Ossian 2: James Macpherson’s Epic Journey
In the middle of the eighteenth century, the landscape of Scotland and the way of life of its inhabitants were changing fast, under the influence of the Enlightenment and the ingenious innovators of the Agricultural Revolution. In thinking about and trying to understand these changes, contemporary Scots turned to accounts from other lands, and accounts from history, in the hope that these comparisons might tell them about themselves and where they stood.
Lowland thinkers also looked at their neighbours in the Highlands. Some of them at least viewed the Scottish Gaels who lived there as ‘contemporary ancestors’, the original Scots, supposedly still living in a patriarchal, primitive, semi-barbarian clan-based society. But how to find out more about the mysteries of their history?
In 1760 the literary nation was electrified by the claims of a twenty-four-year-old from Badenoch in the eastern Highlands: that in his native Gaelic oral tradition he had collected fragments of an epic dating back one and a half millennia. Over the next three years James Macpherson would publish what he claimed were authentic prose translations of these ancient poems, telling of fierce, heroic battles fought by Highland warriors in a gloomy, sublime landscape. But Macpherson’s characters, women as well as men, were strangely contemporary too: noble, sensitive, emotional, even civilised. These warriors fought, and died, for love as well as for glory. With his poems of Ossian, it seemed that Macpherson had given Scotland, and all of northern Europe, literature to rival the Mediterranean classical epics of Homer and Vergil.
In this talk we’ll investigate the life, work, and legacy of James Macpherson. How did he create his epics – and who helped him? What poems did he draw upon for inspiration, from his own Gaelic culture? What impact did Macpherson’s poems have, in Britain and beyond—and on Scottish Gaelic culture too? And, of course, how did the fierce Ossianic controversy over the epic’s authenticity first begin?
Speaker Bio:
From the Isle of Lewis, Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart is a leading scholar of Scottish Gaelic language, folklore, and oral tradition. He is Associate Professor at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, University of the Highlands and Islands, where he lectures in Scottish Highland history and material culture, and Gaelic literature and folklore. He has written numerous academic articles, and is often interviewed on radio and television.
Curated & Hosted by:
Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience
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