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Erin Ròse Latta's avatar

MacPherson sounds like a fascinating figure, even if many scholars doubt the veracity of his claims of coming across Ossianic poetry and translating it from the original Gaelic. He was undoubtably a very talented author. I can understand why people would be upset by his dishonesty, but it sounds like he cared a lot about Celtic culture, and around the time he was writing., there was very little scholarship on the subject, so I can at least laud him for trying to spread awareness of it.

Your deep-dives of Celtic history and literature and always so fascinating!

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Adam's Notes's avatar

Years ago John Dolan aka The War Nerd shared a fascinating paper from his time in academia where he compared James Macpherson to both John Smith (of the Mormons) and literary forger Thomas Chatterton. I believe he argued that Smith and MacPherson were closer to each other than either was to Chatterton. I can't find the actual paper in my files right now, but I did come across this note I must've made at the time: "Also a really interesting discussion about the ways people actively suspend their disbelief, and the needs of the Americans and the Scots to find a better history for themselves (Dolan argues the English were secure enough not to need this, and thus Chatterton was the only failure among these three examples)."

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