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Ossian: Fact or Fiction |
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However…there was one problem with the runaway success of Ossian et al. Was it all real? Critics quickly began to question the authenticity of MacPherson’s claims about the ancient documents. They pointed to inconsistencies in the text, questioned translations, suggested he had a team of writers helping him and even went as far as to claim MacPherson had invented the entire thing.
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While Goethe was namechecking the stories in his works, they were being challenged and debunked in works such as Samuel Johnson’s ‘A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland.’ It was even suggested that the opportunity to expose MacPherson as a fraud was high on Johnson’s motivations for travelling to the Highlands. He was not a fan:
“The poem of Fingal, he said, was a mere unconnected rhapsody, a tiresome repetition of the same images. "In vain shall we look for the lucidus ordo, where there is neither end or object, design or moral."”
James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934-64), II, 126.
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