Study guide
Fingal (Ossian)
Open the interactive study guide →
Overview
- Published
- London, December 1761 (title page dated 1762), as Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem, in Six Books, with several shorter 'Poems of Ossian'
- Presented as
- A prose translation from the Gaelic of Ossian, a bard of the third century AD and son of Fingal
- Actual author
- James Macpherson (1736–1796), working from Gaelic heroic ballads and his own invention
- Form
- Epic in six books of rhythmic, highly figured prose, with framing songs and inset episodes
- Setting
- Ulster (Ullin) and the heath of Lena below Mount Cromla, with memories of Morven (western Scotland) and Lochlin (Scandinavia)
- Narrator
- Ossian, blind and aged, the last survivor of his race
- Main action
- Fingal of Morven sails to rescue Ireland, whose regent Cuthullin is losing the war against Swaran, king of Lochlin
- Champion
- Hugh Blair, whose Critical Dissertation (1763) set Ossian beside Homer
- Controversy
- Its authenticity was denied by Samuel Johnson (1775) and heavily qualified by the Highland Society's Report (1805)
- Influence
- Read across Europe: Goethe, Herder, Cesarotti, Napoleon, Girodet, Ingres, Mendelssohn
Context
James Macpherson was born in 1736 at Ruthven in Badenoch, in the central Highlands, into a Gaelic-speaking world that was being dismantled after the Jacobite defeat at Culloden in 1746; he grew up amid the reprisals and the disarming of the clans. He studied at Aberdeen and briefly at Edinburgh, taught at the charity school in Ruthven and published verse of his own. In 1759 he met the dramatist John Home, who was eager to see genuine Highland poetry, and showed him a version of a Gaelic piece on the death of Oscar. Home and the Edinburgh minister and critic Hugh Blair urged him to translate more (Stafford 1988) (Saunders 1894) (deGategno 1989).
The result was Fragments of Ancient Poetry (Edinburgh, 1760), fifteen short prose pieces with an unsigned preface by Blair hinting that a whole epic might still be recovered from oral tradition (Macpherson 1760). Edinburgh men of letters raised money to send Macpherson in search of it. In two journeys in 1760–61, through Skye, the Outer Hebrides, Mull and Argyll, he collected ballads from reciters and obtained some manuscripts, helped by Gaelic-speaking friends. Fingal followed in December 1761, dated 1762, and a second epic, Temora, in 1763; both were gathered with the shorter pieces as The Works of Ossian in 1765, and revised as The Poems of Ossian in 1773 (Macpherson 1762) (Macpherson 1996).
Blair's Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (1763), printed with the collected works from 1765, gave the poems their critical frame. Blair read Ossian as the voice of an early, uncorrupted society, compared him point by point with Homer, and found him more tender and more sublime (Blair 1763). Behind him lay the Scottish Enlightenment's history of the 'stages of society', in which poetry was thought to flourish most in the hunting and pastoral ages, and a wider European taste for the primitive, the melancholy and the sublime.
Doubt began almost at once. Samuel Johnson, after his Highland tour, declared in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) that the epics had never existed in Gaelic in the form Macpherson printed, and challenged him to produce his manuscripts (Johnson 1775). Irish scholars objected that the heroes were Irish and that Macpherson had fused two distinct cycles of legend; Charlotte Brooke's Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789) offered real translations as a corrective (Brooke 1789). After Macpherson's death the Highland Society of Scotland reported in 1805 that Ossianic ballads were genuinely traditional, but that no original of Fingal as a whole could be found (Mackenzie 1805). Twentieth-century scholarship, above all Derick Thomson's, identified the ballads Macpherson used and the much larger share he wrote himself (Thomson 1952).
Whatever its status, Fingal was one of the most influential books of its century. Melchiorre Cesarotti's Italian version (1763) carried it into Italy and eventually to Napoleon, who prized it; Herder made it central to his idea of the poetry of peoples; Goethe's hero reads Ossian aloud at the climax of The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Girodet and Ingres painted Ossianic subjects for Napoleon's residences, and Mendelssohn's Hebrides overture, known as Fingal's Cave, grew out of a visit to Staffa in 1829 (Gaskill 2004) (Moore 2004). Fingal is therefore read today both as a disputed 'translation' and as a founding text of European Romanticism.
Plot overview
The poem is sung by Ossian, old and blind, long after the events. Swaran, king of Lochlin, has invaded Ireland, where the young Cuthullin rules as regent for the boy-king Cormac. Cuthullin's counsellor Connal advises waiting for Fingal, king of Morven, but Cuthullin chooses to fight. The first day's battle on the heath of Lena is indecisive; on the second, despite a warning from the ghost of Crugal, the Irish are routed. Cuthullin withdraws in shame to a cave on Mount Cromla just as Fingal's ships arrive.
Fingal, remembering Swaran's sister Agandecca, whom he once loved and who was killed by her father Starno for warning him of treachery, offers Swaran a feast before battle; Swaran refuses. Over two days Fingal's heroes, Gaul, Oscar, Ossian, Fillan and Ryno, drive back the men of Lochlin, and at last Fingal wrestles Swaran to the ground and binds him. The victory is costly: Fingal's youngest son Ryno is killed, and the king grieves for him and for Orla, a gallant enemy he could not save.
That night, over a feast, Fingal frees Swaran, recalling the old bonds between their houses, and refuses his offer of ships. Swaran sails home in peace. Fingal seeks out the disgraced Cuthullin, silences a jeering follower, and restores his spirit with the promise that his fame will grow again. The poem ends as Morven's heroes set sail for home.
Throughout, the action is interrupted by episodes, songs of 'other times' about lovers and warriors who died young, and by Ossian's own laments: everyone he sings of is dead, the harp is silent in Morven, and the bard sits alone at the tombs of his friends.
Book by book
Book 1: The Invasion and the First Battle
Summary
Cuthullin is sitting at Tura when the scout Moran reports the fleet of Swaran. Cuthullin has the shield of Semo struck to summon his chiefs. In council the cautious Connal urges peace until Fingal arrives; the hot-headed Calmar calls for war, and Cuthullin chooses to fight. Asking after absent friends, he hears from Fergus the tale of Morna, who killed the jealous Duchômar after he murdered her lover Câthba, and was killed by him as he died.
The armies meet on Lena. Swaran's scout describes Cuthullin's chariot and horses in an elaborate set piece, and Swaran scorns the thought of flight. The battle is vast but indecisive, and Ossian pauses to lament the fallen, among them Trenar, mourned by the 'maid of Inistore'. At night Cuthullin sends the bard Carril to invite Swaran to a feast; Swaran refuses with arrogance. Carril sings instead of Cairbar and Grudar, friends who quarrelled over a bull, and of Brassolis, who died on Grudar's body. Cuthullin thinks of his wife Bragéla on Skye, and Connal posts a night watch.
Analysis
The opening book sets out the poem's method. The narrative moves in short declarative sentences and balanced clauses; almost every action is doubled by a simile from nature (stream, mist, storm, rock), and characters are fixed by recurring epithets: 'blue-eyed' and 'car-borne' Cuthullin, 'Carril of other times', 'Erin of streams'. This style owes as much to Homer and to the parallelism of the Authorised Version as to Gaelic verse, and Blair praised it as the natural eloquence of an early age (Blair 1763) (Stafford 1988).
The battle is framed from the start by mourning. The Morna episode and Carril's song of Brassolis interrupt the war with stories of love ended by violence, and Cuthullin asks for song to 'give the joy of grief'. That phrase names the emotional economy of the whole poem, the pleasure of sorrow recollected, which made Ossian so congenial to the age of sensibility (Moore 2003).
Send thou the night away in song; and give the joy of grief.
Cuthullin asks Carril for songs of the dead. The 'joy of grief' is the Ossianic emotion par excellence: mourning enjoyed as a refined pleasure.
The car, the car of war comes on, like the flame of death!
The scout's description of Cuthullin's chariot is the book's showpiece. Irish tradition has famous descriptions of Cú Chulainn's chariot, and this is one of the places where older heroic matter shows through.
Book 2: Crugal's Ghost and the Rout of Erin
Summary
Connal, sleeping apart from the others, sees the ghost of Crugal, killed the day before, who warns that the Irish will fall and urges them to leave the field. Cuthullin dismisses the vision; he would rather die than flee. At dawn Swaran sends Morla with insulting terms: Ireland, Cuthullin's wife and his hound. Cuthullin refuses and the second battle begins. Carril's battle-song tells of Degrena, Crugal's widow, killed among the enemy ranks, and her father Cairbar charges in fury.
The Irish give way and some flee. Cuthullin and Connal hold a hill with the survivors, and Moran at last sights Fingal's ships, though night falls before they land. Sitting by a stream, Cuthullin confesses his deepest grief: he once killed his friend Ferda, whom the proud Deugala had goaded into fighting him. Carril answers with the tale of Comal, who shot his beloved Galbina by mistake when she put on his armour, and afterwards sought death in battle.
Analysis
The ghost of Crugal is the poem's first full apparition, and a model for many in Romantic writing: a form of cloud, stars glimmering through it, its voice like a distant stream. Ghosts in Ossian are not terrifying revenants but the frail persistence of the dead in landscape and weather. Cuthullin's refusal to heed the ghost is heroic, but it also begins his fall.
Both inset tales are about killing what one loves. Cuthullin's slaying of Ferda recalls the Irish tradition of Cú Chulainn's combat with his foster-brother Fer Diad and brings guilt into his character; Comal's accidental killing of Galbina repeats the pattern as pure pathos. The episodes slow the epic almost to a standstill, which troubled some neoclassical readers but became one of the work's chief attractions (Stafford 1988) (Thomson 1952).
My spirit, Connal, is on my hills: my corse on the sands of Erin.
Crugal's ghost is divided between body and home; the dead in Ossian belong to the hills, the winds and the songs of their people.
I fear not death, to fly I fear!
Cuthullin's motto: honour lies in refusing flight, not in surviving. It is the code his defeat will shatter.
Book 3: Agandecca and the Coming of Fingal
Summary
At Cuthullin's request Carril sings of Fingal's youth: Starno, king of Lochlin, lured him with the promise of his daughter Agandecca, intending to kill him, but Agandecca warned Fingal and was stabbed by her father; Fingal carried her body home and buried her on Ardven. The wounded Calmar arrives, tells of his fearless ancestors, and stays behind to delay the enemy while the Irish retreat. He dies at dawn, and Cuthullin, defeated and ashamed to face Fingal, withdraws into the woods of Cromla.
Fingal lands and, remembering Swaran's grief for Agandecca, invites him to a feast; Swaran insists on battle that day. Fingal, his sons and Ossian drive the men of Lochlin back until night. By the stream of Lubar Fingal teaches his grandson Oscar the heroic code, telling of Fainasóllis, the princess of Craca whom he could not save from Borbar's arrow. Gaul, son of Morni, asks to lead the next day's fight; Fingal agrees, and before sleeping prays that Agandecca will visit his dreams. Ossian ends the book lamenting that he is now blind and alone among 'little men'.
Analysis
Fingal enters only in the middle of the poem, as a long-awaited deliverer, and the delay is designed to make him seem more than ordinary. Yet his first acts are courtesy and remembrance rather than violence. The Agandecca story binds the two royal houses in love and grief and prepares the ending in reconciliation. Fingal's advice to Oscar, to strike the strong and spare the weak, expresses the ideal of generous, almost chivalric heroism that Blair praised as superior to the ferocity of Homer's Akhilleus (Blair 1763).
Ossian's first extended intrusion into his own narrative, at the end of the book, changes how we hear everything before it. The battle is not happening now; it is remembered by an old man who has outlived it. That doubleness, epic action seen through elegy, is Macpherson's most original structural idea, and it underlies Romantic readings of Ossian as the poet of loss (Stafford 1988) (Moore 2003).
O Oscar! bend the strong in arm: but spare the feeble hand.
Fingal's ethic of mercy, compressed into a balanced antithesis: the Ossianic hero is defined by restraint as much as by strength.
But blind, and tearful, and forlorn I walk with little men!
Ossian turns from the past to his present. The 'little men' of his old age are the diminished posterity the poem mourns.
Book 4: Everallin and the Battle under Gaul
Summary
Ossian addresses the daughter of Toscar, his son Oscar's beloved, and tells how he won his own wife Everallin, killing Cormac, the leader of a rival party, in the fight that followed. In the night Everallin's ghost appears and sends him to rescue Oscar, who is fighting by Luba's stream. Fingal, meanwhile, dreams of Agandecca weeping for the men of her people who are about to die.
At dawn Fingal summons his host and gives command to Gaul, watching from the side of Cromla. Gaul fights fiercely, but Swaran breaks his shield and the men of Morven give way. Fingal rises, and his presence alone halts the rout. He raises his standard and each chief chooses an enemy leader to fight; Fingal chooses Swaran. In the battle Fingal unknowingly kills old Mathon, who had once wept for Agandecca. From his cave Cuthullin watches, is held back by Connal from joining in, and sends Fingal the sword of Caithbat, declaring that his own fame has gone.
Analysis
The book is shaped by the dead women Everallin and Agandecca, whose ghosts guide the living and whose grief reaches both sides of the war. Ossian's love story is told to a young woman who will herself be bereaved, so that courtship, war and mourning are folded into one act of song. The narrator repeatedly confesses himself unable to describe the slaughter; the poem is characteristically more at ease with the aftermath of battle than with battle itself.
Fingal's leadership is shown through stillness: he sits on the hill, and his armies move as he waves his sword. When he rises, the routed warriors stop in shame. The contrast with Cuthullin, brave but unable to win, is sharpened in the final scene, where Cuthullin gives up his ancestral sword. Critics have read Fingal as a figure of ideal, almost Enlightenment, kingship placed in a primitive setting (Moore 2003) (Trevor-Roper 2008).
Rise, Ossian, rise, and save my son; save Oscar, prince of men.
Everallin's ghost intervenes in the battle; in Ossian the dead watch over the living as protective spirits.
I am a beam that has shone; a mist that has fled away
Cuthullin pictures his lost fame as light and mist, the poem's favourite images of transience.
Book 5: Fingal and Swaran; the Deaths of Orla and Ryno
Summary
Connal and Cuthullin watch from Cromla as Fingal and Swaran meet. Their weapons break and they wrestle until the hill shakes; Swaran is thrown and bound. Fingal sets Gaul and Ossian to guard him and to treat him gently as the brother of Agandecca. Pursuing the routed enemy, Fingal meets Orla, a young warrior of Lochlin who will not yield. Fingal cleaves his shield and offers him his life, but Orla is already mortally wounded and dies, asking that his sword be sent to his wife.
Fingal then learns that his youngest son Ryno has fallen. Ullin sings of the lovers Lamderg and Gelchossa, buried nearby, and Fingal lays Ryno and Orla in the same ground. Ossian breaks off to mourn Fingal himself, long dead. As Gaul and Ossian sit with the captive Swaran, Cuthullin retires sadly to the cave of Tura. Carril arrives, reminds Ossian of Everallin, and Ossian asks him for a song.
Analysis
The decisive combat of the epic takes a single paragraph; the long sequel of mourning fills the rest of the book. Orla's death is the poem's most generous treatment of an enemy: Fingal is willing to send him home to his blind father, and the young man's last wish is for remembrance. By burying Orla beside Ryno, Fingal makes the dead of both armies equal in the songs of bards.
Ryno's death is the price of victory, and Fingal's grief anticipates Ossian's grief for Fingal. The book completes a chain of mourners (Fingal for Ryno, Ossian for Fingal, the reader for Ossian) by which the poem turns heroic narrative into elegy. Blair singled out such passages for their tenderness (Blair 1763) (Macpherson 1996).
One day the warriors must die, and the children see their useless arms in the hall.
Fingal's reply to Orla generalises his death: weapons outlive warriors, and fame is uncertain.
When I think I hear thy voice, it is but the passing blast.
Ossian at Fingal's tomb: the dead survive only as wind, the poem's sound of absence.
Book 6: The Peace of Fingal
Summary
Night falls; Carril sings, and the ghosts of those he names bend towards their praise. At the feast Fingal asks Ullin for a song of peace to cheer Swaran. Ullin sings of Trenmor, Fingal's ancestor, who won the hand of Inibaca, sister of a king of Lochlin, so that the two royal houses are related by blood. Fingal frees Swaran and offers him either peace or the single combat that Lochlin once gave Trenmor. Swaran chooses friendship and offers ships; Fingal refuses any reward and reflects that even their fame will pass away like a dream.
Carril reports that Cuthullin is grieving at Tura and has sent his sword; Fingal refuses it, saying that the brave are renowned even in defeat, and tells the story of Grumal as an example. At dawn Swaran sails home. Fingal's hunt renews his sorrow when a deer falls at Ryno's tomb. He finds Cuthullin at Tura, silences the sneering Connan, and promises him future victories. They feast, Cuthullin's spirit returns, and the heroes of Morven set sail for home.
Analysis
The poem ends not in conquest but in magnanimity: the captured enemy is set free, gifts are refused and the defeated ally is consoled. This is the clearest statement of the moral ideal that Blair and many later readers found in Ossian, and it differs sharply from the vengeance of many heroic narratives (Blair 1763). It has also been read politically, as the vision of a just and disinterested Highland king offered to a Britain that had recently crushed the Highlands (Trevor-Roper 2008) (Stafford 1988).
Fingal's speech to Swaran on oblivion is the philosophical centre of the book: tombs will be lost in the heath, and only song may remain. The poem's whole fiction, a last bard preserving a vanished world, depends on that claim. The final image of the ships departing in joy is shadowed by Ossian's interjection that he fights no more and sits forlorn at the tombs of his friends.
We shall pass away like a dream.
Fingal answers Swaran's hope of everlasting fame with a sober acknowledgement of oblivion. Only song, he adds, may preserve their names.
In peace thou art the gale of spring. In war the mountain-storm.
Swaran's tribute to Fingal sums up the ideal hero in two contrasting images from nature.
Characters
Morven (Fingal's people)
- Fingal
- King of Morven, son of Comhal, the title hero. Modelled on Fionn mac Cumhaill of Gaelic tradition, whom Macpherson made a Scottish king. He arrives in Book 3 to save Ireland and defeats Swaran, but he is defined less by force than by generosity: he spares the weak, invites enemies to feast, frees Swaran and consoles Cuthullin. He grieves deeply for Agandecca and for his son Ryno.
- Ossian
- Son of Fingal, warrior and bard, and the narrator. Modelled on Oisín of Gaelic tradition. He sings in old age, blind and alone, having outlived his father, his son Oscar and his wife Everallin. His laments interrupt the narrative and give the epic its elegiac tone.
- Oscar
- Son of Ossian and Everallin, the most promising young hero of Morven. Fingal instructs him in the heroic code in Book 3. He loves the daughter of Toscar, to whom Ossian addresses part of the poem; his early death, told in other Ossianic poems, overshadows the narrative.
- Gaul
- Son of Morni, a fierce and proud warrior who asks to lead the battle so that his own fame may grow. Swaran drives him back in Book 4, and he later helps guard the captive king.
- Ryno and Fillan
- Fingal's younger sons. Fair Ryno, swift and bright as lightning, is killed in the last battle, and his death in Book 5 is the heaviest cost of Fingal's victory. Dark Fillan survives as one of the king's companions.
Ireland
- Cuthullin
- Son of Semo, chief of the Isle of Mist (Skye) and regent of Ireland for the boy-king Cormac. Modelled on the Irish hero Cú Chulainn, who belongs to a different and older cycle of legend. Brave, impetuous and proud, he refuses to wait for Fingal or to heed Crugal's ghost, loses the war and retreats in shame to a cave, from which Fingal restores him. He is the poem's tragic figure.
- Connal
- Son of Colgar, Cuthullin's counsellor, a warrior who prefers peace and repeatedly advises patience until Fingal comes. He sees Crugal's ghost and later restrains Cuthullin from shaming himself further.
- Calmar
- Son of Matha, an eager young warrior who argues for war in the first council and later, mortally wounded, stays behind to cover the Irish retreat.
- Bragéla
- Cuthullin's wife, daughter of Sorglan, who waits on her rock on Skye watching for his sails. She never appears in the action but is the constant object of his thoughts.
Lochlin
- Swaran
- Son of Starno and king of Lochlin (Scandinavia), the proud invader of Ireland. A formidable warrior who scorns flight and peace, he is also the brother of Agandecca and once mourned her. Defeated and bound by Fingal, he is released and departs as his friend.
- Agandecca
- Daughter of Starno and sister of Swaran, Fingal's first love. She warned Fingal of her father's plot and was killed by him. Her memory, and later her ghost, bind Fingal to Lochlin and make him merciful to Swaran.
- Starno
- Swaran's father, a treacherous king who tried to murder the young Fingal and killed his own daughter for betraying the plot. He appears only in Carril's song.
- Orla
- A young warrior of Lochlin who will not yield to Fingal and dies of his wounds after Fingal spares him. Buried beside Ryno, he stands for the dignity of the enemy.
Bards and ghosts
- Carril
- Cuthullin's aged bard, 'Carril of other times', son of Kinfena, who sings most of the inset tales and carries messages between the leaders. In Book 6 Ossian addresses him as a spirit who still touches the harp in his hall.
- Ullin
- Fingal's chief bard, who sings of Trenmor and of the lovers in Lamderg's tomb, and spurs Gaul on with battle-song.
- Crugal
- An Irish chief killed in the first battle, whose ghost appears to Connal in Book 2 to foretell the defeat of Erin.
- Everallin
- Ossian's dead wife, daughter of Branno, whose ghost in Book 4 sends Ossian to save their son Oscar.
- The daughter of Toscar
- Oscar's beloved (named Malvina in other Ossianic poems), the listener to whom the old Ossian addresses his song in Book 4.
Themes
Fame, memory and oblivion
Heroes in Fingal live for fame, and fame depends on bards and tombs: grey stones on the heath and songs that carry the dead to future times. Again and again a warrior asks to be remembered, and Fingal promises tombs to friend and enemy alike.
Yet the poem doubts that memory can last. Fingal tells Swaran that their tombs will be lost and that they will pass like a dream, and Ossian tells us that the harp is silent in Morven. The poem presents itself as the last fragile record of a vanished world, and its 'translation' as a rescue from oblivion (Stafford 1988).
The joy of grief
Cuthullin's phrase in Book 1 sums up the emotional mode of the poem: grief remembered and savoured in song. The inset episodes are almost all tales of lovers or friends who die young, and the warriors listen to them for comfort.
This aesthetic of pleasurable melancholy belonged to the culture of sensibility of the 1760s and explains much of Ossian's popularity, from Blair's praise of its tenderness to the tears of Goethe's Werther (Blair 1763) (Moore 2003).
Magnanimity and heroic restraint
Fingal's ideal is to be a storm to the proud and a gentle breeze to the weak. He invites enemies to feasts, offers to spare Orla, frees Swaran and refuses all reward. Unlike Homer's heroes, he does not strip or mutilate the dead.
Sceptics saw in this an eighteenth-century moral refinement projected on to an early society, one of their grounds for doubting the poem's antiquity; admirers who wished the primitive to be noble found it the poem's greatest beauty (Blair 1763) (Curley 2009).
Defeat and the recovery of honour
Cuthullin's story runs from confidence through defeat to shame, and finally to restoration. His refusal to wait for help brings disaster, but Fingal insists that the brave are renowned even when vanquished.
A brave people defeated but not dishonoured: the theme has been read against the Highlands after Culloden, when Macpherson was writing (Trevor-Roper 2008) (Stafford 1988).
Age, blindness and survival
Ossian is the last of his race. His interjections remind us that every hero in the poem is dead, and that the singer is blind, old and alone. The epic is always also an elegy.
The figure of the last bard became one of the most potent images of Romantic literature, and of the 'bardic nationalism' of Britain and Ireland in the following decades (Trumpener 1997).
Motifs
Mist and cloud
Mist is everywhere in Fingal: armies are like mist on the hills, ghosts are made of cloud, and fame flies like mist. It gives the poem its blurred, half-seen landscape, and it stands for transience and for the thin boundary between the living and the dead.
Ghosts on the wind
The dead ride on clouds and speak in the wind: Crugal, Everallin and Agandecca all appear. They are frail and sorrowful rather than frightening, and they come to warn, guide or grieve. Ossian himself hears his dead friends in the passing blast.
Songs of other times
Bards repeatedly halt the action to sing tales of the past, which the listeners take as comfort or example. This structure of songs within songs mirrors Ossian's own role as the bard of a vanished age.
The feast of shells
Feasting, with drink passed in shells and songs to the harp, is the ritual of hospitality and peace. Offers and refusals of feasts mark key moments in the plot, from Swaran's arrogant refusal in Book 1 to the feast of reconciliation in Book 6.
Similes from nature
Nearly every action is likened to storm, sea, stream, rock, moon or mist. Blair praised these as the natural imagery of an early poet; later readers noticed how limited and repetitive the stock is, which gives the poem its hypnotic uniformity.
Symbols
The grey stone and the narrow house
The tomb marked by a single grey stone, and the 'dark and narrow house' of the grave, are the poem's chief symbols of death and of fragile memory. The stones speak of the dead to later hunters, but they too may be lost in the heath.
The harp
The harp is the instrument of the bards and of memory. In Ossian's old age it hangs on the wall, touched only by the spirit of Carril; the silent harp of Morven stands for the end of a culture.
The sword of Caithbat
Cuthullin's ancestral sword, which he sends to Fingal as a sign that he is no longer worthy of it. Fingal's refusal to take it is a refusal to accept Cuthullin's dishonour.
Sails on the sea
White sails bring both threat and rescue: Swaran's fleet, Fingal's long-awaited ships, Bragéla's watch for her husband's return. The departing sails at the end mark the restoration of peace.
Critical debates
Forgery, translation or creative reworking?
The oldest question about Fingal is whether it is a fraud. Macpherson claimed to have translated an ancient epic; his opponents said he had made it up. Modern scholarship rejects both extremes. Derick Thomson showed that Macpherson drew on identifiable Gaelic ballads of Fionn and his warriors, including ballads of invasions of Ireland from Lochlann, but that he combined, rearranged and very largely rewrote them (Thomson 1952).
Fiona Stafford's study placed the work in Macpherson's own life and culture, as an imaginative response to a damaged tradition (Stafford 1988). Howard Gaskill, editor of the standard modern edition, has argued that the label of forgery has prevented proper reading of the poems as literature, and that eighteenth-century ideas of translation allowed great freedom (Gaskill 1991) (Macpherson 1996).
Johnson versus Macpherson
Samuel Johnson was the most famous sceptic. In A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) he argued that Gaelic had no ancient written literature, that oral tradition could not preserve a long epic intact, and that Macpherson's failure to show his manuscripts settled the matter. Macpherson seems to have threatened him, and Johnson answered with a famously contemptuous letter refusing to be intimidated (Johnson 1775) (Saunders 1894).
Thomas Curley argues that Johnson was substantially right about the fraud, while setting his stance against wider British attitudes to the Celtic peoples and the Celtic revival (Curley 2009). Others note that Johnson underestimated both Gaelic oral tradition and the manuscripts that did exist (Meek 1991).
The Gaelic sources and the Highland Society
The Highland Society's Report (1805), produced by a committee chaired by Henry Mackenzie, gathered testimony from ministers and reciters. It concluded that a body of traditional Ossianic poetry existed, often with the same heroes and incidents, but that no original corresponding to Fingal or Temora as a whole had been found, and that Macpherson had probably filled gaps, joined pieces and added refinements of his own (Mackenzie 1805).
The real sources include the Book of the Dean of Lismore, a manuscript compiled in Perthshire in the early sixteenth century containing many Fenian ballads, and a living oral tradition of ballads about Fionn mac Cumhaill and his son Oisín (Ross 1939) (Meek 1991). Comparison shows how Macpherson changed their tone: the ballads are often vigorous, humorous and set in a Christian frame, with Oisín arguing with Saint Patrick, while Macpherson's Ossian is solemn and sentimental (Thomson 1952).
The Irish objection
Irish scholars objected that Fionn, Oisín and Cú Chulainn were heroes of Irish tradition, and that Macpherson had appropriated them for Scotland by making Fingal a Scottish king who rescues Ireland. They also pointed out that he had fused two separate cycles: the Ulster cycle of Cú Chulainn and the later Fenian cycle of Fionn.
Charlotte Brooke's Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789) answered with verse translations of genuine Irish poems, printing the Gaelic texts alongside, a pointed contrast with Macpherson's unseen originals (Brooke 1789). Katie Trumpener places this quarrel within a wider rivalry of 'bardic nationalisms' in Britain and Ireland (Trumpener 1997) (Curley 2009).
Ossian and Scottish identity after Culloden
Fingal appeared fifteen years after Culloden, when the Highlands were being disarmed and transformed. It offered Scots a heroic past as ancient as Homer's and a civilised, magnanimous Highland king, at the moment when Highland society itself was being dismantled.
Hugh Trevor-Roper, in a book published after his death, treated Ossian as one of a series of Scottish 'inventions' of the past, a cultural nationalism founded on fabrication (Trevor-Roper 2008). Stafford and Moore read the work more sympathetically, as an attempt to preserve a threatened culture by translating it into the terms of the Enlightenment (Stafford 1988) (Moore 2003).
Primitivism, Blair and the comparison with Homer
Blair's Critical Dissertation set Ossian beside Homer: both were poets of early societies, but Ossian was more tender, more sublime and morally purer, his heroes free of the cruelty Blair saw in the Iliad. The comparison fitted Enlightenment theories of the stages of society and the belief that the earliest ages were the most poetic (Blair 1763).
Modern critics see the Dissertation as part of the making of Ossian rather than a neutral judgement: Blair's theory shaped what Macpherson produced, and the poem then confirmed the theory. Dafydd Moore reads the poems as a meeting of Enlightenment history and romance rather than a simple primitivist fantasy (Moore 2003) (Stafford 1988).
Ossian, Romanticism and nationalism in Europe
Ossian was translated into most European languages. Cesarotti's Italian version shaped Italian poetic diction; Herder used Ossian to argue for the worth of the poetry of peoples; Goethe made it Werther's reading; Napoleon admired it, and painters such as Girodet and Ingres painted Ossianic subjects for him (Gaskill 2004).
The poems helped to inspire the search for national epics and folk songs across Europe, from Germany to Scandinavia, Hungary and Russia. The essays collected by Gaskill show how differently each culture used them (Gaskill 2004) (Stafford 1998) (Moore 2004).
Key passages
Send thou the night away in song; and give the joy of grief.
Cuthullin asks Carril for songs of the dead. 'The joy of grief' names the poem's distinctive pleasure, sorrow recollected and enjoyed in art, and became a catchword of Ossianic sensibility.
Who is it but Ocean's son and the car-borne chief of Erin?
Ossian identifies Swaran and Cuthullin locked in combat. 'Ocean's son' and 'car-borne' are typical of the fixed, Homeric-sounding titles the poem gives its heroes.
I am light as the blast of Cromla. I move like the shadow of mist!
Crugal describes his ghostly being in images of wind and mist. Ossianic ghosts are insubstantial, mournful presences rather than terrors.
Never search thou for battle; nor shun it when it comes.
Fingal sums up his advice to Oscar. The balanced maxim expresses the restraint that distinguishes Fingal from more violent epic heroes.
But blind, and tearful, and forlorn I walk with little men!
The old bard turns from memory to the present. The contrast between heroic past and diminished present is the poem's emotional structure.
I am a beam that has shone; a mist that has fled away
Cuthullin mourns his lost fame. Light and mist, the poem's images for the transience of glory, describe his defeat.
Soon shall my voice be heard no more, and my footsteps cease to be seen.
Mourning Ryno, Fingal foresees his own death; the line prepares Ossian's lament for Fingal later in the book.
We shall pass away like a dream.
Fingal answers Swaran's hope of eternal fame with a reminder of oblivion. It is the philosophical centre of the poem's ending.
The vanquished, if brave, are renowned.
Fingal refuses Cuthullin's sword and insists that defeat does not dishonour the brave. The line restores Cuthullin and gives the poem its consoling close.
The harp is not strung on Morven. The voice of music ascends not on Cona.
Ossian laments the silence of his own culture: the bards are dead. The poem presents itself as the last voice of a lost world.
Questions for study
Why does Fingal not appear until Book 3, and how does the delay affect our view of him?
Compare the expectation built up in Books 1 and 2 with his first actions, which are courtesy and remembrance.
What does Cuthullin mean by 'the joy of grief', and how does the poem cultivate it?
Look at the inset tales of dead lovers and at how the listeners respond to them.
How does the presence of an old, blind narrator change the epic?
Consider Ossian's interjections at the ends of Books 3, 5 and 6.
Compare Fingal and Cuthullin as models of heroism.
Think about patience and impetuosity, leadership and personal courage, and Fingal's judgement of the defeated.
What role do ghosts play in Fingal?
Crugal, Everallin and Agandecca: what they want, and how the living respond.
How are enemies treated in the poem, and why?
Agandecca, Mathon, Orla and Swaran; contrast the treatment of the dead in the Iliad.
Is the poem's style closer to Homer, to the Bible or to Gaelic ballad?
Look at parallelism, epithets and similes; Blair's comparison with Homer is a starting point.
How did Samuel Johnson argue against the authenticity of the poem, and how strong was his case?
Consider his claims about oral tradition and manuscripts, and what the Highland Society and Thomson later found.
Why might Fingal have mattered so much to Scottish readers in the 1760s?
Think about Culloden, the Union and the wish for an ancient national epic.
Why did a disputed Scottish 'translation' become a European classic?
Think about sensibility, the sublime, primitivism and the search for national poetry: Goethe, Herder, Cesarotti, Napoleon.
Further reading
- Blair, Hugh. A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal. London: T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt, 1763.
- Brooke, Charlotte. Reliques of Irish Poetry. Dublin: George Bonham, 1789.
- Curley, Thomas M. Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud, and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
- deGategno, Paul J. James Macpherson. Boston: Twayne, 1989.
- Gaskill, Howard, ed. Ossian Revisited. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991.
- Gaskill, Howard, ed. The Reception of Ossian in Europe. London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004.
- Johnson, Samuel. A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1775.
- Mackenzie, Henry, ed. Report of the Committee of the Highland Society of Scotland, Appointed to Inquire into the Nature and Authenticity of the Poems of Ossian. Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1805.
- Macpherson, James. Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem, in Six Books: Together with Several Other Poems, Composed by Ossian the Son of Fingal. London: T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt, 1762.
- Macpherson, James. Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and Translated from the Galic or Erse Language. Edinburgh: G. Hamilton and J. Balfour, 1760.
- Macpherson, James. The Poems of Ossian and Related Works. Edited by Howard Gaskill, with an introduction by Fiona Stafford. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996.
- Meek, Donald E. 'The Gaelic Ballads of Scotland: Creativity and Adaptation.' In Ossian Revisited, edited by Howard Gaskill. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991.
- Moore, Dafydd, ed. Ossian and Ossianism. 4 vols. London: Routledge, 2004.
- Moore, Dafydd. Enlightenment and Romance in James Macpherson's The Poems of Ossian: Myth, Genre and Cultural Change. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003.
- Ross, Neil, ed. Heroic Poetry from the Book of the Dean of Lismore. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd for the Scottish Gaelic Texts Society, 1939.
- Saunders, Thomas Bailey. The Life and Letters of James Macpherson. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1894.
- Stafford, Fiona J. The Sublime Savage: A Study of James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988.
- Stafford, Fiona, and Howard Gaskill, eds. From Gaelic to Romantic: Ossianic Translations. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998.
- Thomson, Derick S. The Gaelic Sources of Macpherson's 'Ossian'. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd for the University of Aberdeen, 1952.
- Trevor-Roper, Hugh. The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History. Edited by Jeremy J. Cater. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.
- Trumpener, Katie. Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Written by the Poetry Codex editors. Updated 2026-10-19.