FRAGMENTS OF OSSIAN
recast by
Murdo Macdonald

Everyone, like Samuel Johnson, has an opinion on Macpherson’s Ossian, but few of us ever manage to get a hand on an actual copy of the poetry. Fortunately, Murdo Macdonald does the bibliographic work for us, and details the doggedness of his desultory browsings and subsequent musings which led to the composition of his own versions. (is there ever anything but versions to work through here?) So, this is the big chance to find out what it was about the versions of this poetry that set Europe aflame with romantic passion and melancholy, and, as Napoleon himself put it, ‘Devour Ossian!’

Introduction

Sometimes reading a Japanese poet I seem to be reading Ossian. ‘The summer grasses /Are all that remain to us / Of warrior dreams’; Basho expresses here what Macpherson was to call ‘the joy of grief’,[i] a phrase that encapsulates the sense of cultural loss and struggle that underpins European romanticism. For Macpherson such loss was very real. The Gaelic-speaking Highland culture of which he was part had been under extreme pressure since he was nine years old.[ii] After the Battle of Culloden in 1746, ‘the atrocities began at once’.^[iii] In my essay Ruskin’s Triangle, I allowed the melancholy of Ryokan’s ‘Lying in my freezing hut, unable to sleep; / only the quiet roar / Of water pouring over a cliff’[iv] to flow into Macpherson’s ‘The torrent pours down the rock /No hut receives me from the rain / Forlorn on the hill of winds’.[v]

The recasting I offer here of Macpherson’s prose-poetical writing grew out of that. My approach is selective, that is to say I make every effort to pick out short passages that work independently, but little effort to reflect Macpherson’s words in any complete sense. I have updated spellings and adjusted punctuation and capitalisation. While the line breaks are my own, each verse (though not always each poem) is composed of words that are continuous in Macpherson’s text.[vi] My everyday reference has been a 1796 edition of the 1773 text, published in London by Mundell. Its three duodecimo volumes were bound into one small tough book by Islington Libraries sometime in the twentieth century. It came to me after being deaccessioned probably during the great library cull of the early twenty-first century. Published in the year of Macpherson’s death, it has the old typeface for the letter ‘s’. I have used that convenient copy to point me to earlier versions from 1760 onwards, guided, when necessary, by Howard Gaskill’s invaluable critical edition published in 1996.[vii]  

The remaking of Macpherson’s prose poems in verse by other authors has a history stretching back to Cesarotti’s Italian translation of Fingal published in 1764.[viii] Michael Denis’s German verses were published in 1768/9.[ix] Notable contributions in English came from Ewen Cameron in 1776,[x] and Edgerton Brydges in 1785.[xi] In 1788 came the Spanish of José Alonso Ortiz.[xii] This list is no more than indicative but another work that bears mention is Mary Potter’s remarkable Poetry of Nature published in 1789. It retains Macpherson’s prose poetry but makes of it something new both by selection and through its almost concrete poetical use of a pioneering cursive typeface designed by Caslon.[xiii] Byron’s version of Ossian’s Address to the Sun was made in 1805[xiv] and his distinctly Ossianic Lachin y Gair was written two years later.[xv]Macpherson’s full Gaelic versification was published with a Latin verse translation in 1807.[xvi] An English verse translation in parallel text with the Gaelic verses was made by the Reverend Archibald Clerk of Kilmallie and published in 1870.[xvii] A twenty-first century approach that prompted my own is that of Kirsten Norrie under her pen and performance name of MacGillivray. In The Last Wolf of Scotland, she interlaces lines of Ossian with her own words.[xviii] Another stimulus was William Blake. In an Oxfam shop in Edinburgh, I found a reference to Visions of the Daughters of Albion pencilled on the flyleaf of a neatly rebound pocket edition of Ossian, published by Oliver and Boyd in 1819.[xix] It had the bookplate of Pamela and Raymond Lister and it led me to consider more deeply the text of Macpherson’s Oithona.[xx]

In my reworking of the French of Massenet’s librettists[xxi] for the Ossian aria of his opera Werther (completed in 1887 and premiered in Vienna in 1892),[xxii] I have been conscious of the durability of Macpherson’s original words in Berrathon transmitted to the French librettists through the German translation of Goethe.[xxiii] Osip Mandelstam’s contribution written in 1914 was unexpected but welcome. In my adaptation of his Russian (a language of which I have no knowledge), the translations of Peter France and R. H. Morrison have guided me, but my intention is freedom not precision.[xxiv]

There have been other translations and transmutations of Macpherson’s work in the background of my thinking. I became aware of Runeberg’s King Fjalar thanks to colleagues in Helsinki. Suard, Turgot and Diderot’s versions were brought alive for me by colleagues in Marseille. Cesarotti, likewise, by colleagues in Padua. An inspiring rethinker of Macpherson and poetical form has been Gauti Kristmannsson in Reykjavik.

Closer to home, Macpherson is an enduring subtext in the poetry and songs of Robert Burns. It is hard to read Oithona without thinking of Burns’s Lament of Mary Queen of Scots[xxv] or his evocation of the dead of Culloden in The Lovely Lass of Inverness. Burns’s allusions to Macpherson in The Vision are well known, but the wider context that Macpherson created for his younger compatriot is less appreciated. Less appreciated still is the way Walter Scott begins Lady of the Lake as a resurrection of the bard whose life is ebbing away in Berrathon.[xxvi] The Aeolian quality of the harps in both Berrathon and Lady of the Lake is of interest, particularly with respect to James Thomson’s note to his poem Ode to Aeolus’s Harp, which mentions his fellow London Scot, the composer and instrument maker James Oswald, who started making Aeolian harps in the mid-eighteenth century. Oswald died in 1769, living long enough to set some of Macpherson’s words to music, including. ‘It is night I am alone, forlorn on the hill of storms’ from The Songs of Selma.[xxvii]

(Vignette from a 1797 edition by an unknown artist/engraver)

Contents

From: Fragments of Ancient Poetry

• Evening is grey on the hills
• Autumn is dark on the mountains
• It is night and I am alone
• Rise winds of autumn rise
• All night I stood on the shore
• Morna thou fairest of women

From: Fingal and other Poems

• Turn his dark ships
• Lonely dweller of the rock
• Joy rises in her face
• The night passed away in the song
• It came
• Thou that rollest above
• The wind was abroad in the oaks
• The form fell
• Hast thou left thy blue course in heaven
• Star of the falling night
• The moon shows
• The tear was on thy cheek
• The visions of night arose
• I pass away in my youth
• A troubled joy
• I have searched for the herbs of the mountains
• Why did I not pass away in secret
• The stream roars down the rock
• Night is calm and fair
• Bend thy blue course O stream
• The smoke of the hall was ceased
• The winds begin to rise
• My harp hangs on a blasted branch

From: Temora and other Poems

• I heard the voice of the bards
• We came to the hall of the king
• As when the wintry winds have seized the waves of the mountain lake

Coda: Massenet and Mandelstam

• Why do you wake me?
• I have not heard blind Ossian’s tales

From: Fragments of Ancient Poetry, 1760[xxviii]

Evening is grey on the hills

Evening is grey on the hills

The north wind resounds through the woods

White clouds rise on the sky

The trembling snow descends

The river howls afar

Along its winding course[xxix] 

Autumn is dark on the mountains

Autumn is dark on the mountains

Grey mist rests on the hills

The whirlwind is heard on the heath

Dark rolls the river through the narrow plain

A tree stands alone on the hill

And marks the grave of Connal

The leaves whirl round with the wind

And strew the grave of the dead[xxx]

It is night and I am alone

It is night and I am alone

Forlorn on the hill of storms

The wind is heard in the mountain

The torrent shrieks down the rock

No hut receives me from the rain

Forlorn on the hill of winds

Rise, moon from behind thy clouds

Stars of the night, appear

Lead me, some light to the place

Where my love rests from the toil of the chase

His bow near him unstrung

His dogs panting around him

But here I must sit alone

By the rock of the mossy stream

The stream and the wind roar

Nor can I hear the voice of my love[xxxi]

Rise winds of autumn rise

Rise winds of autumn rise

Blow upon the dark heath

Streams of the mountains roar

Howl ye tempests in the trees

Walk through broken clouds, O moon

Show by intervals thy pale face

Bring to my mind that sad night

When all my children fell[xxxii] 

All night I stood on the shore

All night I stood on the shore

All night I heard her cries

Loud was the wind and the rain beat

Hard on the side of the mountain

Before morning appeared

Her voice was weak

It died away

Like the evening breeze

Among the grass of the rocks

Spent with grief she expired

O lay me soon by her side[xxxiii]

Morna thou fairest of women

Morna thou fairest of women

Daughter of Cormac-Carbre

Why

In the circle of stones

In the cave of the rock

Alone?

The stream murmureth hoarsely

The blast groaneth in the aged tree

The lake is troubled before thee

Dark are the clouds of the sky

But thou art like snow on the heath

Thy hair like a thin cloud of gold

On the top of Cromleach

Thy breasts like two smooth rocks

On the hill which is seen

From the stream of Brannuin

Thy arms as two white pillars

In the hall of Fingal[xxxiv]

From: Fingal and other Poems 1761[xxxv]

Turn his dark ships

Turn his dark ships

From the rock

Thou rider of the storm![xxxvi]

White roll the waters on either side

The strength of ocean sounds

Come thou I said from the roar of ocean

Thou rider of the storm

O ye ghosts of heroes dead!

Ye riders of the storm of Cromla![xxxvii] 

Lonely dweller of the rock

Lonely dweller of the rock

Look over that heathy plain

Thou seest green tombs

With their rank whistling grass

With their stones of mossy heads

Thou seest them

Son of the rock

But Ossian’s eyes

Have failed[xxxviii]

Joy rises in her face

Joy rises in her face

But sorrow returns again

Like a thin cloud on the moon

Wilt thou not return my love?[xxxix] 

The night passed away in the song

The night passed away in the song

And morning returned in joy

The mountains showed their grey heads

And the blue face of ocean smiled

The white wave is seen tumbling round the distant rock

The grey mist rises slowly from the lake[xl]

It came

It came

In the figure

Of an aged man

Along the silent plain

Its large limbs did not move in steps

For a ghost supported it in mid air

It came towards Selma’s hall

And dissolved in a shower of blood[xli]

O thou that rollest above

O thou that rollest above

Round as the shield of my fathers

Whence are thy beams, O sun!

Thy everlasting light?

Thou comest forth in thy awful beauty

And the stars hide themselves in the sky

The moon, cold and pale

Sinks in the western wave

But thou thyself movest alone

Who can be a companion of thy course!

The oaks of the mountains fall

The mountains themselves decay with years

The ocean shrinks and grows again

The moon herself is lost in heaven

But thou art for ever the same

Rejoicing in the brightness of thy course

When the world is dark with tempests

When thunder rolls, and lightning flies

Thou lookest in thy beauty from the clouds

And laughest at the storm

But to Ossian thou lookest in vain

For he beholds thy beams no more

Whether thy yellow hair flows on the eastern clouds

Or thou tremblest at the gates of the west

But thou art perhaps, like me, for a season

And thy years will have an end

Thou shalt sleep in thy clouds

Careless of the voice of the morning

Exult then, O sun, in the strength of thy youth

Age is dark and unlovely, it is like the glimmering light of the moon

When it shines through broken clouds and the mist is on the hills

The blast of north is on the plain

The traveller shrinks in the midst of his journey[xlii]

The wind was abroad in the oaks

The wind was abroad in the oaks

The spirit of the mountain shrieked

The blast came rustling through the hall

And gently touched my harp

The sound was mournful and low

Like the song of the tomb[xliii]

The form fell

The form fell

Shapeless into air

Like a column of smoke

Which the staff of the boy disturbs

As it rises from the half-extinguished furnace.[xliv]

Hast thou left thy blue course in heaven

Hast thou left thy blue course in heaven

Golden-haired son of the sky

The west has opened its gates

The bed of thy repose is there

The waves come to behold thy beauty

They lift their trembling heads

They see thee lovely in thy sleep

But they shrink away with fear

Rest in thy shadowy cave O sun

And let thy return be in joy

But let a thousand lights arise

To the sound of the harps of Selma[xlv]

Star of the falling night

Star of the falling night

Fair is thy light in the west

Thou liftest thy unshorn head from thy cloud

Thy steps are stately on thy hill

What dost thou behold in the plain?

The stormy winds are laid

The murmur of the torrent comes from afar

Roaring waves climb the distant rock

The flies of evening are on their feeble wings

And the hum of their course is on the field

What dost thou behold, fair light?

But thou dost smile and depart

The waves come with joy around thee

And bathe thy lovely hair

Farewell, thou silent beam

Let the light of Ossian’s soul arise[xlvi]

The moon shows

The moon shows

Half her face

On the hill

The daughter of night

Turns her eyes away for she beholds

The grief that is coming

There is no sound in the hall

No long-streaming beam of light

Comes trembling through the gloom[xlvii]

The tear was on thy cheek

The tear was on thy cheek

At his departure the sigh

Rose in secret in thy breast

But thou dost not come

To meet him with songs

With the lightly trembling

Sound of the harp[xlviii]

The visions of night arose

The visions of night arose

Oithona stood in a dream

Before the eyes of Morni’s son

Her dark hair was loose and disordered

Her lovely eye rolled in tears

Blood stained her snowy arm

The robe half hid the wound of her breast

She stood over the chief, and her voice was heard[xlix]

I pass away in my youth

I pass away in my youth

And my name shall not be heard

Or it will be heard with sorrow

The narrow house is pleasant to me

And the grey stone of the dead[l]

A troubled joy

A troubled joy

Rose on her mind

Like the red path

Of the lightning

On a stormy cloud

Her soul was resolved

And the tear was dried

From her wildly looking eye[li]

I have searched for the herbs of the mountains

I have searched for the herbs of the mountains

I have gathered them on the secret banks of their streams

Sadness shall come

Like night on thy native streams

For thou art fallen in thy youth[lii]

Why did I not pass away in secret

Why did I not pass away in secret

Like the flower of the rock

That lifts its fair head unseen and strews

Its withered leaves on the blast?

My heart is not of that rock

Nor my soul careless as that sea

Which lifts its blue waves to every wind

And rolls beneath the storm

Prepare the narrow tomb

Sleep comes like a cloud

On my soul[liii]

The stream roars down the rock

The stream roars down the rock

He waits for the rising moon

To guide him to his home

Ghosts ride on the storm tonight [liv]

Sweet is their voice between the squalls of wind

Their songs are of other worlds

The rain is past

The dry wind blows

Streams roar and windows flap

Cold drops fall from the roof

I see the starry sky

But the shower gathers again

The west is gloomy and dark

Night is stormy and dismal

Receive me my friends from night.[lv]

Night is calm and fair

Night is calm and fair

Blue, starry, settled is night

The winds, with the clouds, are gone

They sink behind the hill

The moon is up on the mountain

Trees glister, streams shine on the rock

Bright rolls the settled lake

Bright the stream of the vale[lvi]

Bend thy blue course O stream

Bend thy blue course O stream

Round the narrow plain of Lutha

Let the green woods hang over it

From their mountains

And the sun look on it at noon

The thistle is there on its rock

And shakes its beard to the wind

The flower hangs its heavy head

Waving at times to the gale

Why dost thou awake me O gale?

It seems to say

I am covered with the drops of heaven

The time of my fading is near

And the blast that shall scatter my leaves

Tomorrow shall the traveller come

He that saw me in my beauty shall come

His eyes will search the field

But they will not find me

So shall they search in vain

For the voice of Cona

After it has failed in the field

The hunter shall come forth in the morning

And the voice of my harp shall not be heard[lvii]

The smoke of the hall was ceased

The smoke of the hall was ceased

Silence was among the trees of the hill

The voice of the chase was over

I saw the daughters of the bow

I asked about Malvina

But they answered not

They turned their faces away

Thin darkness covered their beauty

They were like stars on a rainy hill by night

Each looking faintly through her mist.[lviii]

The winds begin to rise

The winds begin to rise

The dark wave of the lake

Resounds[lix]

My harp hangs on a blasted branch

My harp hangs on a blasted branch

The sound of its strings is mournful

Does the wind touch thee, O harp

Or is it some passing ghost?[lx]

From: Temora and other Poems 1763[lxi]

I heard the voice of the bards

I heard the voice of the bards

Lessening as they moved along

I leaned forward from my shield

And felt the kindling of my soul

Half-formed, the words of my song

Burst forth upon the wind

So hears a tree on the vale

The voice of spring around

It pours its green leaves to the sun

And shakes its lonely head

The hum of the mountain bee is near it

The hunter sees it with joy

From the blasted heath[lxii]

We came to the hall of the king

We came to the hall of the king

Where it rose in the midst of rocks

Rocks on whose dark sides

Were the marks of streams of old

Broad oaks bend around with their moss

The thick birch waves its green head

Half-hid, in her shady grove

Roscrana raised the song

Her white hands rose on the harp[lxiii]

As when the wintry winds have seized the waves of the mountain lake

As when the wintry winds have seized the waves of the mountain lake

Have seized them in stormy night and clothed them over with ice

White to the hunter’s early eye the billows still seem to roll

He turns his ear to the sound of each unequal ridge but each is silent

Gleaming strewn with boughs and tufts of grass which shake

And whistle to the wind over their grey seats of frost

So silent shone to the morning the ridges of Morven’s host

As each warrior looked up from his helmet towards the hill of the king[lxiv]

Coda: Massenet and Mandelstam

Why do you wake me?

Why do you wake me?

Ah! breath of spring

Why do you wake me?

On my forehead

I sense your caress

And yet the time is near

Of storm and sadness

Why do you wake me

Oh, breath of spring?

Tomorrow in the glen

The traveller will come

Remembering my former glory

His eyes will look for my splendour in vain

Finding nothing but grief and misery

Why should I wake

O breath of spring?

[Freely translated from the Ossian aria in Massenet’s Werther]

I have not heard blind Ossian’s tales

I have not heard blind Ossian’s tales, I have not tasted that old wine, so why do I find myself in my imagination in a forest clearing? Why do I think as I look up that I see Scotland’s blood-red moon? I hear the rooks cawing and the sound of the harp reflected into ominous silence. And I see in my mind’s eye warriors’ tartan fluttering in the breeze, warriors’ shields flashing in the moonlight! But in contrast to this wonderful rambling dream with which my fellow poet has deluged me, the neighborhood looks dull indeed. That’s the thing about poetry: it jumps generations until suddenly some bard like me composes it again as his own.[Freely adapted into prose from English versions of Mandelstam’s words]

---

[i] The phrase occurs twice in Fingal, An Ancient Epic Poem, In Six Books: Together with several other Poems, composed by Ossian the Son of Fingal, (London: Becket and De Hondt, 1762), on pages 16 and 194, and once in Temora, An Ancient Epic Poem, In Eight Books: Together with several other Poems, composed by Ossian, the Son of Fingal, (London: Becket and De Hondt, 1763), on page 132. The version of Basho is my own.

[ii] Murdo Macdonald, ‘Ossian, Kalevala and visual art: a Scottish perspective’, in European Revivals: From Dreams of a Nation to Places of Transnational Exchange, (Helsinki: Finnish National Gallery, 2020), pages 3-22, at pages 3-4.

[iii] Murray Pittock, Culloden, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), page 99.

[iv] Ryokan, One Robe, One Bowl, translated by John Stevens, (New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1977), page 72.

[v] Murdo Macdonald, Ruskin’s Triangle, (London: Ma Bibliothèque, 2021), page 94. The words are from the 1773 version of The Songs of Selma, the line breaks are my own.

[vi] Each line is something of a scene direction. I am reminded of Eisenstein’s comments about Milton. On page 52 of the Film Sense he writes: ‘Paradise Lost itself is a first-rate school in which to study montage and audio-visual relationships.’ In his final chapter he takes such thinking further with respect to the battle on the ice from Alexander Nevsky. Sergei Eisenstein, The Film Sense, translated and edited by Jay Leda, (London: Faber and Faber, 1943), pages 52 to 57, and pages 114 to 156. But Macpherson is more like Bergman than Eisenstein: very cinematic, and very northern. You can see the montage, shot by shot.

[vii] James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, edited by Howard Gaskill and introduced by Fiona Stafford, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996). The University of Galway project, Ossian Online can also be recommended.

[viii] Melchior Cesarotti, Poesie di Ossian Figlio de Fingal, Antico Poeta Celtico, (Padova: Giuseppe Comino, dated 1763, but published 1764). Note that Cesarotti, in Italian translation, is the first to adopt the title Poems of Ossian. Macpherson doesn’t adopt that title until 1773.

[ix] Michael Denis, Die Gedichte Ossians, eines alten celtischen Dichters, (Vienna: Trattnern, 1869).

[x] Ewen Cameron, The Fingal of Ossian, An Ancient Galic Poem in Six Books Translated from the Galic by J. Macpherson and Rendered into Heroic Verse, (Warrington: William Eyres, 1776).

[xi] S. Edgerton Brydges, Sonnets and Other Poems, with a Versification of the Six Bards of Ossian, (London: Wilkie, 1785).

[xii] Joseph Alonso Ortiz, Obras de Ossian: poeta del siglo tercero en las montañas de Escocia, (Valladolid: Imprenta de la Viuda e Hijos de Santander, 1788).

[xiii] Mary Potter, Poetry of Nature, comprising, a selection of the most sublime and beautiful apostrophes, histories, songs, elegies, &c. from the works of the Caledonian bards. The typographical execution in a style entirely new, and decorated with the superb ornaments, of the celebrated Caslon. (London: J. P. Cooke, 1789).

[xiv] Byron’s version can be found on pages 229 to 231 of the Coleridge / Prothero edition of his complete works, (London: John Murray, 1898). Note that Byron’s Ossianic Oscar of Alva and The Death of Calmar and Orla: An Imitation of Macpherson’s Ossian can be found in the 1833 Murray edition, edited by Thomas Moore, as can Lachin y Gair and When I Roved a Young Highlander.

[xv] Verse three of Lachin y Gair begins with a quote, marked as such, clearly intended to evoke the words of Ossian, ‘Shades of the dead! Have I not heard your voices / Rise on the night-rolling breath of the gale?’  The verse continues, in distinctly Ossianic vein, even down to the use of the word ‘car’ for ‘chariot’: ‘Surely the soul of the hero rejoices, / And rides on the wind o’er his own Highland vale. / Round Loch na Garr while the stormy mist gathers, / Winter presides in his cold icy car: / Clouds there encircle the forms of my fathers; / They dwell in the tempests of dark Loch na Garr.’

[xvi] The Poems of Ossian in the Original Gaelic with a literal translation into Latin, by the late Robert Macfarlane, A.M., together with a dissertation on the authenticity of the poems, by Sir John Sinclair, Bart. and a translation from the Italian of the Abbè Cesarotti’s dissertation on the controversy respecting the authenticity of Ossian, with notes and a supplemental essay, by John M’Arthur, Published under the sanction of the Highland Society of London. (London: Printed by W. Bulmer & Co. [for] G. & W. Nicol, 1807).

[xvii] Archibald Clerk, The Poems of Ossian in the Original Gaelic with a Literal Translation into English, (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1870).

[xviii] MacGillivray, Last Wolf, in particular ‘Riders on the Storm’, ‘Eccho’, ‘Macpherson’, and ‘MacGhillebhragh an Dùin’, and the notes on pages 123 and 124.

[xix] The note reads: ‘p 232 Oithona basis of Visions of the Daughters of Albion cf Wright Life of WB v. 1 p 59’. The reference is to Thomas Wright’s two volume Life of William Blake, (Olney: Wright, 1929). Along with the passage from Wright, see Raymond Lister, William Blake, (London: Bell, 1968), pages 6, 7, 47. It may be the case that Blake’s use of the name ‘Albion’ also has its immediate inspiration in his reading of Macpherson. See Macpherson’s mention of Albion in his note referring to the name Alpin, in Fingal and other Poems, 1762, page 210.

[xx] See Ruskin’s Triangle, page 99.Macpherson’s influence on Blake’s approach to the form of poetical prose is also of note. Both authors show an interest in what one can call the visually dense prose-poetical page (as does Mary Potter). Blake takes that as far as his print-making abilities will allow in Jerusalem.

[xxi] Édouard Blau (1836-1906), Georges Hartmann (1843-1900), and Paul Milliet (1848-1924).

[xxii] For the significance of the aria to the opera as a whole, see Matthew Franke, ‘The Harp, the Lied and Ossianic Narratives in Massenet’s Werther’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 18, 2021, pages 455 to 474.

[xxiii] For an informed view of Goethe’s translations of Ossian, see Howard Gaskill, ‘”Arise, O magnificent effulgence of Ossian’s soul!”: Werther the Translator in English Translation’, Translation and Literature, Autumn 2013, Vol. 22, No. 3, pages 302 to 321; also see Gaskill’s introduction to the same issue, ‘The Translator’s Ossian’, pages 293 to 301.

[xxiv] Peter France, ‘Fingal in Russia’, in The Reception of Ossian in Europe, edited by Howard Gaskill, (London: Thoemmes, 2004), pages 259-73, at page 259; R. H. Morrison, Poems from Mandelstam, (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1990), page 72.

[xxv] ‘And, in the narrow house of death, / Let Winter round me rave’.

[xxvi] ‘My harp hangs on a blasted branch. The sound of its strings is mournful. — Does the wind touch thee, O harp, or is it some passing ghost! — It is the hand of Malvina! but bring me the harp, son of Alpin; another song shall rise.’ [Macpherson: Berrathon].  ‘Harp of the North! that mouldering long hast hung / On the witch-elm that shades Saint Fillan’s spring / And down the fitful breeze thy numbers flung, / Till envious ivy did around thee cling, / Muffling with verdant ringlet every string,— / O Minstrel Harp, still must thine accents sleep? / Mid rustling leaves and fountains murmuring, / Still must thy sweeter sounds their silence keep, / Nor bid a warrior smile, nor teach a maid to weep?’ [Scott: Lady of the Lake].

[xxvii] Information and recording provided to me by John Purser. See also James Porter, Beyond Fingal’s Cave: Ossian in the Musical Imagination, (Rochester NY: University of Rochester Press, 2019), page 19 note 4. Porter points out that the setting appears as song 119 in volume one of James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum, published between 1787 and 1803, (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1991).

[xxviii] Full title: Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and Translated from the Galic or Erse Language, (Edinburgh: Printed for G. Hamilton and J. Balfour, 1760).

[xxix] Fragments, page 16.

[xxx] Fragments, page 23.

[xxxi] Fragments, page 46.

[xxxii] Fragments, page 50.

[xxxiii] Fragments, page 53.

[xxxiv] Fragments, page 62.

[xxxv] Full title: Fingal, An Ancient Epic Poem, In Six Books: Together with several other Poems, composed by Ossian the Son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic Language. (London: Printed for T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt, 1762).

[xxxvi] For illumination of the filiations of Macpherson’s repeated phrase, ‘rider(s) of/on the storm’, see MacGillivray, The Last Wolf of Scotland, second edition, (Pasadena CA: Red Hen / Pighog Press, 2016): (i) epigraph; (ii) ‘Riders on the Storm’, page 92; (iii) note on ‘Riders on the Storm’, pages 123-4.

[xxxvii] First two verses from Fingal Book 3, pages 39 and 46; third verse from Fingal Book 4, page 53.

[xxxviii] Fingal and other Poems: Battle of Lora, page 112.

[xxxix] Fingal and other Poems: Battle of Lora, page 119.

[xl] Fingal and other Poems: Carthon, page 133.

[xli] Fingal and other Poems: Carthon, page 133.

[xlii] Fingal and other Poems: Carthon,pages 141-2. The passage recast here is commonly called ‘Ossian’s Address to the Sun’, see, for example, Byron’s version, written in 1805, which concludes: ‘For Age is dark, unlovely, as the light / Shed by the Moon when clouds deform the night, / Glimmering uncertain as they hurry past. / Loud o’er the plain is heard the northern blast, / Mists shroud the hills, and ‘neath the growing gloom, / The weary traveller shrinks and sighs for home.’

[xliii] Fingal and other Poems: Darthula, page 168.

[xliv] Fingal and other Poems: Carric-Thura, page 200; also see MacGillivray, Last Wolf, page 94.

[xlv] Fingal and other Poems: Carric-Thura, page 193.

[xlvi] Fingal and other Poems: Songs of Selma, page 209.

[xlvii] Fingal and other Poems: Oithona, pages 241 and 242.

[xlviii] Fingal and other Poems: Oithona, page 242.

[xlix] Fingal and other Poems: Oithona, page 243.

[l] Fingal and Other Poems: Oithona, page 244.

[li] Fingal and Other Poems: Oithona, page 246.

[lii] Fingal and other Poems: Oithona, page 247, both verses.

[liii] Fingal and other Poems: Oithona, first verse page 244, second verse page 245, third verse page 248.

[liv] See MacGillivray, Last Wolf, epigraph. Another variant is ‘Ghosts ride on the tempest to-night: / Sweet is their voice between the gusts of wind; / Their songs are of other worlds!’ quoted by Fiona Stafford in her introduction to the 1996 edition of Ossian, page v. It comes from a letter of 29 June 1760 from Thomas Gray to Richard Stonhewer. It is extracted by Gray from work sent to him from Scotland, by Macpherson’s supporter Hugh Blair (see page 471 of the 1996 edition, note 28). This pre-publication work was sent to Gray as verse. It became prose-poetry in due course. Both versions can be found in Malcolm Laing’s edition of Ossian, (Edinburgh: Constable, 1805), volume 2, pages 412 to 442. 

[lv] Fingal and other Poems: note to Croma; songs of the five bards, second bard, page 254.

[lvi] Fingal and other Poems: note to Croma; songs of the five bards, fourth bard, page 255.

[lvii] Fingal and other Poems: Berrathon,page 257.

[lviii] Fingal and other Poems: Berrathon,page 259.

[lix] Fingal and other Poems: Berrathon,page 267.

[lx] Fingal and other Poems: Berrathon,page 267.

[lxi] Full title: Temora, An Ancient Epic Poem, In Eight Books: Together with several other Poems, composed by Ossian, the Son of Fingal, (London: Becket and De Hondt, 1763).

[lxii] Temora and other Poems, page 62.

[lxiii] Temora and other Poems, page 67.

[lxiv] Temora and other Poems, page 137. In his introduction to the Mercat Press edition of Ossian published in 1971,John MacQueen notes that ‘Consciously or unconsciously, Tolkien owes a good deal to Macpherson’.