Macpherson, James

Macpherson, James (1736–96). Scottish ‘translator’ whose Poems of Ossian (1760–3), based in part on Gaelic oral tradition, purported to be a lost Celtic epic. Although titled Poems, Macpherson's work is in prose and was published serially under three titles, Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland (1760), Fingal (1762), and Temora (1763). The Poems' authenticity was challenged from their initial publication, and the ‘originals’ Macpherson produced to back his claim were fabricated. None the less, his characterizations manifestly draw upon characters in Irish and Scottish Gaelic tradition; e.g. Fingal is Fionn mac Cumhaill, Darthula is Deirdre, and Ossian is Oisín. While modern readers often find Macpherson's prose insufferably turgid, the Poems of Ossian electrified 18th- and early 19th-century Europe, finding admirers as diverse as Napoleon, Goethe, who translated them into German, William Blake, Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, and Brahms who, among many, set them to music. Bogus though he may have been, Macpherson drew learned attention to Irish and Scottish Gaelic traditions and caused the name Oscar to be one of the most widely known from Celtic storytelling. See George F. Black, Macpherson's Ossian and the Ossianic Controversy (New York, 1926); Derick S. Thomson, The Gaelic Sources of Macpherson's Ossian (Aberdeen, 1952); ‘Macpherson's Ossian: Ballads into Epics’, in Bo Almqvist et al. (eds.), The Heroic Process (Dun Laoghaire, 1987), 243–64. His Breton counterpart is Hersart de La Villemarqué. See IOLO MORGANWG.