James Macpherson's Ossian Poems, Oral Traditions, and the Invention of Voice

The Invention of Voice and the Intimacy of the Oral Text

When James Macpherson's Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and Translated from the Galic or Erse Language appeared in 1760, it was greeted with widespread approval. Macpherson's collection purported to translate the work of Ossian, a semi-mythical third-century C. E. Scottish bard in the mold of Homer, who preserved his culture's traditions in song. The claim that this collection was the "genuine remains of ancient Scottish poetry" attracted passionate adherents (Macpherson 1966:A2). For nationalistic Scots, Ossian provided a tantalizing image of an advanced culture comparable to and contemporaneous with those of classical Greece and Rome. For many English authors, Ossian served as an example of native British creativity that superseded the neoclassicism of the early eighteenth century.¹ Thomas Gray declared, for example, that he was in "extasie" after reading the Ossian poems and characterized Macpherson as a thrilling "demon" of poetry (Gray 1935:ii, 680). This "extasie" partly inspired Gray to compose his own imitations of Norse and Celtic folktales. Ossian's popularity traveled widely outside of Great Britain; prominent literary and political figures, including the German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Jefferson, and Napoleon Bonaparte offered enthusiastic assessments of the sentimentality and humanity that they saw in the poems.

The fervor of such readers was met with equally forceful skepticism. Many critics suggested that Macpherson fabricated Ossian and forged his poems to succeed in a literary marketplace that had largely ignored his earlier publications.² Samuel Johnson unequivocally asserted that the poems cannot be "genuine remains" because, he believed, it was impossible for oral transmission to preserve poetry of any considerable length or cultural traditions of any complexity (Johnson and Boswell 1984:113-14). He argued that they were "too long to have been remembered" by an ancient people who, he thought, had not developed writing and therefore must have been uncivilized (Johnson 2000:637-38). He insinuated that the Scots' desire to reclaim ancient traditions, and thus neutralize the intense English colonialism that followed the failed Jacobite uprising in 1745, made them susceptible to Macpherson's cunning forgery.

Controversies over the legitimacy of Macpherson's Ossian poems are an essential part of their literary reception and cultural meaning. These persistent debates, however, obscure the role that Macpherson plays in the emergence of modern British poetic voice. Macpherson's Ossian is more than an example of native creativity or Scottish nationalism; the Ossian poems are the best-known instance of a wider tendency shared by many mid- and late eighteenth-century authors to make oral traditions—considered politically and geographically marginal to civilized Britain—central to the period's most innovative poetic experiments. These experiments sought out alternate modes of inspiration in folk culture as a way to counteract what Susan Stewart calls the eighteenth century's crisis in authenticity (Stewart 1991:105). Enlightenment Britain is often associated by modern scholars with the emergence of a viable literary marketplace and the category of the professional writer.³ But many authors felt that the impersonality and rationality of the marketplace increasingly disconnected them from their readers and eroded the vibrancy of their creative imagination. Authors like Gray, Macpherson, William Collins, Robert Burns, and Felicia Hemans, among many others, responded to this crisis by encompassing oral traditions and embodying its voices within their printed texts. Oral voices presented models of authentic speech that defused the sense that authors were anonymous and distanced from their readers. They were so appealing, therefore, because they promoted an image of artistic expression based on the shared intimacy of communal relationships and the immediacy of face-to-face contact. Collins, for example, depicts the speaker of his 1749 "An Ode to a Friend on his Return &c" as a medium for the songs of ancient Scottish bards whose voices he records in his text and transmits to English readers (Lonsdale 1977:167-73; 52-58). Collins insinuates that by reading his poem the audience is able to "hear" these bards sing again. Thematizing the English poem as a...