Ossian, the ‘Homer of the North’, the greatest literary hoax (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Ossian, the ‘Homer of the North’, the greatest literary hoax (2016)

independent.co.uk

53 pointsdrjohnson27 comments

Read it in grad school (for an English PhD). And honestly, that's the only context in which I'd recommend doing so. It's a dreary slog of a book; we were reading it more for its historical importance than for any particular literary quality.

But I don't recall anyone at the time (mid 90s) doubting that the book was a forgery -- a somewhat inept mish-mash of Celtic literary figures and motifs. The interesting part was that people went absolutely wild for it. To the point that one can now speak of "Ossianism" as a significant literary movement.

Nabokov spoke with respect of it in the introduction to his translation of the epic of Prince Igor. (Or so I recall--it has been a while since I read it.) He knew perfectly well that it was a forgery, but the translations into Continental languages may have been better than the English. Clearly they answered a felt need.

Well it's a real work of fiction. No matter who the actual author is, the work exists as (not so great, you say) literature, it's not a fake roswell alien. Why wouldn't it have fans or imitators?

From wikipedia:

> Johnson also dismissed the poems' quality. Upon being asked, "But Doctor Johnson, do you really believe that any man today could write such poetry?" he famously replied, "Yes. Many men. Many women. And many children."

Well Jonson was disparaging towards 'Paradsise Lost' as well.

Johnson was quite the man for the pithy quote.

When Ridley Scott's Napoleon came out, I picked up Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts. Turns out Napoleon kept a copy of Ossian on him at all times during his war campaigns. Going deeper into the rabbit hole, I bought a copy of Ossian.

My pet theory is that he cribbed a lot of inspiration from Ossian for his famous harangues to his army before pivotal moments in battle.

"Farewell, thou bravest of men! Thou conqueror in the field! But the field shall see thee no more; nor the dark wood be lightened with the splendor of thy steel. Thou hast left no son. But the song shall preserve thy name. Future times shall hear of thee; they shall hear of the fallen Morar."

As Will Ferrell said, it gets the people going.

Usually the "I found and translated this old work" gimmick is presented within the text, not outside it.

That aside, digital humanities work can be interesting, but I found a preprint of the actual paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.00142.pdf) and their conclusion seems to be "Ossian is closer to these Irish works than it is to Homer".

I'm not going to bother digging into their methods to see if they're plausible, but it's not clear to me why you'd expect anything else, or be able to conclude much of anything from that. If Ossian were real, then you'd expect later sources like "Acallam na Senórach" to either have been inspired by it or similar sources; if Ossian were not real then you'd expect it to have been inspired by "Acallam na Senórach" or similar sources.

That is, they've found correlation, but from all hitherto existing analyses we already know there's substantial correlation, and what we care about is causality.

> Usually the "I found and translated this old work" gimmick is presented within the text, not outside it.

This was such a common trope in 18th century fiction that I'm surprised anyone took it at face value.

I think in mediaeval and earlier times, there was a tendency for authours to pass of their own original works as newly found previously unknown works from antiquity so that it would be taken much more seriously.

It is similar to what folklorists like the Grimm brothers did, or the publisher of the Arabian Nights, Antoine Galland, so not necessarily suspect.

I’m fascinated by the Ossian affair. But I don’t get the premise of this article. The “social network” of characters in Ossian is closer to characters in Irish legends than to Homer? You would expect that even if it had been authentic ancient legends. I’m sure if you compare Volsung Saga to Nibelungenlied you will also get closer matching networks, since they are based on the same ancient body of legends.

Huh. Yeah, I thought there would be more substance. But this seems completely meaningless. Or perhaps even like it supports the ancient origin story.

They didn't compare Ossian to Homer. Read it again. They compared Ossian to Irish legends and then compared The Odyssey to The Illiad. Ossian was suspiciously close to the Irish where Odyssey and Iliad were quite different.

While this would make some sense, you appear to be wrong:

We compare the connectivity structures underlying the societies described in the Ossianic narratives with those of ancient Greek and Irish sources. Despite attempts, from the outset, to position Ossian alongside the Homeric epics and to distance it from Irish sources, our results indicate significant network-structural differences between Macpherson’s text and those of Homer.

https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S02195259165...

On a slightly different topic, I was reading about other greek epics beyond Homer, and I knew there were things like the Theban Cycle and a broader Trojan War cycle, and it turns out that some of them may have never existed, they almost certainly weren't any kind of "cycle", the ones that did exist weren't very good, and that they may never have been written down at all outside of summaries.

https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2020/02/epic-cycle.html

> that they may never have been written down at all outside of summaries.

That is normal for preclassical literature. Even the works of Homer weren't standardized until several centuries after they were created.

> some of them may have never existed

Actually, this is not uncommon for anything ancient, too. I believe most scholars doubt the existence of, for example, Homer himself.

Isn't there an old joke that says the works of Homer were actually written by another man of the same name? The joke being that Homer is somewhat apocryphal already.

What was the original source that Macpherson was supposed to be translating from? An ancient book? Oral tradition? Something else?

He claimed he had collected and recorded orally transmitted verse, just like other folklorists did at the time. It is still unclear whether he made it all up or whether some of the material was indeed based on now lost oral sources.

An interesting comparison is Finnish folklorist Einar Lönnrot who collected the “national epic” Kalevala. We know Lönnrot largely used authentic oral sources, but he combined fragmented songs into a long narrative with his own edits and additions to make it more epic.

Elías

I guess it's a hoax? And not just a pen name, writing under the guise of a fictional person?

Not the first or best time that's been done. A long and proud history, up to and including 'The 13th Warrior' and 'The DaVinci Code'.

>Now scientists have used mathematical techniques to compare patterns in the “social networks” of characters in Ossian with those in two key Irish stories – and discovered they are almost a perfect match, virtually ending any remaining debate.

Seems like a flimsy argument, irrespective of the other evidence.

Not really. If I write a series of stories about Herlock Solmes and his friend Dr. Wohn Jatson and everything maps up one-to-one with the Sherlock stories, it's pretty clear I copied them even if I changed the names. Or to give a real example, consider the famous silent movie "Nosferatu". While it was theoretically about a vampire named Count Orlock being visited at his castle by a lawyer named Thomas Hutter and how Orlock ends up moving to Hutter's city and attacking his family, it is pretty obviously the story of Count Dracula and Jonathan Harker, and the widow of Dracula's author sued the makers over it.

Yes, but you don't need a social network graph for the cases you describe. As you say, they're obviously the same story with some names changed.

This article seems to claim that two stories had the same social graphs, but weren't obviously the same story. I find that a bit hard to believe.

Even if they were, how would they know the Irish stories weren't derivative?

D'oh!

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