Gaelic Ossian—Internal Evidence, Etc

The list will shew that the Irish claim to all genuine old Gaelic poetry is unfounded; but I have little doubt that versions of anything which has ever been extensively known amongst the Scotch Gael has been equally well known to their Irish brethren. The best course is to make peace; share this common Celtic property; make the best possible use of it; and preserve what is left.

But this long race was for ‘Ossian’s poems,” and the prize is not yet awarded. There is no direct evidence as to who compounded the famous work; and unless the poems will tell us, I know not where to seek for a reply to the questions which remain. Who wrote the Gaelic of 1807? and which was the first written, that Gaelic or the English?

The first question I cannot answer; but it seems highly improbable that MacPherson wrote it himself. Ewan MacLachlan, one of the best of modern scholars, wrote to MacCallum (see page 224 of the Gaelic book)—

“If the works of Ossian are a forgery, we have sufficient grounds to believe that the imposition cannot be charged on modern times.” “Antiquity has ascribed the contents of your work to Ossian.”

But MacCallum’s work consists of traditional ballads, not of the large poems, so the sentence of Ewan MacLachlan, which at first seems all for the Gaelic of 1807, is really for the Gaelic of 1813. As he truly says, most of that Gaelic rests upon manuscripts and traditions.

I am not aware that any Scotch Highlander of this day has given his opinion of the published Ossian. So it may be of some interest to read what men, who have studied it, really think of it; and, first, I will give the opinion which ¥ I had formed for myself from reading the controversy, and from a knowledge of vernacular Gaelic, which passes unquestioned everywhere, and was acquired in childhood, but which does not include any critical knowledge of the niceties of the written language.

When the Gaelic Fingal, published in 1807, is compared with any one of the translations which purport to have been made from it, it seems to me incomparably superior. It is far simpler in diction. It has a peculiar rhythm and assonance which seem to repel the notion of a mere translation from English as something almost absurd. It is impossible that it can be a translation from MacPherson’s English, unless there was some clever Gaelic poet then alive, able and willing to write what Eton school-boys call “ull sense verses.”

It is scarcely credible that such a man would conceal his name, unless he were both poet and translator; and all who have written on the subject deny that MacPherson had any great knowledge of Gaelic or power of versification.

Great part of Fingal might, with propriety, be divided into stanzas of four lines, having much of the peculiar assonance of poems of undoubted authenticity, which are still recited; the whole clinks and hangs together in such a way that no one but a poet could have so jointed words to express ideas.

The words also are often chosen for their appropriate sound, as well as for their meaning and rhythm—

“Answered the brave like wave on a crag,” has two long deep vowel sounds, something like 10AN, tone, combined with other broad vowels; suggestive of the deep thunder of dashing waves, and of a grand deep voice, as the famous line in Milton is of the harsh grating of the Gates of Hell (Paradise Lost, book ii.)—

“_____And on a sudden, open fly,

With impetuous recoil and jarring sound,

The infernal doors, and on their hinges grate

Harsh thunder.”

Nothing is more probable than that a poet should choose the Gaelic words if his ears were familiar with the loud deep roar of the Atlantic on a still evening; nothing more improbable than that they should happen to be chosen by one who was not a poet, who was translating prose ideas from another language. It is probable that the Gaelic in this case was first composed, though it cannot be proved.

Again, a mere translator would surely have taken the model before him, or some other; he would have written prose like MacPherson’s, or he would have copied some known metre. The Gaelic is wholly unlike the English, and is not prose, and to the best of my knowledge the irregular metre has no exact counterpart, while the nearest resemblance to it is in the genuine Gaelic traditional ballads, which treat of the same people, and often describe the same incidents—

Is the metre and meaning without the assonance of four lines in “Fingal” of 1807, and the passage savours of originality, or a genuine model.

MacPherson’s fragments, published 1760, which are the least suspected of all his works, contain the following as a translation (page 60)—“I saw their chief, says Morven, tall as a rock of ice. His spear is like that fir; his shield is like the rising moon.”

There is nothing about ice in the Gaelic of 1807.

In the same page is the English equivalent for the Gaelic line, quoted above—

Now either the word “sonn,” the hero which gives the assonance, was loosely translated by the pronoun “he,” or some one in translating the English prose, changed “he” into “the hero.”

Kennedy gives a traditional equivalent for the line, which means—

“The might of his shout was as billow’s crest,” and this was rendered by the reporters of the Highland Society “literally,” thus—

“He spoke with the force of a breaking wave.”

But if this English line were translated back into Gaelic, it would lose all its force. is English Gaelic, and prosaic prose, and so would be a similar translation of MacPherson’s English line.

And so we must assume that two able Gaelic poets had freely translated one English line in two different ways so as to please the ear; or that the line in the fragments was translated from a line in Gaelic older than 1760, and different from that of 1807.

Again, the metre in this book of Fingal often varies to suit the meaning, and that is another argument for the originality of the Gaelic.

When the warriors are running together, the rhythm is rapid, and names are strung together in the same fashion as they are in ballads and similar compositions.

It is slow when the meaning requires it, while every here and there a single line stands alone, and seems to end a passage.

Some passages, such as the famous description of Cuchullin in his Car, are not in the same metre as the rest, and resemble the measured prose of the tales. Similar passages are in old MSS.

Other passages seem to be made up. Take, for example, the address to the sun in Carricthura.

It is given in “Leabhar nan cnoc,” by Dr. MacLeod in 1834, by MacCallum in 1816, published in part by the Highland Society in their report, 1805; by Stewart, 1804, got by the Rev. Mr. MacDiarmaid from the dictation of an old man in Glen Lyon, about 30 years before 1801, say 1770. The old man had learned this and other poems in his youth from people in the same glen, so that this, at least, must be far older than MacPherson’s first publications, 1760. It was repeated to my grand aunts when they were girls, with other Ossianic pieces, by people who lived in cottages far up in the hills above Loch Tarbert, and these were translated for them by a clergyman, as they could not speak Gaelic to the people themselves. It is still repeated in Skye.

As got from the people by MacCallum, in 1816, the first ten lines are connected in meaning. The sun sets and sinks down to his resting place, the waves come slowly about him, and timidly raise their heads to gaze on the beautiful sleeping sun of the skies, with his golden hair, as waves might seem to do when the setting sun was watched by a poet from a west country hill. The words follow each other harmoniously, they have the clink or “assonance” of Gaelic poetry, they make two and a half stanzas, and each line is complete in sense, which accords with other Gaelic poetry. So far the poem might be sung, and so far it is like other traditional poetry still extant, and so far MacPherson’s translation agrees closely with the Gaelic.

The eleventh line is of a different length, and does not clink with the others, and stands alone. It joins the next two lines which belong to each other, and make up another stanza. This stanza (the fifth) is weak where it compares the sun to a sunbeam, but it would be a noble metaphor if it likened a warrior to a sunbeam rushing over a level sward, and I suspect that it was originally composed with that intention.

The last eight lines make two complete stanzas, but the last is in a different metre.

The main idea, again, is different from that of the first ten lines, for the last twelve are not applicable to the quiet summer evening, whose picture was so well drawn in the first ten.

These describe a winter day, not a summer evening.

On the whole, I should argue that the first ten lines were composed in Gaelic by some one who had great command of the language and poetical feeling, and who meant to describe a summer sunset; the last twelve by the same or by some other Gaelic poet, whose head was then full of the picture of a winter’s day; and that the eleventh line is cement, composed to join these two fragments, or picked up and thrust in between them, or the final line of a piece. It is the final line of the passage in Carricthura. I am convinced that these twenty-three lines never were composed by any one poet at one and the same time, but I am satisfied that the poet or poets who made the Gaelic verses composed poetry of no mean order, and MacCallum got them all together from a certain Mr. J. Mac-an-t-saoir in AriChasteal.

I do not assert that the poet’s name was Ossian. I deny on good grounds that it was James MacPherson. I maintain that a poet, and a Scotch Highlander, composed all those Gaelic lines separately, if not together; and judging from my own knowledge of the people, and their ways, it is possible that these may be fragments of sentimental poetry different from the popular ballads, more modern, but certainly older than 1730.

“Grian” is feminine, but the sun is here addressed as a male, The confusion is something like “Sa Majesté le Roi elle,” etc.

The following translation is almost literal, and gives the musical rhythm without the assonance.

The Song of Ullin, in Carricthura, arranged in lines,