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The Invention of Ossian
Casey Dué
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 Meaning of Invention
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.
HOMER is universally allow’d to have had the greatest
Invention of any Writer whatever. The Praise of Judgment Virgil has justly
contested with him, and others may have their Pretensions as to particular
excellencies; but his Invention remains yet unrival’d. Nor is it a Wonder if he
has ever been acknowledg’d the greatest of Poets, who most excell’d in that
which is the very Foundation of Poetry. It is the Invention that in different
degrees distinguishes all great Genius’s: The utmost Stretch of human Study,
Learning, and Industry, which masters every thing besides, can never attain to
this. It furnishes Art with all her Materials, and without it Judgment itself
can at best but steal wisely. [6]
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.
It is to the Strength of this amazing Invention we are to
attribute that unequal’d Fire and Rapture, which is so forcible in
Homer, that no Man of a true Poetical Spirit is Master of himself while
he reads him. What he writes is of the most animated Nature imaginable; every
thing moves, every thing lives, and is put in Action. If a Council be call’d, or
a Battle fought, you are not coldly inform’d of what was said or done as from a
third Person; the Reader is hurry’d out of himself by the Force of the Poet’s
Imagination, and turns in one place to a Hearer, in another to a Spectator. The
Course of his Verses resembles that of the Army he describes,
οἳ δ' ἄρ' ἴσαν ὡς εἴ τε πυρὶ χθὼν πᾶσα νέμοιτο
They pour along like a Fire that sweeps the whole Earth
before it . ‘Tis however remarkable that his Fancy, which is every
where vigorous, is not discover’d immediately at the beginning of his Poem in
its fullest Splendor: It grows in the Progress both upon himself and others, and
becomes on Fire like a Chariot-Wheel, by its own Rapidity. Exact Disposition,
just Thought, correct Elocution, polish’d Numbers, may have been found in a
thousand; but this Poetical Fire, this Vivida vis animi, in a
very few. Even in Works where all those are imperfect or neglected, this can
over-power Criticism, and make us admire even while we disapprove. Nay, where
this appears, tho’ attended with Absurdities, it brightens all the Rubbish about
it, ‘till we see nothing but its own Splendor. This Fire is discern’d
in Virgil, but discern’d as through a Glass, reflected, and more
shining than warm, but every where equal and constant: In Lucan and
Statius, it bursts out in sudden, short, and interrupted Flashes: In
Milton, it glows like a Furnace kept up to an uncommon Fierceness by
the Force of Art: In Shakespear, it strikes before we are aware, like
an accidental Fire from Heaven: But in Homer, and in him only, it burns
every where clearly, and every where irresistibly. (§12–20)
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.
His own Boast of having finish’d half the Iliad in
less than fifteen Weeks shews with what Negligence his Version was performed.
But that which is to be allowed him, and which very much contributed to cover
his Defects, is a daring fiery Spirit that animates his Translation, which is
something like what one might imagine Homer himself would have writ before he
arriv’d to Years of Discretion. (§208–209) [11]
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.
Inventing Ossian
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?
I have the pleasure of frequently hearing justice done to
your dissertation, but I never heard it mentioned in a company, where some one
person or another did not express his doubts with regard to the authenticity of
the poems which are its subject, and I often hear them totally rejected, with
disdain and indignation, as a palpable and most impudent forgery … My present
purpose is to apply to you … to give us proof that the poems are, I do not say
so ancient as the age of Severus, but that they were not forged within these
five years by James Macpherson. [15]
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.
The public may depend on the following fragments as genuine
remains of ancient Scottish poetry. The date of their composition cannot be
exactly ascertained. Tradition, in the country where they were written, refers
them to an era of the most remote antiquity: and this tradition is supported by
the spirit and strain of the poems themselves; which abound with those ideas,
and paint those manners, that belong to the most early state of society. The
diction too, in the original, is very obsolete; and differs widely from the
style of such poems as have been written in the same language two or three
centuries ago … Though the poems now published appear as detached pieces in this
collection, there is ground to believe that most of them were originally
episodes of a greater work which related to the wars of Fingal. Concerning this
hero innumerable traditions remain, to this day, in the Highlands of Scotland.
The story of Oscian, his son, is so generally known, that to describe one in
whom the race of a great family ends, it has passed into a proverb; “Oscian the
last of the heroes.”
There can be no doubt that these poems are to be ascribed
to the Bards; a race of men well known to have continued throughout many ages in
Ireland and the north of Scotland. Every chief or great man had in his family a
Bard or poet, whose office it was to record in verse, the illustrious actions of
that family. By the succession of these Bards, such poems were handed down from
race to race; some in manuscript, but more by oral tradition. And tradition, in
a country so free of intermixture with foreigners, and among a people so
strongly attached to the memory of their ancestors, has preserved many of them
in a great measure incorrupted to this day …
Of the poetical merit of these fragments nothing shall here
be said. Let the public judge, and pronounce. It is believed, that, by a careful
inquiry, many more remains of ancient genius, no less valuable than those now
given to the world, might be found in the same country where these have been
collected. In particular there is reason to hope that one work of considerable
length, and which deserves to be styled an heroic poem, might be recovered and
translated, if encouragement were given to such an undertaking … The last three
poems in the collection are fragments which the translator obtained of this epic
poem; and though very imperfect, they were judged not unworthy of being
inserted. If the whole were recovered, it might serve to throw considerable
light upon the Scottish and Irish antiquities.
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
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:
By the side of a rock on the hill, beneath the aged trees,
old Oscian sat on the moss; the last of the race of Fingal. Sightless are his
aged eyes; his beard is waving in the wind. Dull through the leafless trees he
heard the voice of the north. Sorrow revived in his soul: he began and lamented
the dead.
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.
How hast thou fallen like an oak, with all thy branches
round thee! Where is Fingal the King? where is Oscur my son? where is all my
race? Alas! in the earth they lie … What dost thou, O river, to me? Thou
bringest back the memory of the past.
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]
Hence we may expect to find poems among the antiquities of
all nations. It is probable too, that an extensive search would discover a
certain degree of resemblance among all the most ancient poetical productions,
from whatever state they have proceeded … it is characteristical of an age
rather than a country; and belongs, in some measure, to all nations at a certain
period. Of this the works of Ossian seem to furnish a remarkable proof. [38]
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]
Their passions have nothing to restrain them: their
imagination has nothing to check it. They display themselves to one another
without disguise: and converse and act in the uncovered simplicity of nature. As
their feelings are strong, so their language, of itself, assumes a poetical
turn. Prone to exaggerate, they describe everything in the strongest colours;
which of course renders their speech picturesque and figurative. Figurative
language owes its rise chiefly to two causes: to the want of proper names for
objects, and to the influence and of imagination and passion over the form of
expression. Both these causes concur in the infancy of society. Figures are
commonly considered as artificial modes of speech, devised by orators and poets,
after the world has advanced to a refined state. The contrary of this is the
truth. Men have never used so many figures of style, as in those rude ages,
when, besides the power of a warm imagination to suggest lively images, the want
of proper and precise terms for the ideas they would express, obliged them to
have recourse to circumlocution, metaphor, comparison, and all those substituted
forms of expression, which give a poetical air to language. An American chief,
at this day, harangues at the head of his tribe, in a more bold metaphorical
style, than a modern European would adventure to use in an Epic poem. [41]
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]
As Homer is of all the great poets, the one whose manner,
and whose times come the nearest to Ossian’s, we are naturally led to run a
parallel in some instances between the Greek and the Celtic bard. For though
Homer lived more than a thousand years before Ossian, it is not from the age of
the world, but from the state of society, that we are to judge of resembling
times. The Greek has, in several points, a manifest superiority. He introduces a
greater variety of incidents; he possesses a larger compass of ideas; has more
diversity in his characters; and a much deeper knowledge of human nature. It was
not to be expected, that in any of these particulars, Ossian could equal Homer.
For Homer lived in a country where society was much farther advanced; he had
beheld many more objects; cities built and flourishing; laws instituted; order,
discipline, and arts begin. His field of operation was much larger and more
splendid; his knowledge, of course, more extensive; his mind also, it shall be
granted, more penetrating. But if Ossian’s ideas and objects be less diversified
than those of Homer, they are all, however, of the kind fittest for poetry: The
bravery and generosity of heroes, the tenderness of lovers, the attachments of
friends, parents, and children. In a rude age and country, though the events
that happen be few, the undissipated mind broods over them more; they strike the
imagination, and fire the passions in a higher degree; and of consequence become
happier materials to a poetical genius, than the same events when scattered
through the wide circle of more varied action, and cultivated life. [43]
The simplicity of Ossian’s manner adds great beauty to his
descriptions, and indeed to his whole Poetry. We meet with no affected
ornaments; no forced refinement; no marks either in style or thought of a
studied endeavour to shine and sparkle. Ossian appears every where to be
prompted by his feelings; and to speak from the abundance of his heart. [44]
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 it is usual to judge of poets from a comparison of their
similes more than that of other passages, it will perhaps be agreeable to the
reader, to see how Homer and Ossian have conducted some images of the same kind.
This might be shewn in many instances. For as the great objects of nature are
common to the poets of all nations, and make the general storehouse of all
imagery, the ground-work of their comparisons must of course be frequently the
same … [46]
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.
To refuse the title of an epic poem to Fingal,
because it is not in every little particular, exactly conformable to the
practice of Homer and Virgil, were the mere squeamishness and pedantry of
criticism. Examined even according to Aristotle’s rules, it will be found to
have all the essential requisites of a true and regular epic; and to have
several of them in so high a degree, as at first view to raise our astonishment
on finding Ossian’s composition agreeable to the rules of which he was entirely
ignorant. But our astonishment will cease, when we consider from what source
Aristotle drew those rules. Homer knew no more of the laws of criticism than
Ossian. But guided by nature, he composed in verse a regular story, founded on
heroic actions, which all posterity admired. Aristotle, with great sagacity and
penetration, traced the causes of this general admiration. He observed what it
was in Homer’s composition, and in the conduct of his story, which gave it such
power to please; from this observation he deduced the rules which poets ought to
follow, who would write and please like Homer; and to a composition formed
according to such rules, he gave the name of an epic poem. Hence his whole
system arose. Aristotle studied nature in Homer. Homer and Ossian both wrote
from nature. No wonder that among all the three, there should be such agreement
and conformity. [47]
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]
Upon the whole; if to feel strongly, and describe
naturally, be the chief ingredients in poetical genius, Ossian must, after fair
examination, be held to possess that genius in a high degree. The question is
not, whether a few improprieties may be pointed out in his works; whether this,
or that passage, might not have been worked up with more art and skill, by some
writer of happier times? A thousand such cold and frivolous criticisms, are
altogether indecisive as to his genuine merit. But, has he the spirit, the fire,
the inspiration of a poet? Does he utter the voice of nature? Does he elevate by
his sentiments? Does he interest by his descriptions? Does he paint to the heart
as well as to the fancy? Does he make his readers glow, and tremble, and weep?
These are the great characteristicks of true poetry. [48]
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]
[Ossian’s] poetical merit made his heroes famous in a
country where heroism was much esteemed and admired … Every chief in process of
time had a bard in his family, and the office became at last hereditary. By the
succession of these bards, the poems concerning the ancestors of the family were
handed down from generation to generation.
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]
For it is evident that the Homeric contextus,
which was recited by the rhapsodes from memory and which used to be sung orally
by everyone, was already for a long time corrupt, since it would have been
impossible for the different rhapsodes of the different regions of Greece not to
be forced by necessity to subtract, add, and change many things. [54]
[Josephus declares] that the works of Homer, the oldest
known production of Greece, were not preserved in writing, but were sung, and
retained in memory. If then, with Josephus, we suppose that Homer left no
written copy of his works, the account we find of them in ancient writers
becomes more probable. It is generally supposed that Lycurgus brought them from
Ionia into Greece, where they were known before only by scraps and detached
pieces. Diogenes Laertius attributes the merit of this performance to Solon:
Cicero gives it to Pisistratus; and Plato to Hipparchus … If therefore the
Spartan Lawgiver, and the other personages committed to writing, and introduced
into Greece, what had before been only sung by the Rhapsodists of Ionia, just as
some curious fragments of ancient poetry have been lately collected in the
northern parts of this island, their reduction to order in Greece was a work of
taste and judgment: and those great names which we have mentioned might claim
the same merit in regard to Homer, that the ingenious Editor of Fingal is
entitled to from Ossian. [56]
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]
Take my word for it, poor Homer in those
circumstances and early times had never such aspiring thoughts. He wrote a
sequel of Songs and Rhapsodies, to be sung by himself for small earnings and
good cheer, at Festivals and other days of Merriment; the Ilias he made
for Men, and the Odysseis for the other Sex. These loose songs were not
collected together in the form of an Epic Poem till Pisistratus’s
time. [58]
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]
Their poetical compositions … were adapted to music; and
the most perfect harmony was observed. Each verse was so connected with what
preceded or followed it, that if one line had been remembered in a stanza, it
was almost impossible to forget the rest. The cadences followed in so natural a
gradation, and the words were so adapted to the common turn of the voice … that
it was almost impossible, from similarity of sound, to substitute one word for
another. This excellence is peculiar to the Celtic tongue, and is perhaps to be
met with in no other language. [60]
The strongest objection to the authenticity of the poems
now given to the public under the name of Ossian, is the improbability of their
being handed down by tradition through so many centuries. Ages of barbarism some
will say, could not produce poems abounding with the disinterested and generous
sentiments so conspicuous in the compositions of Ossian; and could these ages
produce them, it is impossible but they must be lost, or altogether corrupted in
a long succession of barbarous generations. [62]
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]
With regard to the manner in which the originals of these
poems have been preserved and transmitted, which has been represented as so
mysterious and inexplicable, I have received the following plain account: That
until the present century, almost every great family in the Highlands had their
own bard, to whose office it belonged to be master of all the poems and songs of
the country; that among these poems the works of Ossian are easily distinguished
from those of later bards by several peculiarities in his style and manner; that
Ossian has always been reputed the Homer of the Highlands, and all his
compositions held in singular esteem and veneration; that the whole country is
full of traditionary stories derived from his poems, concerning Fingal and his
race of heroes, of whom there is not a child but has heard, and not a district
in which there are not places pointed out famous for being the scene of some of
their feats of arms; that it was wont to be the great entertainment of the
Highlanders, to pass the winter evenings in discoursing of the times of Fingal,
and rehearsing these old poems, of which they have been enthusiastically fond;
that when assembled at their festivals, or on any of their publick occasions,
wagers were often laid who could repeat most of them, and to have store of them
in their memories, was both an honorable and profitable acquisition, as it
procured them access into the families of their great men …
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.
Macpherson’s Homer
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.
He seems to have trusted to the immediate resources of his
genius, for the means of carrying him, through his journey. He advances, with
apparent ease: Nor seems he ever to exert all his strength. He never deviates
from his course, in search of ornament. In sublimity of expression and language
he may be equalled: In simplicity and ease, it is difficult to ascend to his
sphere. [68]
Invention and Authenticity
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.
Inventing Homer in the Twentieth Century
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 and the “Yugoslav Homer”
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]
… my assistant, Mr. Albert Lord, is shortly leaving for a
month in Greece. His help has been altogether indispensable to me, and I may say
that I have done twice as much work since I had his very able assistance. He has
relieved me altogether of the very long labeling and cataloguing of the
manuscripts and discs, has helped me with the keeping of accounts and the
presentations of reports, has typed some 300 pages of my commentary on the
collected texts, and most particularly he has ably run the recording apparatus
while we are working in the field, this for the first time leaving me free to be
with the singer before the microphone, and to oversee and take part in the
putting of questions to the singers […] I myself feel the greatest gratitude to
him for the help which he has given me and the expedition is under the greatest
obligation to him. [74]
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:
In Kolashin we got to work. During the last century this
was the home of one of the greatest singers. The name of old One-eye Huso
Husovitch was a magic one in those days, and still is among the Turks (Moslems)
in the region further east where the old masters of Kolashin now dwell. We
sought eagerly for every trace of his tradition. What was he like? How did he
sing? How did he make his living? How did he die? And so on. We had heard of him
first from Sálih Uglian [sic] in Novi Pazar. From Huso Salih had
learned his favorite song about the taking of Bagdad and its queen by Djérdjelez
Aliya, hero of the Turkish border. In Salih’s own words, caught by our
microphone, we have a bit of the tradition of the blind singer’s way of
life.
Nikola: From whom did you learn your first Bosnian
songs?
Salih: I learned Bosnian songs from One-eye Huso Husovitch
from Kolashin.
N: Who was he? How did he live? What sort of work did he
do?
S: He had no trade, only his horse and his arms, and he
wandered about the world. He had only one eye. His clothes and his arms were of
the finest. And so he wandered from town to town and sang to people to the
gusle.
N: And that’s all he did?
S: He went from kingdom to kingdom and learned and
sang.
N: From kingdom to kingdom?
S: He was at Vienna, at Franz’s court.
N: Why did he go there?
S: He happened to go there, and they told him about him,
and went and got him, and he sang to him to the gusle, and King Joseph gave him
a hundred sheep, and a hundred Napoleons as a present.
N: How long did he sing to him to the gusle?
S: A month.
N: So there was Dutchman who liked the gusle that
much?
S: You know he wanted to hear such an unusual thing. He had
never heard anything like it.
N: All right. And afterwards, when he came back, what did
he do with those sheep? Did he work after that, or did he go on singing to the
gusle?
S: He gave all the sheep to his relatives, and put the
money in his purse, and wandered about the world.
N: Was he a good singer?
S: There could not have been a better.
(Trans. by Milman Parry)
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:
“Avdo Medjedovitch, peasant farmer, is the finest singer
the expedition encountered. His poems reached as many as 15,000 lines. A
veritable Yugoslav Homer!”
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.
As I reconsidered very recently the stylization of a
passage from Salih Ugljanin’s “Song of Bagdad” that was found in a dictated
version but not in two sung texts, I was suddenly aware of the experience of
listening to Salih dictate … the pause interrupted neither Salih’s thought nor
his syntax … One might think that dictating gave Salih the leisure to plan his
words and their placing in the line, that the parallelism was due to his careful
thinking out of the structure. First of all, however, dictating is not a
leisurely process … I might add that not all singers can dictate successfully.
As I have said elsewhere, some singers can never be happy without the gusle
accompaniment to set the rhythm of the singing performance.
[85]
The Literate Homer
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.
In the case of the Iliad I have no doubt that the
process of composition extended over many years, perhaps decades, and that the
majority of analysts since Hermann have been right to suppose that there was
first a much shorter poem which then underwent a series of expansions. I do not,
as many of them did, think it necessary to assume a different poet for each
stratum of composition. I envisage one great poet, living in different places at
different times, carrying with him a collection of papyrus roles and adding to
them over the years. [87]
Jede [Papyrusrolle] konnte mehrere hundert Verse fassen. Um
alle 15,000 Verse der Ilias aufzuschreiben (ohne den später eingefügten 10.
Gesang), brauchte er eine ganze Menge Rollen. Das bedeutete eine sehr lange
Arbeit. Der Dichter hat das riesige Werk offenbahr nicht in einem Zug von Anfang
bis zum Ende produziert, sondern einen kürzeren Entwurf viele Jahre hindurch
erweitert und ausgearbeitet; bei dieser Annahme erklären sich manche
Eigentümlichkeiten des Aufbaus. Die Anzahl Rollen, die der fahrende Sänger mit
sich führen musste, wuchs ständig. [88]
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.
The use of writing in early Greece, when seen in the wider
context, more probably duplicated the activity of the oral bards rather than
suppressing it. It is even conceivable that the poet of the Iliad could
have used writing to record his poetry, or more likely part of it. Memorization
was also possible. [90]
The Dream of Ossian
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.
Select Bibliography
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.
Abrams, M. H. 1953. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory
and the Critical Tradition. New York.
Aubignac, F. Hédelin, Abbé d’. 1665/1925. Conjectures
académiques, ou dissertation sur l’Iliade. (Written c. 1665.)
Paris.
Bacon, F. 1605. The tvvoo bookes of Francis Bacon. Of the
proficience and aduancement of learning, diuine and humane.
London.
Bentley, R. 1713. Remarks upon a late discourse of
free-thinking, in a letter to F.H.D.D. by Phileleutherus Lipsiensis.
London.
Blair, H. 1760. Preface. In Gaskill 1996:5–6.
———. [1763]1765. A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of
Ossian. In Gaskill 1996:342–399.
———. 1783. Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres.
London.
Bloom, H., ed. 1986. Homer. New York.
Bowra, C. 1972. Homer. New York.
Bysveen, J. 1982. Epic Tradition and Innovation in James
Macphersons’s Fingal. Uppsala.
Campbell, H. 1822. The Poems of Ossian, translated by James
Macpherson, Esq, Authenticated, illustrated, and explained by Hugh Campbell,
Esq. London.
Chapman, R. W. 1931. “Blair on Ossian.” RES
7:80–83.
Clerk, A. 1870. The Poems of Ossian in the original Gaelic
with a literal translation into English and a dissertation on the authenticity
of the poems by the Rev. Archibald Clerk. Together with the English translation
by Macpherson. Edinburgh and London.
Dué, C. 2005. “Homer’s Post-Classical Legacy.” In Foley 2005
(forthcoming).
Duff, W. 1767. An essay on original genius.
London.
———. 1770. Critical observations on the writings of the most
celebrated original geniuses in poetry. London.
Foerster, D. 1947. Homer in English Criticism: The
Historical Approach in the Eighteenth Century. New Haven.
Foley, J. M. 1998. “Individual Poet and Epic Tradition: Homer as
Legendary Singer.” Arethusa 31:149–178.
———, ed. 2005. The Blackwell Companion to Ancient Epic.
Oxford.
Gaskill, H., ed. 1991. Ossian Revisited.
Edinburgh.
———, ed. 1996. The Poems of Ossian and Related Works.
Edinburgh.
Gerard, A. 1774. An essay on genius.
London.
Grafton, A. 1990. Forgers and Critics: Creativity and
Duplicity in Western Scholarship. Princeton.
Griffin, J. 1980. Homer. Oxford.
Groom, N. 2002. The Forger’s Shadow: How Forgery Changed the
Course of Literature. London.
Hainsworth, J. 1969. Homer. Oxford.
Haugen, K. 1998. “Ossian and the Invention of Textual History.”
Journal of the History of Ideas 59:309–327.
Haywood, I. 1993. The Making of History: A Study of the
Literary Forgeries of James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton in Relation to
Eighteenth-Century Ideas of History. Rutherford.
Hédelin, F., Abbé d’Aubignac. See Aubignac.
Janko, R. 1982. Homer, Hesiod, and the Hymns: Diachronic
Development in Epic Diction. Cambridge.
———. 1998a. “The Homeric Poems as Oral Dictated Texts.”
CQ 48:1–13.
———. 1998b. Review of Ian Morris and Barry Powell, eds., A
New Companion to Homer. Leiden: Brill, 1997. BMCR 98.5.20,
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/1998/98.5.20.html.
Jensen, M. 1980. The Homeric Question and the Oral
Formulaic-Theory. Copenhagen.
King, K., ed. 1994. Homer. New York.
Laing, M. 1805. The Poems of Ossian, &c, containing the
Poetical Works of James Macpherson, Esq. in prose and rhyme: with notes and
illustrations by Malcom Laing, Esq. Edinburgh.
Lamberton, R. 1986. Homer the Theologian.
Berkeley.
Lamberton, R., and J. Keaney, eds. 1992. Homer’s Ancient
Readers: The Hermeneutics of Greek Epic’s Earliest Exegetes.
Princeton.
Lord, A. B. 1936. “Homer and Huso I: The Singer’s Rests in Greek
and South Slavic Heroic Song.” TAPA 67:106–113.
———. 1938. “Homer and Huso II: Narrative Inconsistencies in
Homer and Oral Poetry.” TAPA 69:439–445.
———. 1948a. “Homer and Huso III: Enjambment in Greek and South
Slavic Heroic Song.” TAPA 79:113–124.
———. 1948b. “Homer, Parry, and Huso.” American Journal of
Archaeology 52:34–44.
———. 1953. “Homer’s Originality: Oral Dictated Texts.”
TAPA 94:124–34.
———. 1960. The Singer of Tales. 2nd ed. 2000 by S.
Mitchell and G. Nagy. Cambridge, MA.
———. 1970. “Tradition and the Oral Poet: Homer, Huso, and Avdo
Medjedovic.” Atti del Convegno Internazionale sul Tema: La Poesia Epica e la
sua Formazione (eds. E. Cerulli et al.) 13–28. Rome.
———. 1991. Epic Singers and Oral Tradition. Ithaca,
NY.
———. 1995. The Singer Resumes the Tale. Ithaca,
NY.
Macfarlan, R., ed. 1807. The Poems of Ossian, in the
original Gaelic, with a literal translation into Latin, by the late Robert
MacFarlan, AM. Together with a Dissertation on the Authenticity of the poems, by
Sir John Sinclair, Bart. And a translation from the Italian of the Abbe
Cesarotti’s Dissertation on the controversy respecting the authenticity of
Ossian, with notes and a supplemental essay, by John M’Arthur, LL.D., published
under the sanction of the Highland Society of London. London.
MacKillop, J. 1986. Fionn mac Cumhaill: Celtic Myth in
English Literature. Syracuse, NY.
Macpherson, J., ed. 1761. 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, by James Macpherson.
London.
———. 1763. Temora, an ancient epic poem, in eight books;
together with several other poems composed by Ossian, the son of Fingal,
translated from the Galic language by James Macpherson. London.
———. 1765. The works of Ossian, the son of Fingal,
translated from the Galic language by James Macpherson. 3rd ed.
London.
———. 1773. The Iliad of Homer. London.
Martin, R. P. 1993. “Telemachus and the Last Hero Song.”
Colby Quarterly 29: 222–240.
McAuslan, I., and P. Walcot, eds. 1998. Homer.
Oxford.
Michalopoulos, A. 1966. Homer. New York.
Moore, D. 2003. Enlightenment and Romance in James
Macpherson’s The Poems of Ossian: Myth, Genre and Cultural Change.
Burlington, Vt.
Morris, I., and B. Powell, eds. 1997. A New Companion to
Homer. Leiden.
Nagy, G. 1990. Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an
Epic Past. Baltimore.
———. 1996a. Homeric Questions. Austin, TX.
———. 1996b. Poetry as Performance.
Cambridge.
———. 1997. “Homeric Scholia.” In Morris and Powell
1997:101–122.
———. 1998. “Aristarchean Questions: Gregory Nagy on Richard
Janko on Morris and Powell. Response to 1998.05.20.” BMCR 1998.07.14,
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/1998/1998-07-14.html.
———. 1999. Comments on SO Debate. Symbolae Osloensis
74:64–68.
———. 2000. Review of Martin L. West, ed., Homeri Ilias.
Recensuit/testimonia congessit. Volumen prius, rhapsodias I-XII continens.
BMCR 2000.09.12,
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2000/2000-09-12.html.
Parnell, T. 1715. “An essay on the life, writings and learning
of Homer.” In The Iliad of Homer, trans. A. Pope, vol. I.
London.
Parry, A., ed. 1971. The Making of Homeric Verse: The
Collected Papers of Milman Parry. Oxford.
Parry, M. 1928. L’épithète traditionelle dans Homère: essai
sur un problème de style homérique. Paris. [Repr. and trans. in A. Parry
1971:1–190.]
Perrault, C. 1688–1697. Parallèle des anciens et des
modernes. Paris.
Pope, A., ed. 1715. The Iliad of Homer.
London.
Powell, B. 1991. Homer and the Origin of the Greek
Alphabet. Cambridge.
———. 1997. “Homer and Writing.” In Morris and Powell
1997:3–32.
———. 2004. Homer. Oxford.
Renan, E. 1890. L’avenir de la science: pensées de
1848. Paris.
Rouse, W. 1939. Homer. London.
Rubel, M. 1978. Savage and Barbarian: Historical Atitudes in
the Criticism of Homer and Ossian in Britain, 1760-1800.
Amsterdam.
Rutherford, R. 1996. Homer. Oxford.
Ruthven, K. 2001. Faking Literature.
Cambridge.
Simonsuuri, K. 1979. Homer’s Original Genius: Eighteenth
Century Notions of the Early Greek Epic (1688-1798). Cambridge.
Schmitz, R. 1948. Hugh Blair. New York.
Sharpe, W. 1755. A dissertation upon genius, or, an attempt
to shew, that the several instances of distinction, and degrees of superiority
in the human genius are not, fundamentally, the result of nature, but the effect
of acquisition. London.
Stafford, F. 1988. The Sublime Savage. James Macpherson and
the Poems of Ossian. Edinburgh.
———. 1996. “Introduction: The Ossianic Poems of James
Macpherson.” In Gaskill 1996: v–xxi.
Thomson, D. 1952. The Gaelic Sources of Macpherson’s
Ossian. Edinburgh.
———. 1958. “Bogus Gaelic Literature c.1750-c.1820.”
Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Glasgow 5:172–88.
———. 1963. “‘Ossian’ Macpherson and the Gaelic World of the
Eighteenth Century.” Aberdeen University Review 40:7–20.
———. 1987. “Macpherson’s Ossian, Ballads to Epics.” The
Heroic Process: Form, Function, and Fantasy in Folk Epic (eds. B. Almquist,
S. Ó Catháin, and P. Ó Héalaí) 243–264. Dublin.
Trevor-Roper, H. 1983. “The Invention of Tradition: The Highland
Tradition of Scotland.” The Invention of Tradition (ed. E. Hobsbawm and
T. Ranger) 15–41. Cambridge.
Underwood, S. 1998. English Translators of Homer from George
Chapman to Christopher Logue. Plymouth, England.
Vico, G. 1744. Principi di scienza nuova di Giambattista
Vico d’intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni. Naples.
Vidan, A. 2003. Embroidered with Gold, Strung with Pearls:
The Traditional Ballads of Bosnian Women. Cambridge, MA.
Vivante, P. 1985. Homer. New Haven.
Webb, T. 1982. English Romantic Hellenism 1700-1824.
Manchester.
West, M. L. 1990. “Archaische Heldendichtung: Singen und
Schreiben.” Der Übergang von der Mündlichkeit zur Literatur bei den
Griechen (ed. W. Kullmann and M. Reichel) 33–50. Tübingen.
———. 1999. “The Invention of Homer.” Classical
Quarterly 49:364–382.
———. 2000. “The Gardens of Alcinous and the Oral Dictated Text
Theory.” Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae
40:479–488.
———. 2001. “Homer durch Jahrtausende: Wie die Ilias zu uns
gelangte.” Troia: Traum und Wirklichkeit (ed. J. Latacz, P. Blome, J.
Luckhardt, H. Brunner, M. Korfmann, and G. Biegel). Stuttgart.
Wood, R. 1769. An Essay on the original genius of
Homer. London.
———. 1775. An essay on the original genius and writings of
Homer with a comparative view of the ancient and present state of the
Troade. London.
Wordsworth, J., ed. 1996. Ossian’s Fingal. New
York.
Young, E. 1759. Conjectures on Original Composition.
London.
Footnotes
[ back ] 1.
See, e.g., B. C. Fenik, ed., Homer: Tradition and Invention
(1978), M. L. West, “The Invention of Homer” (1999), and B. Graziosi,
Inventing Homer (2002).
[ back ] 2.
Cf. the anonymous formulation from a school essay quoted by Graziosi
2002:235: “Actually, Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of that
name.” (Graziosi notes that a similar student remark was apparently known to
Mark Twain.) For West’s discussion of the name of Homer and the Homeridai, see
West 1999:366–372. For other theories (ancient and modern) about the origin of
the name, see Graziosi 2002:51–54 and 79–82 with citations of recent scholarship
ad loc.
[ back ] 3.
For Johnson’s views, see further below.
[ back ] 4.
Macpherson claimed to translating Gaelic verse, but his translations are
rendered in rhythmic prose, making the question of what to call Macpherson’s
work rather difficult. In this paper I refer to it as poetry, since Macpherson
had as much of a creative role in the composition of the “original” verse as he
did in the act of translating that verse. Ruthven 2001 has coined the term
“Macphossian” to denote the Ossianic works of Macpherson.
[ back ] 5.
For this critique, see at Dué 2002:83–89.
[ back ] 6.
Pope 1715:§1–5. For this discussion of Pope’s use of the terms fire and
invention I am indebted throughout to the analysis of Simonsuuri 1979:57–64.
Another important eighteenth-century discussion of “Homer’s invention” is that
of Alexander Gerard (1774).
[ back ] 7.
For invention as imagination see Simonsuuri 1979:61.
[ back ] 8.
The term fire, like invention, has roots in antiquity: see again
Simonsuuri 1979:60–61.
[ back ] 9.
On this point see Simonsuuri 1979:62.
[ back ] 10.
On Chapman’s translation see Underwood 1998:16–28.
[ back ] 11.
On Pope’s approval of Chapman’s method see also Simonsuuri
1979:60.
[ back ] 12.
See Simonsuuri 1979:58–59 and Underwood 1998:29–42.
[ back ] 13.
From Cowper’s essay entitled Critical Remarks on Pope’s Homer.
Originally printed in Gentleman’s Magazine in 1785 under the pseudonym
Alethes (‘Truth’), the essay can now be read in Webb 1982:174–179.
[ back ] 14.
See Webb 1982:172–173.
[ back ] 15.
For more on Humes’ letter, see Wordsworth 1996.
The Works of Ossian continue to be cited
everywhere as the premier examples of literary forgery. Much of the first 16
pages of Ruthven’s 2001 book, Faking Literature, is devoted to
Macpherson’s work as a kind of test case. While conceding that “its mixture of
Ossianic residues with Macphossianic embellishments results in a textual
hybridity which destabilises the commonsense notion that a literary text is
either genuine or bogus,” Ruthven nevertheless refers to the Works as
“the canonical texts for anybody interested in either committing or studying
literary forgery” (5), “bogus Ossian” (7), “the key text for analysts of
literary forgery” (13), and a “richly foundational episode in the annals of
modern spuriosity” (15). On Macpherson’s work as an act of literary forgery see
also the discussions of Trevor-Roper 1983, Grafton 1990, Haywood 1993, and Groom
2002.
[ back ] 17.
For more on Macpherson’s professors, the curriculum of the University of
Aberdeen at this time, and Blackwell’s influence, see Stafford
1988:24–39.
[ back ] 18.
For more on Macpherson’s early poetry, see Stafford
1988:40–60.
[ back ] 19.
See Stafford 1988:67–70.
[ back ] 20.
See Stafford 1988:78.
[ back ] 21.
See Stafford 1988:97.
[ back ] 22.
It is more accurate to say that Blair and Macpherson each supported the
belief system of the other. Blair was already working on his Lectures on
Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (published 1783) when he met Macpherson in
1759. These lectures included “The Origin and Nature of Figurative Language,”
“The Sublime in Writing,” and the “Nature of Poetry—its Origin and Progress.” In
his biography of Blair, R. Scmitz puts it this way: “Macpherson’s stuff was meat
for Blair’s theories, and Blair’s theories were … the food on which Macpherson’s
poetical efforts throve and fattened” (Schmitz 1948:44).
[ back ] 23.
As Stafford points out, however, these letters were not as supportive of
Macpherson’s work as Blair’s Dissertation asserts. See Stafford
1988:169. For more on the publication history of the Ossianic corpus see the
edition of Gaskill 1996.
[ back ] 24.
For an overview of the debate see Stafford 1988:163–178.
[ back ] 25.
He published his findings in Journey to the Western Isles
(1775).
[ back ] 26.
In 1952, D.S. Thomson identified the Gaelic poems used by Macpherson and
published them as The Gaelic Sources of Macpherson’s Ossian (Edinburgh,
1952). For more on the relationship of Macpherson’s work to traditional Gaelic
poetry see Bysveen 1982.
[ back ] 27.
See especially the editions of Macfarlan 1807, Campbell 1822, and Clerk
1870.
[ back ] 28.
Stafford 1988:142 compares the Ossianic poetry contained in The Book
of the Dean of Linsmore, a collection of Gaelic poetry compiled between
1512 and 1526 by James and Duncan MacGregor. For the Homeric Odyssey as
a poem about the end of the heroic tradition see Martin 1993.
[ back ] 29.
Stafford 1988:143–144, who argues that blindness serves quite a different
purpose in Macpherson’s poetry than in these other works.
[ back ] 30.
For ancient views of Homer’s blindness Graziosi 2002:125ff. By the
eighteenth century the “Homeric Question” was beginning to be articulated, and
such scholars as D’Aubignac, Perrault, Bentley, and Vico had begun to question
traditional views about Homer as poet, arguing that the Homeric poems were
composed orally and transmitted over the course of many generations by
rhapsodes. Nevertheless, the traditional view of Homer as blind bard persisted
and was espoused by such scholars as Parnell (whose 1715 life of Homer
accompanied Pope’s translation of the Iliad) and Blackwell (1735).
[ back ] 31.
See Lamberton 1986:8–9.
[ back ] 32.
See especially the description of the death of Sarpedon in Iliad
17.49–60.
[ back ] 33.
Cf. Stafford 1996:xiv: “he had succeeded in bringing together apparently
contradictory aesthetic ideals with remarkable harmony. The traditional
neo-classical view of the epic as the highest form of poetry had been combined,
through the development of the bard figure and his personal memories, with the
newer demands for originality, individuality, and spontaneous
composition.”
[ back ] 34.
See Stafford 1988:169: “Above all, it was the pseudo-epic form that most
disappointed the Highlanders. Even James Macdonald, who admired Fingal
and Temora greatly, wished that ‘Mr. Macpherson had not given them in
that form for it is not the natural dress of Ossian’ and the same objection has
always been raised by any reader familiar with genuine Gaelic
ballads.”
[ back ] 35.
See Stafford 1988:137–139.
[ back ] 36.
Simonsuuri 1979:111.
[ back ] 37.
For more on the intellectual history of these ideas see Rubel
1978.
[ back ] 38.
Blair 1765/1996:347.
[ back ] 39.
Rubel 1978.
[ back ] 40.
Important early articulations include those of Vico 1730, Sharpe 1755,
and Young 1759. Not long after the publication of the Works of Ossian
were published the essays of Duff 1767 and 1770 and Wood 1769/1775.
[ back ] 41.
Blair 1765/1996:345–346.
[ back ] 42.
Blair 1765/1996:386.
[ back ] 43.
Blair 1765/1996:357.
[ back ] 44.
Blair 1765/1996:381.
[ back ] 45.
Blair 1765/1996:364. Cf. p. 374: “Let him read the story of Pallas in
Virgil, which is of a similar kind; and after all the praise he may justly
bestow on the elegant and finished description of that amiable author, let him
say, which of the two poets unfold most of the human soul.” See also p.
390.
[ back ] 46.
Blair 1765/1996:386.
[ back ] 47.
Blair 1765/1996:358.
[ back ] 48.
Blair 1765/1996:398.
[ back ] 49.
Simonsuuri 1979:112–113 has a slightly more skeptical interpretation of
Macpherson’s participation in the intellectual debates of his day concerning
Homer than I offer here: “Macpherson had been influenced by the ideas current in
primitivist circles in the 1750s and 1760s, but his own arguments, it must be
remembered, remained naively non-theoretical … Macpherson’s idea that Homer was
a poet who had lived and worked in a society similar to the third-century
Ossian’s was derived from his own experience as a translator of early Gaelic
poetry rather than from study or understanding of the nature of the Homeric
epic.”
[ back ] 50.
Macpherson’s Dissertation and the first incarnation of Blair’s
Dissertation were both published in 1763, and there was almost
certainly cooperation between the two. The appendix to the 1765 version of
Blair’s Dissertation, which I quote below, does not specify the source
of Blair’s information about the Scottish oral tradition, but it may well have
been Macpherson himself.
[ back ] 51.
On this point see also Haugen 1998, 316. As she points out, Blackwell’s
book is entitled An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of
Homer.
[ back ] 52.
I must point out here that Macpherson himself never publicly admitted to
not having complete manuscripts on which he based his Fingal and
Temora. These were never produced and almost certainly did not exist.
Macpherson went so far as to literally retranslate the poems into Gaelic in a
failed attempt to prove their authenticity, and it is here that most modern
scholars would draw the line between creative reconstruction (of an original
that did not exist, but that Macpherson at least believed existed) and outright
forgery.
[ back ] 53.
See Perrault 1688-1697, Bentley 1713, and Vico 1744. For attestations of
even earlier arguments along these lines see Grafton, Most, and Zetzel
1985:5.
[ back ] 54.
The translation is that of Nagy 1997:101.
[ back ] 55.
Wolf 1795/1985:137 (chapter 33).
[ back ] 56.
Wood 1775:278–279. See also Wood 1769:lxiv–lxv.
[ back ] 57.
Haugen 1998:315.
[ back ] 58.
Bentley 1713:18.
[ back ] 59.
See Nagy 1997:102–112.
[ back ] 60.
Macpherson 1763/1996:49. Cf. Rosalind Thomas’s strikingly analogous
arguments concerning the memorability of Homeric poetry and verse in general:
“it is a commonplace in the study of oral tradition that anything passed on in
verse has a better chance of accurate transmission … Poetry was itself also
memorable and memorizable” (Thomas 1992:114).
[ back ] 61.
See Blair 1765/1996:350. See also above on Blair’s comments about the
oral tradition in his preface to Fragments of Ancient Poetry as well as
Haugen 1998:317.
[ back ] 62.
Macpherson 1763/1996:48.
[ back ] 63.
See Stafford 1988:164.
[ back ] 64.
Here I call attention to Gregory Nagy’s arguments over the past two
decades concerning the text fixation of the Homeric Iliad and
Odyssey. Nagy argues that text fixation of the two poems took place not
through writing but in the context of increasingly regulated performance at the
Panathenaic festival. As the poems passed through this “Panathenaic bottleneck”
the degree of variability became increasingly limited until the point at which
we find them in the Ptolemaic papyri. This is a more sophisticated and developed
theory than the one offered by Macpherson of course, and it is interesting to
note that despite the apparent similarities, the goals of Nagy and Macpherson
could not be more antithetical. Whereas Macpherson is seeking to assure his
readers of the preservation of a master poet’s composition through memorization
and continual performance, Nagy seeks to explain how a performance system that
was at one time multiform became uniform. On the “Panathenaic bottleneck” see
Nagy 1990:23, 1996a:43, 1996b:77, and 1999.
[ back ] 65.
Haugen 1998:320.
[ back ] 66.
Stafford 1988:124.
[ back ] 67.
Macpherson 1773:xx.
[ back ] 68.
Macpherson 1773:x–xi.
[ back ] 69.
Stafford 1996:xiv.
[ back ] 70.
On West’s edition, see below.
[ back ] 71.
E.g. Lord 1953, Jensen 1980, Janko 1982 and 1998, West 1990, and Powell
1991 and 1997. For a summary and discussion of the various dictation theories
see Nagy 1996:30–35.
[ back ] 72.
Graziosi 2002:6.
[ back ] 73.
Cf. Lord 1970:13: “For the purposes of this paper I am assuming that the
Homeric poems are oral traditional songs, that they were written down from a
traditional oral poet in a living and very rich tradition of song in ancient
Greece.” See also the citations in note 69, above.
[ back ] 74.
Quoted by S. Mitchell and G. Nagy in their introduction to the 2nd
edition of Lord’s Singer of Tales (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1960; 2nd edition, 2000). The quotation comes from M. Parry, “Report on
Work in Yugoslavia, October 20, 1934–March 24, 1935,” Milman Parry Collection of
Oral Literature, p. 12.
[ back ] 75.
I am grateful to Stephen Mitchell, curator of the Milman Parry Collection
of Oral Literature, for providing me with a copy of this essay.
[ back ] 76.
Lord 1948b:40.
[ back ] 77.
Foley 1998:161.
[ back ] 78.
Lord 1936, 1938, 1948a; see also Lord 1948b and 1970.
[ back ] 79.
Parry was able to complete only 12 pages of this book before his death.
They are published in Lord 1948.
[ back ] 80.
See Lord 1970.
[ back ] 81.
Lord 1948:42.
[ back ] 82.
Parry 1928:1, quoting Renan 1890:292. See Lord 1948b:34.
[ back ] 83.
See, e.g., Lord, 1948:41.
[ back ] 84.
See Vidan 2003:10.
[ back ] 85.
Lord 1991:47–48.
[ back ] 86.
Martin 1993:223.
[ back ] 87.
West 2000:487.
[ back ] 88.
West 2001:108.
[ back ] 89.
See Thomas 1989. For a critique of the term “orality” see Bakker
2005.
[ back ] 90.
Thomas 1992:50.
[ back ] 91.
See, e.g., Rouse, 1939, Michaelopoulos 1966, Hainsworth 1969, Bowra 1972,
Griffin 1980, Vivante 1985, Bloom 1986, King 1994, Rutherford 1996, McAuslan and
Wolcott 1998, and Powell 2004.
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