SOURCE: "James MacPherson, Ossian, and the Revival of Interest in Oral Bardic Traditions in Eighteenth-Century Scotland," in Midwestern Journal of Language and Folklore, Vol. VI, No. 1-2, Spring / Fall, 1980, pp. 51-5.

[In the following essay, Grobman discusses the eighteenth-century rise in interest in Scottish oral tradition and notes that this focus helped to ensure the initial popularity of Macpherson's Ossianic poetry.]

When Scotland lost its own Parliament by merging with the English Parliament on May 1, 1707, with the Treaty of Union, Scottish culture succumbed steadily to English influences. Scottish poets and musicians continued to leave for English cities, a process begun in 1603 when the departure of James VI for England forced court patronage of the arts to cease in Scotland. Yet Scottish national pride continued to grow, causing many poets and writers to resist anglicization stubbornly and turn to a regional, vernacular Scottish-Gaelic source of folk poetry.

A leading Scottish Scholar, Thomas Blackwell, while teaching at Marischal College in Aberdeen, extolled the superiority and excellence of the Greek bard, Homer, and Greek epic in general. He also suggested that Homer, as well as other ancient bards, was an oral poet-performer using formulaic techniques and that his mythology was transmitted orally, particularly in song.¹ This caused two dominant strategies in the Scottish literary renaissance of this era: first, a search for ancient Scottish bardic models in Homer's mode (the survivalists); and, second, a growing need to cultivate contemporary Scottish poetic talent in Homer's mode (the revivalists). Let us focus on the "survivalist" channel as it affected the "revival" movement. Basically, three trends emerged.

First, there was the "pure Scots" tradition which drew its ancient bardic models from the predominantly oral Gaelic sources of the past. The earliest written models came from the twelfth century, although Scottish-Gaelic as a distinct form was hardly found in formal written literature until the fifteenth century because it was primarily an oral tradition. Rather than collecting ancient oral traditions, most of the pure-Scots poets began producing new Scottish-Gaelic poetry, printing poems from 1751 onward. Alexander Macdonald, Duncan Ban Macintyre, Rob Donn Mackay, and Dugald Buchanan represent the best of this trend. Although some scholars, such as Jerome Stone, collected Gaelic poetry from oral tradition from 1739 through the latter half of the eighteenth century, most of these collections did not gain international attention or fame.

Second, there was the "Anglo-Scots" or native Lowland Scots tradition which drew its ancient bardic models from older Anglo-Scottish literature and oral tradition, primarily from the first Golden Age of Scottish literature in the late Medieval period during the literary reign of the "Makars," the so-called "Scottish Chaucerians." The earliest manuscripts of this type of literature were from the fifteenth century, featuring vernacular Anglo-Scots dialect and chaucerian tale-telling stylistics. Again, the new writers in this tradition were more interested in producing new poetry than collecting and preserving oral traditions of the past. However, some eighteenth-century col-lections in this trend included items from oral sources, most notably James Watson's A Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems both Ancient and Mo-dern (3 volumes between 1706-1711), Allan Ramsay's The Tea-Table Miscellany (4 volumes between 1724-1737), William Thomson's Orpheus Caledonius (1725), and David Herd's Ancient and Modern Scots Songs (1769).

Third, and most important for discussion here, was the Anglicized "Scottish-European" tradition which drew its bardic models from a variety of older literary and oral traditions, in English or English translation, based on more internationally accepted European aesthetic standards. Ironically, this last trend did more for the cause of Scottish pride than the first two put together, even though it meant the anglicizing of ancient oral Scottish traditions. Yet, by its acceptance of English culture and language, it endeavored to beat England at its own game by gaining distinction within English literary standards. By doing so, this third channel attracted the greatest support from the Edinburgh literati and earned itself a world-wide reputation with Anglo-European audiences.

David Hume, one of the Edinburgh intellectuals, became greatly involved in the endeavor of finding a great Scottish poet who could write in English verse better than the English. He felt that the best way for Scotsmen to demonstrate their genius was to avoid writing in Scottish-Gaelic and write in carefully composed standard English. As Ernest Campbell Mossner has pointed out, Hume promoted several Scottish literary "geniuses" out of Hume's literary naivete and nationalistic fervor: 1) Thomas Blacklock, the "Scottish Pindar," 2) John Home, the "Scottish Shakespeare," and 3) William Wilkie, the "Scottish Homer of the Lowlands."² All of them were, indeed, poorly received in world-wide literary circles, failing to achieve proper critical acclaim or fame. But Hume discovered a winner in poet James Macpherson, "The Scottish Homer of the Highlands."

James Macpherson, a young poet from Ruthven, whose boyhood imagination most certainly had been stirred by the uprising of 1745 and nourished on the sentimental literature of the age, found himself at Marischal College in Aberdeen around 1754. Here it seems logical that Macpherson encountered the influential teaching of Thomas Blackwell on the oral mastery of Homer. Regardless, Macpherson acquired some ideas about ancient primitive poetry, or at least caught some interest in it. By 1755, he moved to the University of Edinburgh where he apparently became a student of divinity, because in 1756 he returned to his native Ruthven as a schoolmaster and minister. Here he began composing poems in English but inspired by ancient Gaelic oral tradition, which to him seemed comparable to the ancient Greeks, regardless of its lack of critical attention. At some point, he decided to bring greater attention to the early Scottish oral poets of the Highlands.

Macpherson's initial interest in collecting Scottish oral tradition, whether for the purpose of illustrating primitivistic theories or not, appears to have been inspired by the appearance of a letter in The Scots Magazine in January 1756 written by Jerome Stone, a highland schoolmaster who called attention to the neglected oral pure-Scots poetry of the Highlands.³ Stone offered one sample of an English translation of a Gaelic folksong, "Albin and The Daughter of May: An Old Tale, translated from the Irish," suggesting a link between this tale and Homer's story of Bellerophon.⁴

Stone's translation was rather free, causing many critics to believe that Macpherson was influenced to some extent in the way he handled his own translations. Nevertheless, by the end of 1759, Macpherson put together his own small collection of popular Gaelic poems from oral tradition. Meanwhile, John Home (Hume's "Scottish Shakespeare") and other poets were using Scottish folklore in their own works. Therefore, in 1759, when Home met Macpherson in Dumfriesshire, the subject of Scots poetry arose and focused on the difficulties of accurate translations of Gaelic verse into English. After some persuasion Home persuaded his new friend to translate a sample of Gaelic poetry taken down from the oral recitation of old people in the Highlands. Yet, a few days later he brought back a short original poetic tale in English prose, "The Death of Oscar," the first of a series that he claimed was a literal translation of an old Gaelic poem.⁵ Upon encouragement, Macpherson produced other "translations" which soon were circulated among the literary circles at Edinburgh, causing great excitement.

Macpherson's many supporters helped spread his fame. Adam Ferguson, for example, was convinced that these translations of fragments of Gaelic poetry were accurate. Along with John Home, Ferguson brought Macpherson into contact with Hugh Blair, who soon became the chief promoter. With the help of Blair and other Scottish friends, Macpherson published his Fragments of Ancient Poetry, collected in the Highlands, and Translated from the Galic or Erse Language in 1760. This edition was an immediate success commercially, receiving many favorable reviews. A subscription was taken in Edinburgh to enable Macpherson to make two trips to the Highlands to collect more Gaelic poetry. Blair, Ferguson, Home, Boswell, and David Hume were among the financial supporters of the venture. The end results were Fingal (1761) and Temora (1763).

The rest is history. Although Macpherson attempted to pass both of them off as translations of rather complete epic works composed by Ossian, a third-century oral bardic poet in the Homeric tradition, scholarly evidence indicates otherwise. Apparently, he combined separate and unrelated Gaelic ballads, blending in fragments of others and mixing about six parts of his own imagination to every one part of Scots ballad. Macpherson's forgeries were good enough to convince literary scholars such as Hugh Blair and Lord Kames of the authenticity of his "oral collections"; however, David Hume, a one-time avid supporter, soon became skeptical enough to write a brief critical tract, "Of the Authenticity of Ossian's Poems" (1775-1776), presenting ten arguments that introduced new and unprecedented issues about the proper scientific methodology for collecting ballads and mythic narratives in the field and discussing the very nature of oral traditions.⁶

Despite the fact that Macpherson was guilty of editing, redacting, and fraudulent collecting, most of Scotland, led by critics Hugh Blair and Lord Kames, supported him, probably out of nationalistic pride. However, in England he never gained much support because of a natural rivalry and the constant criticism of England's most influential man of letters, Dr. Samuel Johnson.⁷ Nevertheless, Macpherson's Ossian translations became widely influential throughout the world, including England. To the Scots, Ossian was the Scottish Homer whose works included indigenous Celtic mythology which rivaled the stuff of the Greek epics. Macpherson's depiction of a noble and primitive people coincided with preconceived philosophical ideas that were popular at the time. Based as it was on the idea of a primitive, noble, rural state of nature, Ossian was also perfectly suited to Rousseau's idea of "the noble savage." As Van Tieghem points out, Ossian and Rousseau reinforced each other all through this period.⁸

Of course, what was not realized immediately was that Macpherson had greatly misused the Gaelic oral tradition that he was pretending to represent. The songs about the Fenian warriors, preserved by oral recitation among the native Gael, were still being sung in the Scottish Highlands by professed seannachies at the time Macpherson was collecting. However, they existed, for the most part, in fragmented ballad form rather than in complete epics, an understandable result of fifteen centuries of oral tradition where much of the material is either forgotten or lost. Macpherson, perhaps in his impatience, borrowed freely from other manuscripts and oral collections, and, adding much of his own imagination, literally patched together two complete epics.⁹ In his enthusiasm to provide strictly Scottish epics, he completely denied the fact that the authentic Ossian material was originally Irish, using the works of two Irish historians, Roderick O'Flaherty's Ogygia and Geoffrey Keating' s History of Ireland, to prove that they were Scottish. In doing so, he mixed together the two distinctly separate heroic cycles of Cuchulain (first century A.D.) and Finn (third century A.D.), a common confusion also seen in previous collections.¹⁰

Macpherson's Ossian fit into the literature of sensibility which demanded sentimentalism—the depiction in dramas, tales, and novels of contemporary life in such a way so as to arouse faith in the goodness of human nature. The author seemed to bring forward not only the evidence that was necessary to support the sentimental school, but at the same time the evidence demonstrating theories of primitivism, also popular at this time. Even though this proved to be a misrepresentation of the actual mores and manners of third-century Celtic life, Macpherson insisted on the authenticity of his work, loading the poems with introductions and notes amounting, in all, to several hundred pages.

The positive influence of Macpherson's Ossianic poems on the Romantic literary movement throughout the world was phenomenal. There were endless editions, translations, reprints, and imitations. The English poets—Blake, Coleridge, and Southey—were heavily influenced by Ossian as was Scott originally. In Germany, Klopstock, Haller, Burger, and Schiller were influenced as was Goethe in his early days.¹¹ In France, Macpherson's Ossian caught the fancy of Saint-Simon, Chateaubriand, Andre Chenier, and Napoleon.

Unfortunately, on the other hand, Ossian was one product of the Celtic Revival which inspired other literary redactions and shoddy editorializing of oral antiquities, immediately recognizable in Bishop Thomas Percy's influential ballad collection, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (London, 1765; 3 volumes). It was the Bishop Percys and John Pinkertons, not the David Herds and Joseph Ritsons, who served as models for ballad editors and collectors in the next seventy years following Macpherson's unscrupulous precedent in handling "crude verse." And others with a more creative urge, such as the poets Shenstone, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Keats, and Byron, followed the same models for creating highly literary ballad-like or epic-like verse. The striving for accuracy and authenticity in collecting and presenting oral traditions was an issue to emerge much later in the nineteenth century when folklore as a scholarly discipline began to take a scientific turn.

Notes

¹ See Thomas Blackwell, An Enquiry into the Life and Writing of Homer (London: Oswald, 1735).

² See Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Forgotten Hume. Le Bon David (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943).

³The Scots Magazine, 18 (1756), 15.

⁴Ibid., p. 15.

⁵ See John S. Smart, James Macpherson; An Episode in Literature (London: Nutt, 1905), pp. 89-93.

⁶ See Neil R. Grobman, "David Hume and the Earliest Scientific Methodology for Collecting Balladry," Western Folklore, 34 (1975), 16-31.

⁷ See Samuel Johnson, Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (London, 1775).

⁸ P. Van Tieghem, Ossian en France (Paris, 1917).

⁹ Derick S. Thomson, The Gaelic Sources of Macpherson's "Ossian" (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1951), pp. 79-81.

¹⁰Ibid., pp. 69-72, 10-12.

¹¹ See R. Tombo, Ossian in Germany (New York, 1901).