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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.

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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...

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