SOURCE: "'Ossian' Macpherson and the Gaelic World of the Eighteenth Century," in The Aberdeen University Review, Vol. XL, No. 129, Spring, 1963, pp. 7-20.

In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture at the University of Aberdeen, Thomson relates both Macpherson's Ossianic poetry and the controversy over its authenticity to social and political circumstances in Scotland during the eighteenth century.

What we mark today by these bicentennial celebrations is not a single, isolated occasion, but a series of events which brought James Macpherson, a young man from the Eastern Highlands and an alumnus of both King's and Marischal Colleges, prominently on to the literary stage. 1962 is a sufficiently central date for such celebrations: although James Macpherson made his first timid appearance as a translator in 1760, and although the first edition of Fingal appeared in December 1761, his epic task was not completed until 1763, with the publication of Temora, and the...