The Invention of Ossian

In recent years a number of Homerists have approached the so-called Homeric Question by investigating Homer as author and “inventor” of the poetic tradition that we know as the Iliad. [1] Graziosi turns this approach on its head and instead explores how the ancient Greeks invented the figure of Homer in a multitude of ways and in various places and at various points in time (hence her title Inventing Homer). In the eighteenth century, however, scholars and translators, most notably Alexander Pope, understood the term invention quite differently, assessing the “genius” of Homer in terms of “fire” and “invention.” Such explorations of the “invention” of Homer at different historical moments raise the question as to whether the “of” in Martin West’s phrase “the invention of Homer” is a subjective or objective genitive. Did antiquity “invent” Homer, or did Homer invent the poetic tradition that is now encompassed by his name? For Martin West, the genitive is both subjective and objective. Homer is indeed the inventor of our Iliad, but Homer himself was to some extent invented by his successors, the Homeridai, who are, according to West, responsible for the invention of the very name Homer. In other words, there was a Homer, but his name wasn’t Homer. [2]

In this paper I am going to discuss a parallel process of “invention,” the figure of Ossian in the Gaelic traditions of the Scottish Highlands that were made famous by James Macpherson in the 1760s. In 1760 Macpherson published his Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and Translated from the Gallic or Erse Language, followed by Fingal, An Ancient Epic in 1761 and Temora, An Epic Poem in 1763. Macpherson attributed this body of poetry to a blind third century Gaelic warrior turned bard named Ossian (the son of Fingal, aka Finn Mac Cumail in Irish myth), whose poetry he translated at the request of intellectuals from Edinburgh. The “poems” (which were in fact rendered in rhythmic prose) were a huge success, enchanting England and Europe, and had a significant impact on subsequent literature, helping to usher in the Romantic Movement. It was soon discovered, however, that Macpherson’s “translations” of Highland epics were largely poems of his own creation, based loosely on the oral songs and tales and manuscripts that he had collected in trips to the Highlands in 1760 and 1761. From their first publication it has been debated to what extent Macpherson invented Ossian and Ossianic poetry, with such well known contemporary critics as Samuel Johnson claiming that the whole of Ossianic poetry was a complete forgery with no basis in tradition. [3]

The similarities between Macpherson’s recreation of the legendary figure of Ossian and the conception of Homer at this time are striking. Both figures were seen by Macpherson and many of his contemporaries to be primitive folk poets of “original genius” whose monumental epic poems were transmitted orally for centuries and became corrupted through time, and both were thought to embody the creativity of a primitive culture. Macpherson saw Ossian as the inventor of the Scottish tradition of heroic poetry, whose works had been corrupted and scattered over time. Likewise, Homer had since antiquity been credited with inventing the Greek epic tradition. Conversely, Macpherson himself was accused of inventing not only an oral tradition, but also a “Homer” behind the tradition. In what follows I attempt to analyze the complex relationship between tradition and innovation (or “invention”) in the poetry of Macpherson by examining some of the intellectual currents and influences that combined for the contruction of Macpherson’s Ossian and his Ossianic poetry, and I will focus in particular on the role of Homer and Homeric poetry in this construction. [4]

By exploring the concept of invention by way of Macpherson’s Ossian, I hope as well to reveal some of the many ways in which we ourselves continue to invent Homer even as we attempt to identify and analyze Homer’s invention. It is not my purpose in the present paper to critique, as I have already done elsewhere, the common use in Homeric scholarship of the term invention to refer to supposed mythological or narratological innovations on the part of a master poet. [5] Rather I am here concerned with the process by which we invent the very idea of Homer every time we write about Homeric poetry. I submit that the parallels between Macpherson’s invention of Ossian and the modern inventions of Homer come most sharply into view wherever we find those most vexing terms “orality” and “literacy” deployed, defined, and refined. Remarkably, Macpherson struggled with many of the same problems in connection with Ossian that would ultimately consitute the Homeric Question. The Ossianic controversy helps us to put this Homeric Question in the context in which it was born. We will see that theories about orality and the Homeric epics have always been closely tied to attempts to define the nature of Homer’s authorial genius, and, explicitly or implicitly, continue to be today.

The complexity of the word invention goes beyond the subjective and objective genitives that accompany it in English. Deriving ultimately from the rhetorical term inventio, it was used by Cicero and others up until the sixteenth century to denote the discovery of subject matter and choice of materials. By the sixteenth century the meaning of this word began gradually to move beyond the realm of oratory and became associated with creativity in its various forms. For example, in the 1605 essay The Advancement of Learning, Francis Bacon combines the term invention with the following concepts: “inquiry and invention” (I.3), “inventions and experiments” (IV.11), “wisdom, illuminations, and inventions” (VIII.6). We can see that for Bacon the term could refer to things discovered as well as to the process of discovery.

But perhaps the most notable early use of the term invention with reference to Homer is by Alexander Pope, who opens his preface to his 1715 translation of the Iliad as follows:

For Pope, who was endeavoring with his translation to prove that Homer was not merely the rival of Virgil but in fact his superior, the genius of the poet Homer lies in the notion of invention, which he calls “the very Foundation of Poetry.” According to the poetics of the day, Virgil was the greater artist, but Pope’s asssertion that invention “furnishes Art with all her Materials” points ahead to Romantic notions of genius and the eventual supremacy of Homer in conventional assessments of the two poets.

The term invention, for Pope, comprises many things at once: originality, raw creativity, and what would later be called imagination. [7] Very closely related to it is the term “fire,” which, as he makes clear just a few sentences later in the Preface, Pope uses to denote both the inspiration of the poet and its effect on the poet’s audience, who is to be carried away by the force of the poetry: [8]

Here we see that fire too is linked to genius. It represents a force that is both innate in the poet as well as one that can be transferred from the poet to the audience. Pope’s assessment of the relative amounts of fire found in other poets implies that Homer is the supreme genius, because in Homeric poetry fire is found everywhere, undampened by technique or art.

This articulation of the essence of poetry presents an acute problem for the translator. How can a translation, no matter how accurate, convey the original “fire” and “invention” of Homeric poetry? [9] Pope’s attempt at a solution was to create a poem of his own invention, inspired and based closely on the Homeric text, but by no means a strict imitation. In this one respect Pope was following in the footsteps of George Chapman, who believed that he had a special connection to Homer, which he articulated in Neoplatonist terms, that allowed him to surpass all other translators that had come before him in revealing the true meaning of the Homeric texts. [10] Chapman produced a draft of his translation of the Iliad in only a few weeks, and Pope to a certain extent approved of this method, noting that Chapman worked as Homer himself must have composed:

The “daring fiery Spirit” that suffuses Chapman’s translation is indicative of Chapman’s own genius as a poet and his connection on that level with Homer. Pope hoped to infuse his own translation with that same fire and invention.

Ironically, one result of this attempt by Pope to instill fire and invention into his translation was an Iliad keenly attuned to Pope’s own poetics and the poetics of the day. [12] The meter is rhyming heroic couplets, and the poetry is polished, prompting the often quoted remark by Bentley “It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.” Pope’s Iliad was greatly admired in its own day but was also to be extremely influential for centuries to come, in many ways forming a new standard by which epic would be judged. In other words, Pope’s poem obeyed the rules while at the same time imposing new ones.

Despite the admiration that he earned for his inventive translation, Pope was nevertheless quickly accused of invention in the negative sense of forgery—a charge that would be echoed against the work of Macpherson half a century later. In 1785, two decades after the publication of The Works of Ossian, the poet William Cowper wrote of Pope’s translations: “The Iliad and Odyssey, in his hands, have no more of the air of antiquity than if he himself had invented them.” [13] Cowper, of course, went on to publish his own translations in 1791, in English Blank verse, thereby continuing the cycle of inventing Homer for the next generation. His aim was to restore the Homeric “simplicity” that he felt was lacking in Pope’s translation. [14] As we shall see, this emphasis on Homer’s simplicity was as rooted in conceptions about Homer in Cowper’s day as Pope’s heroic couplets were rooted in the poetics of his.

I propose to turn now to Macpherson’s (shall we say again) inventive translations of Highland poetry and his alleged invention of the figure of Ossian. In a letter of 1763, David Hume describes to Professor Hugh Blair (author of a Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian that asserts the authenticity of Macpherson’s poetry) the reception that Macpherson’s work was having in England in the years immediately following its publication:

Humes’s letter cuts to the heart of the questions that even today to some extent haunt Macpherson’s poetry. [16] What is the nature of the material Macpherson was claiming to translate, and what is the relationship between the poems he produced and the traditional material on which it was based? Did Macpherson “invent” Ossian and Ossianic poetry any more than Chapman or Pope invented the Iliad and Odyssey?

James Macpherson was born in 1736 and raised in the Scottish Highlands not far from Ruthven Barracks, a fortress erected by the British army after the 1715 Rising, in which Scottish (and later English) Jacobites rebelled against King George I. Macpherson was well versed in the Gaelic mythological traditions that were still vibrant during his lifetime even as the English were vigorously attempting to suppress Highland culture. During much of Macpherson’s childhood and adolescence, the members of his clan (led by Macpherson’s uncle, Ewan Macpherson of Cluny) participated in the violence surrounding Charles Edward Stuart’s failed attempt in 1745 to claim the British throne. After the ultimate defeat of the Highland rebels the victorious British army imposed strict measures designed to wipe out Highland traditions, such as the wearing of tartan plaid and the playing of bagpipes. In 1752, at the age of sixteen, Macpherson went to study at the University of Aberdeen. There he studied with professors who were themselves the students of Thomas Blackwell, who was the principal of Marischal College in Aberdeen at the time. [17] Blackwell’s extremely influential book, An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735), attributed Homer’s genius to the environment in which he lived and, in connection with that environment, his life’s experiences. As we shall see, Blackwell’s theories about Homer would play an important role (whether directly or indirectly) in shaping Macpherson’s ideas about the figure of the bard and warrior Ossian and his relationship to Ossianic poetry.

Macpherson returned to Ruthven in 1756 and became a schoolteacher. At the same time, he was attempting to publish his own poetry, and between 1755 and 1760 published several poems in Scots Magazine. [18] He also apparently collected some manuscripts of Highland poetry at this time. Much of Macpherson’s early poetry celebrated Highland traditions, including the unpublished poem, “The Hunter,” and Macpherson’s first epic, The Highlander. The Highlander does not purport to be a translation of traditional Highland poetry, but does in fact owe much to traditional material and points ahead in many ways to his Ossianic poems. [19] In 1759, Macpherson met by chance the Scottish playwright John Home, who first asked Macpherson to translate Highland poetry. Home then introduced Macpherson to Hugh Blair, a prominent professor at the University of Edinburgh (soon to be the Regius Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres), who likewise eagerly sought translations of Highland poetry. Macpherson seems to have been reluctant at first, arguing that it would not be possible to reproduce the “spirit and fire of the original.” [20] Macpherson soon complied, however, and produced a poem entitled “The Death of Oscur.” As would be the case with his subsequent Ossianic poetry, “The Death of Oscur” contains characters familiar from Scottish mythological traditions, but otherwise departs dramatically from traditional material and does not seem to be based on any single Gaelic original. In the following year, Macpherson published his Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and Translated from the Gallic or Erse Language (among which was included “The Death of Oscur”), a collection of fifteen unconnected prose pieces, together with a preface written by Hugh Blair.

Despite their loose relationship with the surviving Gaelic poetry of the time, the Fragments were never presented as anything other than direct translations of manuscripts collected by Macpherson. A second edition of the fragments (published in the same year as the first) asserts: “In this edition some passages will be found altered from the former. The alterations are drawn from more compleat copies the translator had obtained of the originals.” Nevertheless, at least in scale and scope, the Fragments were far more accurate renditions of Highland poetry than Fingal and Temora would be, and for this both Macpherson and Blair were almost apologetic. For Macpherson and Blair, the short fragments were disappointing in that they were not recognizable as part of an epic poem akin to the Iliad or Odyssey. [21] Blair, influenced by Macpherson’s theories, spoke of the Fragments as the trace remains of a lost epic that Macpherson believed must have existed. [22] It is worth excerpting a significant portion of the preface here:

It was here in the final sentences Blair’s preface that the theory of a lost Highland epic was first articulated. He speaks of an oral tradition and a “race” of Bards, who transmitted the poetry from the remote past to the current day. He suggests that this epic, “which deserves to be styled an heroic poem,” could be recovered, an undertaking to which he would not only give encouragement, but which he would finance as well. Blair does not discuss in detail the presumed author of this epic, Ossian, who is the speaker of several of the fragments; he refers only to “the Bards” as authors. But Ossian was a traditional figure in Celtic myth, the son of the hero Fingal, and many Gaelic ballads are put in the mouth of Ossian, who is imagined, as Blair points out, as “the last of the heroes.” It would be the publication of Fingal, An Epic Poem (which was explicitly attributed to Ossian) in 1761 that would establish for non-Gaelic speakers the primacy of Ossian as author and primitive bard par excellence.

Fragments of Ancient Poetry was a great success, and, aided by the fundraising efforts of Hugh Blair, Macpherson set out in August of 1760 to collect more fragments of Gaelic poetry, in search of Scotland’s lost epic. But, as with the Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Macpherson soon came to believe that the short ballads and prose narratives he was able to collect were only the last remaining vestiges of an epic that had disintegrated over the many centuries since the lifetime of Ossian. He therefore felt compelled to reconstruct this epic based on the sum total of his knowledge of the tradition—though Macpherson himself would never acknowledge that he had done so. The result was Fingal, An Ancient Epic, published in 1761, followed soon after by Temora, An Epic Poem in 1763. Both were accompanied by Macpherson’s notes on the material. An expanded edition of the two poems was published in 1765 as The Works of Ossian. Included in this edition were Hugh Blair’s defense of Macpherson, A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, and, as an appendix, letters that had been collected by Blair testifying to the accuracy of Macpherson’s translations. [23]

For the next several decades, even as poets and artists were being inspired to create their own Ossianic compositions, scholars published vehement attacks against and defences of Macpherson’s work. Experts in Irish and Welsh language, literature, and history, English critics, and other interested learned people questioned the authenticity of the poems on various levels and sought proof of the poems’ antiquity and the accuracy of the translations. [24] Samuel Johnson, who was one of Macpherson’s fiercest critics, went so far as to go on a tour of the Highlands in an attempt to prove that Ossianic poetry did not exist before Macpherson. [25] The debate continued until Macpherson’s death in 1796, at which point the Highland Society of Scotland initiated a comprehensive investigation into the controversy. The Report of the Committee of the Highland Society of Scotland, Appointed to Inquire into the Nature and Authenticity of the Poems of Ossian, published in 1805, concluded that while Macpherson had indeed made use of Gaelic originals for the plot of his poems and had even translated many passages directly from Gaelic exemplars, his epics were largely the products of his own imagination. [26] Even after the publication of this authoritative report, editions of Ossian continued to be published for decades to come by scholars arguing for or against their “authenticity.” [27]

Macpherson’s Ossian is thus a complex blend of traditional figure, the legendary bard and hero of Scottish myth, and a poet of Macpherson’s own invention. What was Macpherson’s Ossian like? As we have seen, Hugh Blair’s preface to Fragments of Highland Poetry said little about the alleged composer of the poetry. Fragment VIII, however, provides a clear picture of the bard:

These words were quite literally translated into a pictorial form on the front page of Fingal. There too Ossian sits among the rocks with his long flowing beard and mountains in the background. Macpherson’s Ossian is a blind old man, full of sorrows, who laments the heroes of the past in a first person narration.

Figure 1. Detail of the front page of Macpherson’s Fingal (1761)

The retrospective quality that pervades the works and that is evident here seems to have been an integral part of the character of Ossian in Gaelic tradition long before Macpherson, as were his age and blindness. [28] But as Fiona Stafford points out, these qualities inevitably linked him with poet/prophets like Homer and Milton. [29] In antiquity Homer was consistently portrayed as blind and this conception of Homer persisted into the eighteenth century. [30] The belief in a blind Homer derives at least partially from the Homeric texts themselves, most notably the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, in which the narrator proclaims that he is a blind man from Chios, and Odyssey book 8, in which the blind poet Demodokos entertains the feasting Phaeacians: “him the muse had dearly loved, but she had given to him both good and evil, for though she had endowed him with a divine gift of song, she had robbed him of his eyesight” (Odyssey 8.63–64). But an equally important blind figure in Homer is Teiresias, the “seer” and prophet of Apollo whose ability to know the past and future and to interpret the will of the gods was directly linked to his blindness. Robert Lamberton has pointed out how the frontispiece to Chapman’s 1615 translation of the Odyssey equates the blind Homer with the visionary Teiresias. [31] A comparison of this image of Homer with Macpherson’s own depiction of Ossian on the frontispiece of Fingal shows how intertwined the three figures—that is, Homer, Teiresias, and Ossian—have become in the hands of Macpherson.

Figure 2. Frontispiece to Chapman’s Odyssey (1615)

Unlike Teiresias, however, Ossian’s visions are only of the past, not the future, and in this respect he shares the function of Homer, who recalls the glory of the heroes who died long ago. Fragment VIII continues:

Ossian takes his inspiration from nature: he hears the “voice of the North” through the trees, which activates his sorrow, and the river activates his memory. The heroes of the past, including his father, Fingal, and even the next generation, his own son Oscur, have fallen like oak trees. Ossian is the last of these heroes, and all he can do is lament past glory.

In just this brief excerpt, we can see how Macpherson’s conception of Ossian, despite having roots in Highland heroic traditions, owes a great deal to the intellectual and literary trends the of mid-eighteenth century, particularly as they relate to Homer. To begin with the literary, we can see Macpherson’s use of Homeric similes to give the poetry an epic flair: the comparison of fallen heroes to trees is frequent Homeric image, sometimes elaborately drawn out. [32] But even Macpherson’s insistence that Ossianic poetry constitute epic betrays an eighteenth century worldview, one in which epic is considered simultaneously the highest and most primitive form of expression. [33] As we have seen, the Fragments were presented in their very title and in Blair’s preface as excerpts of a grander, epic whole. In fact, it would be Macpherson’s recasting of Highland poetry into an epic form that would most offend his Highland compatriots. [34]

Macpherson’s debt to Greek and Latin epic is not limited to the mere use of similes; the similes themselves have affinities everywhere with those of Homer and Virgil. Malcolm Laing produced an annotated edition of Ossian in 1805 with parallel passages from Virgil, Homer, and Milton, but, remarkably, these similarities are often signaled by Macpherson himself in the notes. [35] Indeed, this phenomenon alone, as I now propose to show, gives us great insight into Macpherson’s understanding of the nature of epic and the primitive bard. As we shall see, many of the literary aspects of Macpherson’s work cannot in fact be separated from the intellectual environment in which Macpherson lived and was educated.

Kirsti Simonsuuri has gone so far as to say: “It is not entirely cynical to say that if the poems of Ossian had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent them.” [36] We have already seen that Macpherson studied under the students of Thomas Blackwell, whose Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer argued for a close connection between the environment in which a poet lived and the notion of “genius.” Homer was able to compose works of genius because he lived in a primitive historical period most conducive to experiencing and observing the kinds of events that make up great poetry. In the eighteenth century it was being argued that every culture proceeds through the same stages of development, and that it is only in the earliest stages that poetic genius can flourish. [37] In his Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, Hugh Blair argues:

This conception of the nature of epic, established well before Macpherson began his series of translations, was so powerful that, as Margaret Rubel has noted, the composition of epic poetry had virtually ceased in Britain by the 1760s. Epic was understood to be the natural and spontaneous expression of the culture that produced it, in either the so-called “Savage” or “Barbarian” phase. [39] In fact, as Rubel’s study documents, the works of Homer and Ossian came to be regarded as the quintessential examples of the Barbarian and Savage periods respectively in the history of societies. This tendency to interpret poetry as a witness to and product of the time period in which it was composed gained momentum after the publication of the Works of Ossian, but had its roots already firmly established in the work of Blackwell on Homer, and is most evident in Blair’s Dissertation, which was first published in 1763 and accompanied Macpherson’s translations in editions published from 1765 onward. [40]

Blair’s Dissertation applies Blackwell’s and his own similar theories about Homer to Ossianic poetry in a comprehensive fashion in order to assert the antiquity and authenticity of Macpherson’s material. It is worth analyzing this Dissertation in some detail for the light it sheds on contemporary theories about the nature of epic and what are likely to have been Macpherson’s own assumptions about Ossian. The Dissertation begins with an analysis of one of the more striking features of the poems that I have already mentioned, the presence everywhere of simile and metaphor. The frequent use of simile and metaphor—particularly when those same similes and metaphors can be found in the poetry of Homer, Virgil, and Milton—might suggest a kind of poetic refinement that is antithetical to the notion of the primitive, savage bard. Blair argues that, “in the infancy of societies,” the reverse is actually the case:

This passage, which appears near the beginning of the essay, sets up an important premise that operates throughout Blair’s Dissertation: the authentic language of a primitive bard is naturally simple, that is, without artifice and ornament, but also “poetical” and “metaphorical,” because language has not yet advanced far enough to describe things in direct terms. Primitive poetry is likewise by definition full of undisguised emotion and unrestrained passion (in other parts of the Dissertation this is called “fire”) because primitive peoples have not learned to restrain their emotions. The “uncovered simplicity of nature” was, as we have seen, something often admired in Homer’s language and a point on which Pope was criticized. Blair, too, faults Pope for his overly ornate and metered translations, arguing that through prose is the only way to capture Homer’s simplicity: “Mr. Pope’s translation of Homer can be of no use to us here. The parallel is altogether unfair between prose, and the imposing harmony of flowing numbers. It is only by viewing Homer in the simplicity of a prose translation, that we can form any comparison between the two bards.” [42]

From here, Blair sets up Homer and Virgil as two consecutive steps forward on a kind of evolutionary course, with Ossian as the more primitive and therefore the more “authentic” poet, the more “original” genius. A demonstration of this principle can be found slightly later in the Dissertation. Blair commences an extended comparison of Homer and Ossian that comprises the bulk of the essay:

This passage illustrates well the approach that Blair takes throughout. Homeric poetry is more sophisticated than Ossianic poetry because Homer’s society is more advanced than Ossian’s. But Ossian’s ideas are better suited to poetry, and, as a poet in a more primitive society, Ossian has more “fire” and is closer to “genius” than Homer. In Blair’s critical framework, the very things that make Homer and Virgil more sophisticated are their downfall:

Wherever Ossian and Homer are compared, it is found that Homer is technically superior, but Ossian is nevertheless the better poet. Ossian is better because he is rougher, cruder, simpler, less refined and ornate, and above all, because he is more impassioned and unrestrained in his emotions. A similar comparison can be made between Homer and Virgil. Whereas Homer is merely “affected,” Virgil is downright lifeless. There is an inverse relationship between artistry and emotion, with the result that Virgil’s poetry, composed in a far more advanced stated of society than Homer’s or Ossian’s, cannot possibly inspire emotion in the reader: “His perfect hero, Aeneas, is an unanimated, insipid personage, whom we may pretend to admire, but whom no one can heartily love.” [45]

To return once more to simile and metaphor, Blair explains the many parallel passages between Ossian and Homer this way:

For Macpherson and Blair, echoes of Homer in his Ossianic poetry are not evidence of poetic artistry, designed allusions, or, as Macpherson’s critics would attempt to show, plagiarism and forgery. They were instead proof of Ossian’s—and Homer’s—primitive genius and connection to nature. It is presumably for this very reason that Macpherson does not hesitate to point out what are for us revealing similarities between passages in his Ossianic translations and the poetry of Homer and Virgil.

As I have noted already, the bulk of Blair’s Dissertation consists of an extended comparison of Ossian and Homer, designed to assert not only the antiquity and authenticity of the Ossianic material, but also to demonstrate its relative superiority. Composed in a more primitive state of society, it is even more natural in its simplicity, more spontaneous, and more vibrant than Homeric poetry and therefore inherently superior. Blair’s efforts in this regard, are telling, because they point to both the prestige of Homeric poetry at this time as well as the current scholarly views of Homer himself. Homer was the standard by which Ossian would necessarily be judged. Macpherson’s Ossian, at least partly through Blair’s efforts, became the Original Genius that was the obsession of the second half of the eighteenth century, supplanting in that role Homer, who had been the obsession of the seventeenth and early eighteenth.

It is interesting to note therefore that, in addition to a comparison of Ossian to Homer, a large part of Blair’s Dissertation consists of an analysis of Fingal in relation to Aristotle’s Poetics. Blair finds that Fingal conforms remarkably well to the Aristotelian precepts. As with the use of figurative language, Blair’s take on this conclusion is, from a modern perspective, almost comically counterintuitive, and yet completely in keeping with contemporary theory:

Aristotle’s ideas about good poetry are derived from Homer, because Homeric poetry is by definition good poetry. And Homer is guided by nature alone, as is Ossian. Therefore Ossianic poetry, is not surprisingly, good poetry according to the rules of Aristotle. Blair’s Dissertation therefore is not a rejection of Homer and the Classical standards that still very much governed criticism in the 1760s. Who Homer was and how he operated had changed since the early days of the Renaissance, but he was nevertheless the poeta sovrano (as Dante had called him), the man to beat.

Blair concludes his Dissertation by once again invoking the “fire” of Ossian, his connection to nature, and the emotions his poetry inspires as the keys to his “poetical genius”:

If Blair’s Dissertation is any indication of current thinking about the nature of epic and its composition, we can see that for Macpherson, who studied Greek and read Homeric poetry at the University in Aberdeen and Marischal College in the 1750s (around the same time that Blair was beginning to deliver his lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres), Homer served as the blueprint for the primitive bard of “original genius.” Nowhere in Blair’s Dissertation is the existence of such a figure at the origin of the Greek epic tradition (or the presumed Scottish one) questioned or defended. When Macpherson was asked to translate Highland poetry for the Scottish literatti, Ossian did not need to be invented out of thin air, he only needed to be conjured in Homer’s image. The idea of Homer as primitive bard in the earliest phases of Greek civilization had been universalized for all civilizations to such an extent that it is even possible that Macpherson himself did not consciously choose to model his Ossian on Homer. He may simply have interpreted the song and story-telling traditions familiar from childhood within the framework of contemporary theory, and, when faced with the task of translating those traditions for a British audience, he, consciously or unconsciously, exaggerated those aspects of the traditions that would have the greatest impact. [49]

When we turn to Macpherson’s own Dissertation (Dissertation concerning the Antiquity, &c. of the Poems of Ossian the Son of Fingal, written to accompany the publication of Temora in 1763), we find, amazingly, almost no mention of Homer himself, but his presence is nevertheless everywhere felt. Macpherson’s arguments concerning the oral transmission of Ossian’s poems echo those of Blair’s preface to the Fragments as well as his Dissertation. [50] It is here, in the complicated nexus of questions concerning orality, literacy, and the transmission of the poems, that, I submit, the intersection between Macpherson’s conception of Ossian and eighteenth century theories about Homer comes into highest relief for the modern scholar of Homer. Macpherson writes:

Macpherson goes on to compare the oral transmission of Ossianic poetry to the oral traditions of other cultures. Interestingly enough, he cites the transmission of Greek law as an example of a body of material that was preserved orally for many centuries, but not the Homeric epics. Is this omission an indication that Macpherson did not think of the Homeric poems as having been handed down in the same way? Certainly Blackwell, whose published writings on Homer seem to have played an important formative role in Macpherson’s education, had no knowledge whatsoever of an orally composing, illiterate Homer. His account of Homer’s life takes pains to demonstrate the means by which Homer’s impoverished mother secured him an education, so that he could ultimately write the Iliad and Odyssey—for how could they have come into existence otherwise? [51]

Yet, as I have noted, it is difficult not to find Homer at every turn in Macpherson’s enterprise. In the passage I have just cited and in other comments about oral transmission Macpherson implies an integrity and epic quality to the corpus of Ossianic poetry that it clearly did not possess in Macpherson’s day or in any other. We see here as well an emerging concept of authorship, coupled with the idea of a poet who surpasses his fellow bards in “poetical merit,” much as Homer is imagined still to this day by many scholars who wish to reconcile notions of authorship and genius with oral tradition. We have seen too that Macpherson conceived of the poetry he was able to collect as “fragments” of a whole. How are we to reconcile the implied integrity of an Ossianic epic corpus, faithfully transmitted over the centuries, with the necessarily fragmentary and non-epic nature of Macpherson’s sources? [52] A perfect reconstruction of Macpherson’s thoughts and intentions on this point is impossible, of course, but it seems likely that Macpherson conceived of himself as a kind of Peisistratus in the reconstruction of Ossian’s lost epics. Ossian’s poetry, like Homer’s, had once been a unity and epic in form, but was scattered and nearly lost in the centuries after Ossian’s death. It was only through Macpherson’s efforts to collect and assemble the scattered fragments that the epics of Ossian were saved.

As early as 1665 the Abbé d’Aubignac, following ancient sources, had argued that the Homeric poems were composed orally and had been (imperfectly) transmitted by rhapsodes. Other early theories about the oral transmission of Homeric poetry were postulated by Perrault in France, Vico in Italy, and Bentley in England. [53] The theory of orally composed songs being handed down and corrupted over time would be articulated most forcefully by Villoison (1788) and Wolf (1795) after the discovery of the Venetus A manuscript of the Iliad with its wealth of ancient scholia. Villoison writes:

Wolf, writing seven years later, argues likewise: “the ancients themselves ascribed the origin of variant readings to the rhapsodes, and located in their frequent performances the principal source of Homeric corruption and interpolation.” Wolf postulated, based on comments made by Pausanias, Josephus, and Cicero, that Peisistratus “was the first to set down the poems in writing and to have put them in the order in which they are now read.” [55] Wolf is usually credited as the most influential modern proponent of this theory. But already in 1769, very shortly after the publication of the Works of Ossian, Robert Wood had suggested that Lycurgus, Peisistratus, or a similarly influential figure was responsible for the first written text of the poems. Wood compares that massive editorial project with the work of none other than Macpherson himself:

Wood imagines a Homer whose epics had disintegrated into scraps before they were reconstituted by an important figure like Lycurgus, Solon, or Peisistratus. Wood envisions for Homer the very process that Macpherson claimed for Ossian. It is partly on the basis of this passage that Kristine Haugen has recently argued that Wood and Wolf formed their theories about the transmission of Homer within the context of the Ossianic phenomenon and were directly influenced the arguments of Macpherson and Blair. [57]

But Wood was by no means the first to revive the notion of a Peisistratean recension from antiquity. In 1743 Bentley had argued similarly. Where Bentley and Wood seem to differ is in their understanding of the integrity of the Homeric corpus. Bentley writes:

Bentley’s Homer never was an epic poet; that genre was imposed on his work by others. We can contrast Bentley now with Villoison, writing a few decades later, who, like Wood, imagines a Homer who composed the Iliad and Odyssey, as epics, orally. These poems were memorized and orally transmitted through the generations largely intact but with the inevitable corruption, additions, and variations creeping in. In his introduction to the Venetus A manuscript of the Iliad, Villoison expresses the belief that the ancient scholia will allow scholars to recover the original text as Homer sang it. Wolf denies that such a recovery is possible, giving up any hope of determining Homer’s own text, and instead argues, like Bentley, that the transmitted Iliad and Odyssey are the product of a later age. [59]

How do Macpherson’s and Blair’s arguments about the oral transmission of Ossianic poetry fit into these debates about the text of Homer that ranged in the decades before and after the publication of the Works of Ossian? The question is not a simple one to answer. To begin with, whereas Villoison and Wolf focus on corruption and variants in the transmission of the Homeric texts, Macpherson, at least in his published writings, spoke of the Ossianic poems’ preservation over time and the handing down of the poetry “with great purity.” He argues that the rhythmic nature of the Gaelic verse discouraged disintegration:

In his own Dissertation , Blair likewise speaks of “preservation” by the “oral tradition” and emphasizes the exalted position of the Bards in Celtic society, contrasting them with the “strolling songsters” “in Homer’s time.” [61] In emphasizing the integrity of the surviving Ossianic poems Macpherson and Blair were attempting to counter a prevailing distrust in oral tradition. Macpherson writes in his Dissertation:

Macpherson’s Disseration was written in 1762 to accompany the publication of Temora in 1763. Macpherson was thus already aware of the skepticism with which his translations were being met. For many, the chief grounds for denying their authenticity centered around the problem of transmission. [63]

In the appendix to his Dissertation published with the 1765 edition of the Works of Ossian, Blair confronts this skepticism directly and discusses why Ossian’s poems have survived almost to the exclusion of other poets:

For Blair, just as Macpherson, the existence of an oral heroic song tradition was not enough to ensure the preservation of Ossian’s poetry. It was Ossian’s superiority as a poet, “held in singular esteem and veneration,” that caused his songs in particular to be remembered. Here Blair makes the comparison with Homer directly: Ossian’s epics were preserved because he was the “Homer of the Highlands.” His poetry spawned competitions at festivals that ensured that the texts of these poems remained fixed over the centuries. Both Blair and Macpherson seem to have felt that by articulating a theory of text fixation through memorization and performance in a regulated setting they could assure their readers of the authenticity of the material that Macpherson was claiming to translate. [64]

But despite these assertions to the contrary, Macpherson himself clearly believed that the original texts of Fingal and Temora composed by Ossian had been corrupted and fragmented by later singers and the editors who recorded the songs. As Haugen points out, Macpherson’s accompanying notes to Fingal and Temora refer to suspected interpolations and question the authenticity of various fragments, and within the texts themselves he indicates lacunae. [65] Fiona Stafford has pointed to an anecdote recorded in the letters of the Reverend Andrew Gallie, with whom Macpherson worked on the Gaelic manuscripts that he collected during his tour of the Highlands in 1760: “I remember Mr. Macpherson reading the MSS. found in Clanronald’s, execrating the bard himself who dictated to the amanuensis, saying, ‘D—n the scoundrel, it is he himself that now speaks, and not Ossian.” [66] As Stafford points out, this anecdote reveals a great deal about Macpherson’s attitude towards the poetry he had collected. He shared the same distrust in the oral tradition that he was trying to combat with his arguments about the integrity of the Ossianic material. Macpherson clearly felt that it was up to him to decide what was Ossianic and what was not. In this way Macpherson’s attitude foreshadows in a striking way the arguments of Wolf and the subsequent analytical approaches to Homeric poetry in the nineteenth century.

I think we can see now how Macpherson’s efforts in the 1760s to collect, assemble, and translate the lost epics of Ossian reflect in remarkable ways the developing “Homeric Question” that would preoccupy scholars of the next century. As I noted above, Kristine Haugen has recently argued that the “Ossianic Question” played an important role in the evolution of the Homeric one; but it seems clear that the reverse is also true, and that Macpherson was more theoretically informed than he is usually given credit for. Macpherson seems to have modeled himself on Peisistratus, and his Ossian is the quintessential primitive bard of original genius. In fact, Macpherson managed to capture the scholarly interests of the day so effectively that Wood compared Peisistratus to him (rather than the other way around), and Ossian surpassed Homer, for a brief period at least, as the poet closer to nature and therefore even more “original” in his genius.

The invention of Ossian by James Macpherson, which was predicated on the invention of Homer by Macpherson’s eighteenth century contemporaries, came full circle when, in in the 1770s, Macpherson turned his translation efforts from Ossian to Homer himself. Once the figure of Ossian had been presented to the world and explicated within the framework of contemporary theory concerning the primitive bard, and once the inevitable comparisons began to be made between Homer and Ossian, Macpherson took it upon himself to make accessible a more accurate English text of the Homeric Iliad than had ever been available before. We have seen that Blair had already pronounced Pope’s translation “of no use” for the purposes of comparing the two bards, since he had obscured Homer’s natural simplicity by imposing a meter. (Macpherson had of course translated Ossian’s verse into simple prose.) Macpherson addressed this difficulty by creating his own prose translation of the Iliad.

In the preface to his Iliad translation Macpherson makes clear what his goal is in translating Homer: “The extent of his [Macpherson’s] design has been, to give Homer as he really is: And to endeavor, as much as possible, to make him speak English, with his own dignified simplicity and energy.” [67] Elsewhere in the preface we see even more clearly what Macpherson means by “Homer as he really is”:

Macpherson’s Homer is once again a direct reflection of the contemporary conception of the primitive bard in his natural glory, unfettered by technique or art and sublime in his simplicity. But this conception, of which Homer was initially the defining example, is, amazingly, here being reapplied to Homer by Macpherson, precisely because Ossian has supplanted Homer as the primitive bard par excellence. Now that Ossian had been so successfully invented in Homer’s image, Homer could now be reinvented in Ossian’s.

Macpherson’s poems are unquestionably forgeries in the sense that they are not translations of Gaelic originals. That has been clear since 1805, when the Highland Society of Scotland published its report. Instead, they are the epics that Macpherson felt should have existed or in fact did exist at one time. To his mind, Macpherson was merely, like Peisistratus, bringing together the scattered fragments of a lost genius. But Macpherson’s “translations” were much more than that, because they evoked Highland heroic legend in a form and style that appealed to the poetic sensibilities of contemporary Europeans. They tapped into a growing interest in so-called “primitive poetry” and “original genius,” and they did so in a tone that has been called wistful and elegiac, and in a style that was, by its very primitiveness, modern. [69]

The question of authenticity, which is so closely bound up with any discussion of the Ossianic poems, has, as we have seen, many points of contact with the Homeric Question, which has dominated Homeric scholarship ever since Wolf. The complex notion of authenticity operates with regard to the Works of Ossian on many levels. When people questioned the authenticity of the Works, they were first and foremost questioning their antiquity. It was important to scholars of the eighteenth century that Macpherson’s epics were in fact as old as they claimed to be, because genius was thought to reside only in the infancy of societies. Closely related was the question of accuracy. Did Macpherson faithfully translate the ancient Gaelic originals? The notion of an accurate translation has changed considerably since the eighteenth century; few would now deem Chapman’s or Pope’s translations of Homer accurate in any scientific sense. But in Macpherson’s day a translation could be termed authentic if it reflected what readers believed to be true about the poetry in its original language. Thus, a prose translation could claim to be superior to verse if it conveyed the original “simplicity” of the poet. In this sense a translation is as much an act of reception and can tell us as much about the poetics of the time in which it was produced as an ancient life of Homer can tell us about the reception of the Homeric tradition in the time and place in which it was composed. Macpherson’s Iliad, like Cowper’s or for that matter Fagles’s prize-winning Iliad, delivered the Homer that its audience wanted to hear.

Last but not least, in debating its authenticity Macpherson’s contemporaries were questioning the authorship of the Ossianic poetry: was Macpherson working with Ossian’s texts, or severely distorted, imperfectly remembered versions of his texts? The very question reveals a great deal about eighteenth century attitudes towards oral tradition, and about how little has changed since then. The idea of Ossian as both primitive bard and at the same time author and originator of an entire epic tradition has its roots in Scottish legend but is very much Macpherson’s and Blair’s own invention. Ossian is certainly not the only narrator of Scottish traditional song and tales nor is he the “Homer of the Highlands,” even though, as the son of Finn/Fingal, he plays an important role in Scottish mythological traditions in which he is both a bard and warrior hero. For the Greeks of the archaic period and well into the Classical, Homer really is the inventor of Greek heroic epic and he is credited with the authorship of not only the Iliad and Odyssey but even the entire Epic Cycle. Macpherson and Blair attributed the same kind of authorial status to Ossian beginning with the publication of Fingal, turning him into a Homer. Macpherson and his audience required a genius to which they could attribute the primitive poetry Macpherson was claiming to translate. The idea that an oral tradition could exist independently of such a genius was simply not conceivable in the 1760s, nor would it be for nearly two more centuries.

The search for an “authentic” text presupposes an author of that text. For Macpherson, that search did not presuppose literacy. He believed it possible that Ossian’s poetry could be composed and fixed orally and handed down in memory by generations of bards. In this sense the oral tradition of Ossian’s poetry was in Macpherson’s mind little different than the textual transmission of a literate author whose texts were copied and recopied with the inevitable mistakes, omissions, and interpolations that accompany such a process. This same model was postulated for Homer, and versions of it continue to this day to be postulated for Homer, because scholars are still unwilling to let go of the genius at the beginning (or, according to some, the end) of the tradition. The quest for the authentic text of Homer continues, with new, “definitive” texts being produced. The methodologies behind these editions continue to reflect the disagreements about the nature of the received text that emerged in the eighteenth century: Van Thiel’s editions do not attempt to reconstruct a Homeric text that is earlier than the earliest medieval manuscripts; Martin West, on the other hand, believes it possible to recover the ipsissima verba of a maximus poeta. [70] These editors share with Macpherson the belief that there is an authentic text of Homer. Where they disagree is in the extent to which that text is recoverable.

It is indeed remarkable, given attitudes toward oral tradition at the time and Macpherson’s belief in Ossian’s authorship of Scottish epic, that Macpherson was comfortable in asserting that Ossian could not write. Homer was still understood by many at that time to have been literate. As we have seen, Macpherson attempted to combat this attitude by emphasizing the preservation of the poetry in festival settings and by means of a system of high ranking, specially trained bards. But he never attempted to show that Ossian could write. The prestige and superior quality of Ossian’s poetry were enough to ensure its preservation amidst a flourishing oral song tradition. Today, even while living oral traditions are becoming better and better documented and understood, some modern scholars are once again trying to invent a Homer who can write. An alternative to this (re-)developing theory is of course the by now well established “dictation theory,” which likewise attributes the successful preservation of Homer’s texts to the technology of writing. [71] Both theories allow for an authentic text and its preservation in writing, but even more fundamentally, allow for an authorial genius as the creator of that text. In the next section I will explore briefly these latest inventions of Homer.

Barbara Graziosi’s book, Inventing Homer, explores ancient inventions of Homer but, as she herself suggests, her work should impel us to look at the way that we continue to invent Homer in modern scholarship. She writes, “By focusing on the earlier representations of Homer, I hope to show that the modern formulation of the Homeric Question is based on a conception of Homer very different indeed from that of our early sources: in those sources, Homer is the object of invention, not of discovery.” [72] In other words, if I read her correctly, ancient sources invented Homers, whereas we try to find the real one. The answers we come up with, however, are as inextricably bound up in our own cultural assumptions and values as the ancient lives of Homer. Because I cannot possibly cover all of the twentieth (or even twenty-first) century inventions of Homer, I am going to compare and contrast two that I feel are particularly relevant to the Ossianic phenomenon and that draw together many of the points I have already discussed, especially when it comes to the process by which oral poetry is transmitted and eventually committed to writing in a canonical form. We will see that these more recent Homers reveal the same quest for authenticity, authorship, and poetic genius that marked the debates of the eighteenth century and that shaped Macpherson’s invention of the figure of Ossian.

Albert Lord, author of the itself canonical Singer of Tales and the invaluable assistant of Milman Parry during his fieldwork in the former Yugoslavia, is often credited as the inventor of the modern Homeric “dictation theory.” Reduced to its essence, this theory posits that Homer, a master composer who could not write, dictated the Iliad and/or the Odyssey to someone who could, thereby creating an authoritative text on which all others are ultimately based. [73] To the extent that this attribution is correct—and as we will see there are good reasons to revise this uncritical assessment of Lord’s work on the subject—it seems obvious why he thought along these lines. He himself had been present at countless dictation sessions. I would like to take this opportunity therefore to explore some of Lord’s earliest, unpublished writing about his experiences. I will then contrast this essay and other early articles with something he wrote at the very end of his life, more than fifty years later.

Albert Lord (1912–1991) went to Yugoslavia for the first time at the age of 22, from June 1934 to September 1935. Parry described his activities as follows:

Albert Lord took photographs throughout the trip and kept a record of his experiences with a view to submitting them to a popular magazine such as National Geographic. The essay that he wrote, dated March 1937, was entitled “Across Montenegro: Searching for Gúsle Songs” and was never in fact published. [75]

We can see already in this early essay a fascination with two singers in particular that would shape much of Lord’s subsequent professional scholarship on the creative process of oral traditional poetry and the analogy between the South Slavic and Homeric song traditions. The first is known as Ćor Huso (“Blind Huso”), a singer of a previous generation who was credited by many of the singers Parry interviewed as being the teacher of their teacher, and the source for all the best songs. Lord recounts one of these interviews (conducted by Nikola Vujnović) as he describes their initial attempts to find singers in Kolashin:

Lord later wrote that for Parry Huso came to symbolize “the Yugoslav traditional singer in much the same way in which Homer was the Greek singer of tales par excellence.” He continues: “Some of the best poems collected were from singers who had heard Ćor Huso and had learned from him.” [76] Interestingly enough, Parry and Lord do not seem to have questioned the existence of Huso, though, as John Foley has demonstrated, he is clearly legendary or “at most … a historical character to whom layers of legend have accrued.” [77] So taken was Parry with the analogy between Homer and Huso that before his death he planned a series of articles entitled “Homer and Huso” which Lord completed based on Parry’s abstracts and notes. [78]

The second singer highlighted in the essay is the one whose picture would grace the cover of Lord’s 1960 work The Singer of Tales, that is to say, Avdo Međedović. The Singer of Tales, which publishes the results of Parry and Lord’s investigation of the South Slavic song tradition and applies them to the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey, was Lord’s fulfillment of Parry’s own plan to write a book of that title. [79] The singer referred to in the title is of course generic, because much of what was groundbreaking about Parry and Lord’s work was their demonstration of the system in which traditional oral poetry is composed, a system in which many generations of singers participate. But Lord’s essay makes clear (as does, to a lesser extent, The Singer of Tales) that there is also a particular singer behind the title that Parry and later Lord used to denote their work. That singer is simultaneously Avdo and Homer himself.

Just as Ćor Huso embodied for Parry the Yugoslav traditional singer, Avdo was for Lord on a practical level a living, breathing example of a supremely talented oral poet to whom Homer could be compared. Lord’s Singer of Tales is remarkable for its straightforward exposition of the practical workings of the traditional system in which poets like Avdo composed their songs; it is no surprise therefore that he found a great deal of power in the concrete example that Avdo provided. Avdo dictated songs, was recorded on disk, and was even captured on a very early form of video called “kinescope.” After their initial encounter in the 1930s, Lord found him and recorded him again in the 1950s. He was in many ways the test case for Lord’s theories about the South Slavic (and by extension the Homeric) poetic system.

The photograph of Avdo that was featured on the cover of The Singer of Tales was one that Lord had taken on his first trip to Yugoslavia and was included among the images that were to accompany his unpublished essay (figure 3). The caption reads:

Figure 3. Avdo Međedović

In these excerpts I think we can see how important Avdo was for Lord’s earliest conception of Homer as oral poet. Whereas Parry’s never completed articles comparing the South Slavic and Homeric traditions focused on the hazy figure of Ćor Huso, Lord, when invited to give a lecture on La poesia epica e la sua formazione, entitled his talk “Tradition and the Oral Poet: Homer, Huso, and Avdo Medjedović.” [80] As early as his 1948 article, “Homer, Parry, and Huso,” Lord links Avdo directly with Parry’s Huso: “During the summer of 1935, while collecting at Bijelo Polje, Parry came across a singer named Avdo Međedović, one of those who had heard Ćor Huso in his youth, whose powers of invention and story-telling were far above the ordinary.” [81]

Lord’s comments about Avdo, especially in these earliest descriptions of him, focus on his excellence as a composer (despite the weakness of his voice), his superiority to other poets, and the length of his songs. It is not insignificant that in his unpublished essay Lord misestimates the length of Avdo’s song at 15,000 to 16,000 verses, the approximate length of the Iliad, whereas in fact the longest song that Avdo recorded was 13,331 verses long. By 1948 Lord was careful to report the accurate total of Avdo’s verses, but he was also careful to point out how extraordinary the length of Avdo’s songs were in comparison with his fellow singers, whose songs averaged only a few hundred lines. Clearly it was Lord’s first impression that Avdo provided the answer to the still hotly debated Homeric Question.

In these earliest descriptions too we find traces of a much earlier kind of criticism, reminiscent in fact of the 1760s. In the caption to Avdo’s picture, Lord notes first of all that he is a “peasant farmer” and then that he is a “veritable Yugoslav Homer.” It seems likely that Lord has in mind here, whether consciously or unconsciously, the notion of “primitive genius.” At the very least he seems struck throughout the essay by the conditions under which poetry and song flourished in Yugoslavia. I note as well that when describing Avdo in his 1948 article Lord praises his “powers of invention.” Parry too seems to have begun his research with an interest in primitive genius. His first study of Homeric style, his 1928 doctoral thesis, began with a quote about originality and primitive literature from Ernest Renan: “Comment saisir la physionomie et l’originalité des littératures primitives, si on ne pénètre la vie morale et intime de la nation, si on ne se place au point même de l’humanité qu’elle occupa, afin de voir et de sentir comme elle, si on ne la regarde vivre, ou plûtot si on ne vit un instant avec elle?” [82] Long before he embarked upon his collecting trip to Yugoslavia, Parry was imagining himself as an anthropologist, describing the literature of a primitive people whose way of life he had come to know.

Little seems to have changed then between the 1760s and the 1930s. Parry and Lord, at least at the very beginning of their careers, believed in a Homer—nor is their oral Homer vastly different than the Homer that had previously been imagined by James Macpherson and others. They were able to synthesize the pathfinding results of their fieldwork, which uncovered a complex system of oral poets composing over hundreds if not thousands of years, with much earlier ideas about individual genius, and they were able to do this in part because of the Huso myth (which was interpreted as fact) and because of Avdo. Equally important, however, was the technology that allowed Parry and Lord to record vast stretches of song on aluminum disks and (via the process of dictation) on paper. It was no doubt his own experiences with dictation that led Lord to argue, in a brief article in 1953 entitled “Homer’s Originality: Oral Dictated Texts,” that Homer composed orally and dictated his poems to someone who could write. Lord suggested that the process of dictation, since it is slower than a live performance, allowed for a more original and poetically superior text. This argument is somewhat surprising given Lord’s own descriptions of the difficulty, for most singers, of the dictating process. [83] Few singers could perform without the gusle, and many were so flustered by the unusual performance circumstances that they would often cease abruptly, claiming to have forgotten the rest of the song. [84]

It seems obvious that Lord invented a dictating Homer because he was imagining him in Avdo’s image. The technology used to record Avdo was cutting edge at that time, and Lord would never have been so anachronistic as to suggest that Homer was recorded on audio disk. But to assume the technologies required for writing (pen, ink, loose or bound sheets of readily available paper, skilled scribes, etc.) for “Homer’s time” is an equally anachronistic projection. As much as Lord’s work is responsible for the paradigm shift in Homeric studies that has allowed many scholars to abandon the Homer as original genius genre of criticism, he himself had his blind spots on this crucial point. Like Macpherson, Lord could have his Homer and his oral tradition too.

Few people seem to be aware, however, that Lord all but retracted his dictation thesis in his 1991 collection of essays, Epic Singers and Oral Tradition. There, together with the 1953 article, he included an addendum, from which I quote here:

Lord himself as far as I am aware never, in print, discussed the implications of this important revision of his 1953 argument. (Lord died in the same year that Epic Singers and Oral Tradition was published.) But it is also true that Lord never speculated about the historical circumstances under which the Iliad and Odyssey might have been dictated. For Lord, the question of the text fixation of the Homeric poems was not essential; rather, he was concerned with the dynamic process, that is to say their on-going recomposition in performance.

Where are we now? Seventy years after Parry and Lord’s first trip to the former Yugoslavia, forty-five years after the publication of the Singer of Tales, and for that matter, almost 245 years since the publication of Fingal, to what extent have we abandoned the notion of Homer’s primitive genius? Well, we don’t use the word primitive anymore of course. And though it has been resisted, debated, and clarified, Homerists have come to accept the basic conclusion of Parry’s research and Lords amplification of it, namely that the Iliad and Odyssey derive ultimately from an oral traditional performance system. But attempts to construct a bard of exceptional genius (whether named Homer or not) continue to be made. Richard Martin (1993:223) is right to point out that a kind of “quest for the primitive” is made whenever one tries to identify the “original” form of the Iliad or Odyssey or tries to make a judgment between older, genuine, “Homeric” strata and later accumulations. [86] Some of the most recent quests for Homer, however, do not primitivize his genius but rather civilize it, attributing to him the techniques of a literate poet. Homer’s genius lies not in his primitive expression of the world around him, his traditional language and tales, but rather in his ability to manipulate that tradition and break free of it (it does indeed seem to be imagined as a prison break) by means of the technology of writing.

Martin West’s 1998–2000 Teubner Iliad promises to be and is widely considered the latest, greatest, and perhaps even definitive Homer. And yet his text of the Iliad is based on his conception of Homer, the poet and the man. In other words, Martin West has, like editors before him, invented a Homer in order to establish a definitive text of his work. What is West’s Homer like? West gives us an indication of the kind of Homer he envisions on the first page of his introduction to the Teubner text: “Ilias materiam continet iamdiu per ora cantorum diffusam, formam autem contextumque qualem nos novimus tum primum attinuit, cum conscripta est; quod ut fieret, unius munus fuit maximi poetae.” West acknowledges the oral tradition that furnished material on which the Iliad is based, but then says that our Iliad took its form when it was first written down. This was the work of a maximus poeta, a genius, it is implied, who could write. That the poet was also the writer is made clear as West continues: “per multos annos, credo, elaboravit et, quae primum strictius composuit, deinceps novis episodiis insertis mirifice auxit ac dilatavit.” The insertion of “credo” here is telling. West is forced to admit, already on the first page, that his conception of Homer is a matter of faith.

In the past five years West has promulgated this image of Homer in a variety of scholarly and popular publications, and in several of the modern languages. Unlike Lord, who, though seeming to have found the answers to the Homeric Question he was looking for in his dictation theory, never articulated a specific scenario for the construction of the Homeric text, West’s publications provide details about Homer’s composition process and even what his life was like:

In an exhibition catalogue entitled Troy: Dream and Reality (Troia: Traum und Wirklichkeit), West explains it for the lay person:

West’s Homer backpacks around Greece, occasionally coming up with new ideas and making corrections in the margins. Hence even the variants and apparent inconsistencies in the texts that have come down to us can be explained within a literate model of authorship.

West’s model depends on the idea that a master oral poet can become a literate one, and for this he is indebted to recent work that questions an often assumed dichotomy between orality and literacy. In fact as Rosalind Thomas’s work and that of others has shown, orality and literacy cannot be diametrically opposed in the way that they are sometimes alleged to be. [89] Literate cultures are inevitably also oral. I am skeptical of the logic that posits the reverse, namely that oral poets can become literate ones in the course of an individual’s lifetime, but it is not my purpose here to refute such logic. Rather, I am interested in the Homeric subtext behind these kinds of arguments. Thomas writes:

Without addressing the question of whether or not Thomas’s argument is valid, let me just observe that, like Macpherson in the case of Ossian and West in the case of Homer, Thomas is concerned to show that it is possible that a composition by a single bard was transmitted largely intact over many centuries. Thomas’s reasoning here and in her other published work allows for the genius model of Homeric composition; the extent to which her Homer differs from other scholars is in her willingness to attribute orality, literacy, or some combination of both to the genius composer. It is my suspicion, however, that the real agenda behind the recent proliferation of studies like that of Thomas’s, studies which stress the interdependence of oral and literate forms of communication, is in fact to create a space in which the genius of Homer can continue to flourish in a way with which we (21st century Americans, Canadians, and Europeans) can feel comfortable. All in all, though we cannot deny the formative role of an oral tradition in the creation of the Homeric epics, in today’s hyperliterate and hypercivilized world we academics would prefer to have a Homer who can write.

I would like to conclude this exploration of tradition and invention with a return to Ossian by way of West’s Traum of Homer (or is it Wirchlichkeit?). As I observed at the outset of this essay, my title, “the Invention of Ossian,” and its counterpart, “the Invention of Homer,” contain both a subjective and objective genitive. We can use the word “dream” in a similar way, and the beautiful thing about the word dream is that it can be both a noun and a verb. It can, moreover, be an object, a thing one has seen in one’s sleep, or it can have a creative and even inventive connotation, a thing one has “dreamed up.” Dreams, as we find in Homer, are notoriously tricky things. Some have substance and reveal important truths; others are insubstantial yet deceive you with their verisimilitude. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, a Neo-Classical painter working on the cusp of the Romantic Movement, captures the ambiguity that I have traced in this essay with his 1813 painting, The Dream of Ossian (figure 4).

Figure 4. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, The Dream of Ossian (1813)

In this paper I have tried to suggest that (1) not unlike James Macpherson do we dream up Homer even as we dream of him, and that (2) no less than in the 1760s do we continue to obsess over the question of Homer’s genius (termed, in the earliest discussions of it, “invention”). That we cannot separate the poetry from the man is signified by the existence of at least ten titles published in the last fifty years or so in English that consist of simply that magical name, Homer. [91] Our evidence is such that however we dream up Homer it is of necessity a matter of faith and will always be rooted in current conceptions of poets and poetry. Unlike Macpherson, most of us do not compose “Homeric” poetry. But we all compose lives of Homer, and each one says far more about the poetry and scholarship and the preoccupations of our own time than it does about Homer’s.

NOTE: A most useful online bibliography for James Macpherson and the Ossianic controversy is maintained by R. Sher and Moore at http://www.c18.rutgers.edu/biblio/macpherson.html.