How Scotland’s Ossian changed the world
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Ossian is a character that has inspired Scottish culture like very few others. A mythological hero that very few people know about, even though some of the most beautiful Scottish locations are named after him.
And not just in Scotland; from the greatest writers and works of literature, like Tolstoy, and Anna Karenina, where Ossian is referenced, to presidents like Thomas Jefferson (who said his poetry was the greatest of all), and leaders like Napoleon, he caused a cultural phenomenon that impacted literature, art and poetry all over the world. The seminal philosopher, Henry David Thoreau, one of the first to develop the idea of peaceful protest and civil disobedience, as well as one of the first to discuss how important conservation and ecology is (and like a God to John Muir), even said that the poems claimed the same merit and stamp as Homer’s Iliad. Walter Scott was certainly influenced, and he went on to invent the historical novel based on his own Scottish landscapes and characters inspired by the poems, and essentially created the Scottish identity and idea of culture, which still holds true today. The poems even, it is agreed by many scholars, helped to create modern European nationalism. And they inspired Byron and Shelly amongst other artists and poets, in helping to create the romantic movement.
It was all started by a man called James MacPherson from Inverness-shire, who, in 1761-1762, claimed to have gathered up ancient oral folk songs, stories and poems, recited to him by Gallic-speaking Scots, which he translated and put to paper and turned out into the epic, Poems of Ossian. The descriptions within are utter beauty; wild, ethereal Highland Landscapes, covered in mystical fogs dimly lit by sombre moons and orange suns, and crashing and gurgling streams and rivers, and winds that howl and whisper through the trees and forests. And the romantic characters that inhabit these landscapes; ghosts, pagans, druids, noble savages, bards and warriors alike.
Ossian himself was said to be a blind poet and bard, who often dwelt in the lines between earth and heaven. In the cave seen high up on Glencoe’s Three Sisters, the legend is that it was here he was born, and so it took his name. There are also Ossian’s caves on Arran, and in Perthshire at the Hermitage.
There is much debate and controversy over how much of Ossian’s poetry was invented by MacPherson, and how much of it is genuine from what he had gathered from the Scots. Some Irish scholars claim that some of the stories are embellished versions of their own mythological tales. But the Gallic tongue and Scottish and Irish Celtic cultures bore a similar heritage and resemblance, and a large percentage of what MacPherson gathered was indeed from Highland poems and songs.
And even if MacPherson did, as many experts agree, fake or create some of the content, the work is still literary genius, and nothing to be ashamed or embarrassed about. For the beautiful, artistic and literary merit of the poems, MacPherson was buried next to many other great literary figures at Westminster Abbey. The gathering of these folk stories, and the epic way they were set out, in the period it was, and the illuminating poetic descriptions within, inspired so many, and for good reasons.
Our idea of Scottish national identity is in part thanks to James MacPherson and his Ossian’s tales, whether he faked or made up some of them, or not. That culture of storytelling still lives on today, partly aided by these wonderful works, and it is, in my opinion, something to cherish and feel proud of. Created by a Scottish poet and storyteller, whether MacPherson, Highlanders, or Ossian himself, these folk stories inspired and changed the world.
