Macpherson in from the cold

IMAGINE if the world had been brought up to believe that the tales of Harry Potter were factual truth. Would it make the Harry Potter books any less readable if it was subsequently discovered that JK Rowling had written them herself? Would it really diminish her reputation to discover she was the creative genius behind the tales?

Something like this did happen: in 1762, the Scottish poet James Macpherson published the text of an ancient epic poem, written in Gaelic, supposedly by the blind bard Ossian, the son of Fingal, a third-century Scottish king. It was a runaway bestseller, praised by the German poet Goethe. But later the work was exposed as a fake, written by Macpherson himself.

Sadly, and unjustifiably, this discovery led to the eclipse of Macpherson’s literary reputation. But now, thanks to Edinburgh University’s monumental new history of Scottish literature, both Macpherson and Ossian are being rehabilitated. Far from being a complete fake, it now seems that Macpherson’s stories of warriors, giants and doomed love were based on real Gaelic folk tales handed down orally through the generations. We look forward to the movie, which should put Lord of the Rings into the shade.