation of the material from the part of the Campbell Collection printed in Reliquiae Celticae supports the view that the Highland Society, the anonymous purist and Prof. Watson all had a point, although Campbell emerges finally as less of a scoundrel than might be expected from their comments. Of the seventeen items two may indeed be labeled as not derived from oral tradition; for want of another obvious composer, one might regard them as the work of Alexander Campbell, following in the footsteps of James Macpherson.²⁴ While the greater part of these two items displays something that resembles Macpherson's style translated into Gaelic there is nevertheless a certain proportion of lines that use a style modeled on ballad idiom; a number of plot episodes are likely to have come from various ballads and several personal names are connected to a ballad background rather than to Macpherson's mostly invented names. In the case of four more texts, Campbell appears to have reworked existing ballads in order to make them fit into a view of Gaelic ballads derived from Macpherson; versions from an oral context of all four are extant to help determine the extent of Campbell's reworking. Two texts have not yet been ascribed with certainty to either of the two above categories; they may be inventions or reworkings with equal likelihood. The remaining nine ballads are either paralleled by other texts from an oral environment and represent mostly good versions of ballads or texts that contain only a negligible amount of material—mostly place-names or personal names—that has been ostensibly reworked to resemble the style of Macpherson; all of these ballads can be paralleled by corresponding orally collected versions from other contemporary collections.

The published part of the Campbell Collection thus contains a significant amount of recognizably oral material (nine out of seventeen). The statements of a number of Campbell's informants who testified in 1807 that Campbell took down ballads from their recitation ten years earlier survive but the ballads listed in this manuscript show only a small amount of overlap with the collection in its present shape.²⁵ It appears that the collection as we have it today may not be complete; it is also possible that Campbell did not send every text he had collected in the first place to the Highland Society.

Regarding the material not published in Reliquiae Celticae, comprising eleven items, in Campbell's collection, the situation seems to be that there are five oral texts, three of indeterminate status, one that is entirely invented and two which were adapted to resemble Macpherson's style but have come into the collection from elsewhere. In total, there are 29 texts or there-abouts of which fourteen come from an oral context.

The reworkings and Campbell's own texts in the manner of Macpherson are more difficult to evaluate. The dates in the Highland Society papers range from watermarks of 1798 and 1803 to material dated between 1807 and 1809.²⁶ It is thus difficult to come to a conclusion as to the date of composition of the non-genuine texts but a date before 1807 seems probable. While the supposed originals of Macpherson's Ossian appeared only in 1807, nine years after Macpherson's death, it is not impossible that snippets of these "originals" may have been circulated in the Highlands prior to publication and new compositions in Gaelic in the manner of Macpherson were around at the time, e.g. John Smith's Sean Dana.²⁷ There is evidence that Campbell was familiar with this work although it is, of course, possible that Campbell took his main inspiration from Macpherson's English work—just as the translators into Gaelic did—and based his own work on oral material derived from the ballads he had collected.

Generally, it is not difficult to spot passages that are influenced by Macpherson's work, and to contrast them with oral material. Such adaptations, reconstructions or new passages often show a treatment of metrical requirements which is different to what is common in oral versions. The atmosphere of realism or verisimilitude of the ballads is changed to a gloomy and depressed brand of romantic vagueness; sentimental and emotional actions and statements abound. A different and often fictitious set of place-names and personal names predominates. Much of the imagery is remote from what we would expect in the ballads: the formulaic and conventionalized way of description peculiar to the ballads and typical of an oral environment has been developed in a manner that is not present in oral material, and some of the imagery of spirits, storms and landscape which is so prevalent in Macpherson's work has been introduced from outside the Gaelic tradition. There are also instances of non-standard syntax and grammar which are unlikely to have come from the repertoire of genuine tradition bearers.

Some of the methods Campbell used to transform an oral ballad into something that conforms to Macpherson's work are evident in one of the four reworked texts, the ballad entitled Dan Eas Ruagh (The Lay of the Red Cataract) in his collection.²⁸ This has the penciled note "Genuine to all appearance" in the hand of Prof. Watson. Genuineness or an origin in an oral environment is indeed suggested by a comment made by Campbell himself, this is the only text in which the informant he recorded this version from is identified by name. The comment runs:

The above Poem I took down from the recitation of Mrs. Nicolson of Scorribreac, in the Parish of Portree in Skye, who says, that she gave it to Mr. Macpherson, the translator of Ossian, when he traveled through Sky. The underwritten has met with many Editions of this Episode, but the above is the completest he procured.

There is no reason to doubt that Mrs. Nicolson was telling the truth or that she knew oral versions of ballads. The Highland Society Report mentions that Mrs. Nicolson recited her version of Dearg Mac Deirg to Macpherson in 1760 and it was written down for him but that he did not make use of it.²⁹ She seems to be a daughter of Allan Macdonald of Knock, in Sleat,³⁰ and Macpherson is known to have been in Skye in 1760 so that he could easily have collected poetry from the recitation of this lady who may still have been Miss Jenny Macdonald or already the wife of Malcolm Nicolson of Sgoirebreac, chief of Clan Nicolson. Campbell refers to Macpherson as "translator," indicating clearly to which camp in the Ossianic Controversy he belonged; he even links this text with Fingal Book 3 but with the cautionary note "beautiful but not accurate." Campbell's literate term "many editions" refers without doubt to the many oral and fluid versions he encountered when collecting ballads but his reference to completeness should be seen in the context of Macpherson's Fingal where the story of Fainasóllis, the Maid of Craca, is related in Book 3: a lady approaches in a boat; her description follows. In a dialogue between Fingal and herself it is established that she is Fainasóllis, daughter of the king of the island of Craca, pursued by Borbar, the chief of Sora. Fingal promises his protection and Borbar arrives by sea. Fingal invites him to his feast but Borbar kills the lady with an arrow. They fight, Borbar is killed and both he and the lady are buried. The story is put in the mouth of Fingal who relates it to his grandson Oscar.

This is rather like Campbell's text in which a lady approaches in a boat and she is described. It later emerges that her name is Fainte-soils. When she lands at the red cataract she is welcomed by Fionn who asks her why she has come and she requests to be protected from her pursuer Fear Borb. As soon as Fionn promises to protect her Fear Borb duly comes into sight and is described along with his ship. Fionn invites Fear Borb to a feast while the lady looks on in fear. An arrow out of nowhere but presumably shot by Fear Borb kills her and the murderer is himself killed in the fight that follows. Both are buried and the text ends. The parallels to Macpherson's Fingal episode continue in the presence of a tension between a conceptually oral text and the literary medium it has been transferred into; since Campbell's text also contains passages which have direct parallels in oral versions of this ballad the tension is actually increased.

Looking at other oral texts of this ballad, it is worth noting that the tension present in Macpherson's episode and Campbell's text is entirely absent. There are also some significant differences in the treatment of the plot just described. The basic plot structure of the oral version is still "damsel in distress comes to Fionn to be protected from unwanted suitor who attacks as soon as he arrives, and is killed at the cataract." However, there is a large amount of sentimental dialogue and description, following literate models, in Campbell's version that does not appear in any of the oral versions and some of the detail differs too. Instead of Fainasóllis the lady is called the daughter of the king of the Land under the Waves and her pursuer is Baighre or Maighre Borb, son of the King of Sorcha. Fionn's invitation to a feast is not part of any oral version since Maighre Borb attacks immediately. Naturally he is killed as a consequence and buried at the cataract with all honors due to a king's son but the lady survives and stays with Fionn as his wife for a year.

It would be only too easy to blame the lady's death in Campbell's version entirely on the influence of Macpherson—a happy ending, albeit with the slightly immoral implications of the end of the oral ballad, is not in keeping with Macpherson's usual treatment where female protagonists either die violently or fade away in sorrow. There is, however, a closely related ballad recorded from oral tradition: An Ionmhuinn (The Lay of the Maiden) which has a very similar plot to the above in which the lady is indeed killed by her pursuer and the indications are that Campbell knew a version or versions of this ballad since another of his reworked texts is very likely to have been based on this related ballad.

If Campbell is to be believed, Mrs. Nicolson gave Macpherson a text which is remarkably similar to an episode that appears in Fingal, published two years later, and which shows at the same time features of the genuine ballad The Lay of the Red Cataract. It is more likely that Mrs. Nicolson knew an oral version of the ballad and that she gave this to Macpherson. The Fainasóllis episode is obviously Macpherson's and not Mrs. Nicolson's. At the time of Campbell's recording, 37 or so years on from Macpherson's visit, Mrs. Nicolson is likely to have been quite elderly. It would have been both easy and logical for Campbell, if faced with a version impaired by the failing memory of a lady whom he knew to be one of Macpherson's informants, to look up the relevant passage in Macpherson's work and to set about reconstructing Mrs. Nicolson's version. His record as displayed by the rest of his collection shows him to be quite capable of composing Gaelic material that echoes Macpherson's English. Or he may have got a reasonably complete version of the oral ballad and reworked it anyway, as he appears to have done with at least one more of his texts.

While Mrs. Nicolson, obviously an educated lady of some social standing, is quite likely to have read Macpherson's works and may have made some adjustments to her own versions of ballads under the influence of Macpherson it is more likely that Alexander Campbell reworked her text in order to bring it into line with Macpherson's work. One potential source of inspiration for Campbell may have come from a book published in 1787, the year before he graduated from university. This is Dr. John Smith's Sean Dana, a volume which contains Gaelic material with English translation which follows the work of Macpherson. Smith, in connection with the poem Cathula, refers to the "Episode of the Maid of Craca in the 3d book of Fingal; an edition of which, perhaps not the least correct, is subjoined below." The text he actually prints is another reworked version of the same ballad that underlies Mrs. Nicolson's version. Although the bulk of the Sean Dana consists of Smith's own poetry, he sometimes quoted oral material in notes to his poetry, often denouncing the oral texts as later additions of little value. It is likely that Campbell was inspired by the example set by Smith's Sean Dana. Another piece of evidence in support of this hypothesis is the presence of alternative readings in the text ascribed to Mrs. Nicolson, a practice which he may have picked up from Smith as well.

The tension that is present in Mrs. Nicolson's version is highlighted in Campbell's translation as well. The Gaelic text as printed in Reliquiae Celticae begins:

Lá do Fhionn air bheagan sluaigh,Aig Eas-rua' nan eighe mall,Chunncas a seoladh, o 'n lear,Curach ceo is aon bhean ann.

This, paralleled by other oral texts, translates as follows: "One day when Fionn, with few people, was at Eas Ruadh of the slow salmon, they saw sailing from the ocean a boat and one lady in it." In Campbell's hands this turned into: "Fingal with a few of his people stood near the Banks of Eas rua, where its red foaming stream, rushing o'er a lofty rock, sends forth at times those slow and solemn sounds that anounce [sic] the coming storm. They saw a boat, like a mist, sailing on the distant main: a woman was all it carried." We can easily recognize Macpherson's style in the lofty rock and the distant storm, not present anywhere in the Gaelic text. The rest has been elaborated considerably. Macpherson certainly had set the standard for translation from Gaelic but we must not underestimate the constrictions placed upon Campbell by the literary conventions of the time: poetry had to be translated in terms appropriate for poetic expression even if this meant following literary rather than oral models. Faithfulness to an oral original appears to have been less important except when it was required for a specific purpose, for example in the Highland Society's Report.

Another example of elaborate translation appears in the passage where the lady explains her predicament to Fionn:

Tórachd ala orm air muir.
Laoch a's mor guin air mo lorg;
Mac Ridh Sorcha nan sgiath dearg,
Triath da 'n ainm am Fear-borb.

In translation this reads: "A pursuit follows me on the sea. A hero who causes great wounds is searching for me; the son of the king of Sorcha of the red shields, a lord whose name is the Fierce Man." Campbell makes this to: "I am closely followed over the rolling waves. The chief who pursues me with wrath is implacable and dreadful. The king of Tora of red shields is the heroes' [sic] father; and his name is Borbar the fierce." The translation of the first line is quite accurate, apart from the "rolling waves." However, the second line has changed from run-of-the-mill description to slightly over-the-top elaboration but the poetic intention is obvious. The change of focus from son to father in the third line should be seen in the same light. Far more important, however, is the transformation which "Sorcha" and "Fear-borb" have undergone, turning into Macpherson's "Tora" and "Borbar." This is no longer free translation but conscious adaptation to the poetic standard set by Macpherson, turning the fluid oral text into a fixed literary one.

The partially reworked passages display the same kind of transformation already in the Gaelic text. The following example is taken from the dialogue between Fionn and the lady in which he asks who she is and why she has come to him. Campbell's quatrain runs:

Innis dunn a Ribheann og,Fa do bhroin's do chuidrim tnú.'S duilich leum do leon's do chragh,Gu de 'n t ait' o 'n d' thainig thu?

In translation this reads: "Tell to us, young maiden, the reason of your sorrow and of your burden of anger. I am sorry for your distress and your anguish, what is the place you came from?" "Ribheann," or more correctly "ribhinn," with its strongly romantic overtones, is not a word used commonly in the ballads where "nighean" is used as the standard term for a young woman. The last line of the Gaelic text clashes as much with the preceding one in Gaelic as it does in English. Campbell s translation rearranges the sequence of lines: "Tell us lovely beam of youth! from what region art thou come? Whence arises thy sorrow? and whence is thy load of concern?" It is probable that in fact the English version of this quatrain took shape before the Gaelic one. The "lovely beam of youth" and the emphasis on gloom and sorrow are reminiscent of Macpherson so that the simple question "where do you come from?" appears almost ludicrous in its practicality, especially in the Gaelic version of the passage. However, to give Campbell his due, while the content of this quatrain is quite unlike anything found in an oral text, his handling of meter is actually a reasonably competent imitation of the meter of the ballad, with end-rhyme between "tnru" and "thu" and internal rhyme between "og" and "bhroin" and between "chragh" and "ait." It is worth noting that in his reworked passages of this ballad Campbell follows the quatrain structure of the oral text although his own presentation of the ballad divides it into paragraphs of differing length.

The passage telling of the death of the lady and her pursuer is an entirely reworked episode which is not paralleled by anything in an oral version of the ballad:

Mar ghallan am bharraich uaine,
'Chrathas luath os cenn an Aonaich
Sheas an Ainnir—thainig saighead,
" 'S math t amas, a laoich, ach s baoth thu."
Dheirich an sin cath nan sleagh:
Leagadh air an fhairce sonn;
Dhaingeadh lium am fear o 'n chuan,
'S bu chruaidh mo bhuaidh as a chionn.

Campbell translates: "Like a green and tender twig shaken by the blast of the desert, the maid stood trembling by my side. An arrow whizzing came, she fell. "Unerring, hero, is thy aim, but cruel and rash thy deed." The combat of spears begins. The man from Ocean was laid low on the field; he was slain by my hand, and hard to win was the victory." By contrast, a more literal translation would run like this: "Like a branch in the green tops of trees that shakes swiftly above the moor stood the lady—an arrow came, "Good is your aim, hero, but you are fierce." Then arose the combat of the spears: a hero [sic] was laid low on the field; The man from the sea was constrained by me, And my victory over him was hard." Two phrases with a particularly obvious Macpherson association may be singled out from this passage. The phrase "thainig saighead" ["an arrow came"] is a strangely oblique way of describing the lady's death: in oral ballads, there are no arrows coming out of the blue; when somebody important is killed in combat the perpetrator of the deed is invariably named and at least an entire line is devoted to the event, not just two words. Arrow imagery is frequent in Scottish Gaelic poetry in general—although rare in ballads—and this may have contributed to the emergence or survival of an arrow to kill the lady in some later oral versions; however, of these only one, the reworked one found in Smith's Sean Dana, describes the event in the same way as this version so that it may be possible that Campbell plagiarized Smith's work in this instance. Similarly, the line "Dheirich an sin cath nan sleagh" ["then arose the battle of the spears"] is typical of Macpherson.

Like Macpherson, Campbell used material he collected from current oral tradition in his native Skye, but in contrast to Macpherson a significant number of his orally collected texts are extant. There are texts he reworked, as shown above, and it is not too difficult to separate the elements recognizably drawn from oral passages in the reworked material from the equally obvious new passages in the manner of Macpherson. Like Macpherson, Campbell put together new texts quite unlike those from an oral context but using more elements taken more or less from oral tradition. And, like Macpherson, Campbell attempted to pass off his own work as "genuine," with the difference that he intermingled it with the oral ballads in his collection.

The predominantly oral and therefore fluid nature of their source material must have been obvious to Campbell and Macpherson. It is, however, clear that both approached their oral source material from a point of view that was informed by their knowledge of contemporary written and printed literature and found that it did not conform to the standards they regarded as the defining elements of literary merit.³¹ To make the source material accessible to a reading public familiar only with the contemporary literary convention, adaptation became inevitable; equally inevitable was the creation of tension between conceptual orality and medial literacy in the adapted texts, particularly in the case of Campbell's reworked text where medially literate elements intrude into the oral source text. However, the voice of the Ossian of Gaeldom is still to be heard by those who would listen.

Notes

¹ Cf. Donald J. Withrington and Ian R. Grant (general editors), Sir John Sinclair (ed.), The Statistical Account of Scotland 1791-1799, vol. 10 (Wakefield: EP Publishing, 1983), pp. 181-205. The passage quoted appears on p. 184.

² For biographical detail, cf. Hew Scott (ed.), Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae (new edition), vol. 7 (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1928), p. 173. Campbell's collection is extant in the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. Most of it is published in Alexander Cameron, Reliquiae Celticae, vol. 1, ed. by Alexander MacBain and John Kennedy (Inverness: Northern Chronicle Office, 1892), pp. 167-246.

³ Howard Gaskill, "Introduction," in Gaskill (ed.), Ossian Revisited (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), p. 5.

⁴ Henry Mackenzie (ed.): Report of the Committee of the Highland Society of Scotland, appointed to inquire into the nature and authenticity of the Poems of Ossian (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1805), Appendix, p. 9. Lachlan Macpherson, incidentally, has been credited with being one of the authors of the "original Gaelic" of James Macpherson's work; cf. Derick S. Thomson, "Bogus Gaelic Literature c.1750 - c.1820," Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Glasgow, vol. 5, 1958, p. 177.

⁵ Cf.. Fiona J. Stafford, The Sublime Savage (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988), p. 113ff.

⁶ James Macpherson, Fragments of Ancient Poetry, collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and translated from the Galic or Erse Language (second edition), (Edinburgh, 1760). A reprint of this was published with a foreword by Derick S. Thomson in 1979 by Clarsach Publications, Dundee.

⁷ Cf. F. J. Stafford, The Sublime Savage, pp. 63-66 and p. 85. This includes a sample of the ballad with a literal translation and Stone's own.

⁸ Poems by Macpherson appeared in the Scots Magazine in 1755 and 1758: cf. F. J. Stafford, The Sublime Savage, p. 185.

⁹ Cf. Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1960), pp. 3-12.

¹⁰ Derick S. Thomson: The Gaelic Sources of Macpherson's Ossian (Edinburgh and London: Oliver & Boyd, 1952), p. 12.

¹¹ For a full account of Macpherson's Highland tours, cf. F. J. Stafford, The Sublime Savage, pp. 113-32.

¹² See also H. Gaskill, "Introduction," p. 6.

¹³ A complete list of Macpherson's works and the most important editions of his "Ossian" is found in F. J. Stafford, The Sublime Savage, pp. 185-87.

¹⁴ F. J. Stafford, The Sublime Savage, p. 184, gives a list of the extant manuscripts Macpherson collected.

¹⁵ Macpherson's education at Aberdeen University between 1752 and 1755 is discussed in detail by F. J. Stafford, The Sublime Savage, pp. 24-37.

¹⁶ H. Mackenzie, Report; p. 152.

¹⁷ As quoted in D. S. Thomson, Gaelic Sources, p. 65.

¹⁸ Ibid. This follows the orthography and translation given by Thomson.

¹⁹ See also A. B. Lord, The Singer of Tales, pp. 130-37.

²⁰ John F. Campbell (ed.), Leabhar na Fèinne (London, 1872).

²¹ H. Mackenzie, Report, p. 151.

²² In the papers of the Highland Society (now the Royal Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland) in Ingliston, and the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.

²³ Identified as Professor Watson's hand by Mr Ronald Black.

²⁴ Campbell may have tampered with his Gaelic ballads because he was under the impression that the Highland Society wanted texts that were like Macpherson's work (undated written communication from Mr Ronald Black).

²⁵ Lists of his informants, and the material he collected, are to be found in the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.

²⁶ A description of the extant papers relating to Campbell is found in the following catalogue of Highland Society papers: Ronald I. Black: "The Gaelic Academy: Appendix: The Ingliston Papers," Scottish Gaelic Studies, vol. 15, 1988, pp. 103-21.

²⁷ John Smith D.D.: Sean Dana; le Oisian, Orran, Ulann &c, Edinburgh 1787. Most of the material in the Gillies Collection is taken from oral tradition, including a significant number of ballads; Smith was the composer of most of the texts found in his collection.

²⁸ See Reliquiae Celticae, pp. 242-46.

²⁹ Perhaps because its oral character did not suit his requirements. The way in which the passage relating to Mrs. Nicolson is phrased appears to indicate just that. See Highland Society Report, p. 58.

³⁰ The lady's identity was confirmed by Dr. Alasdair Maclean.

³¹ See also Elizabeth Eisenstein: The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), vol. 1, pp. 129-36.