Telling Tales Read Online Free

writers as Hume, Carlyle, Johnson and, perhaps most famously, Goethe.
    Born in 1738 in the Scottish Highlands to an old and influential family, James Macpherson was, it seemed, destined for the priesthood. But this clever little boy, educated first at Inverness and then at Aberdeen and Edinburgh, had a passion for old Gaelic folk tales and a love of language which did not go unobserved by his family, who began to realize that something a little more creative than the kirk might be his destiny.
    At Edinburgh University he wrote and published a few poems which were generally considered to be quite terrible, including one called ‘The Highlander’, an ambitious and interminable heroic poem which appeared in 1758 and which he later tried to suppress. The pattern of attempting to publish something as fiction which you later bring out as objective fact (or at least a literary
object trouvée
) is typical of the literary hoaxer, and its implication of a last-ditch attempt of a would-be writer to make his name is as pertinent to Macpherson as it is to the twenty-first-century’s James Frey.
    After graduating, the only gainful employment Macpherson could find was a post as a tutor for the staid and isolated Balgowan family. He hated it. Spending long dark evenings cloistered with the offspring of a family of uninspiring dullards and no prospect of the literary success he still longed for, it is perhaps no wonder that he resolved to make his mark on Scottish letters by any means necessary. So, in 1760, still resident at Balgowan, he produced the first of the manuscripts which would make him famous. These
Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland
were, he said, great Gaelic poems by a bard called Ossian which he had collected and translated on his lonely travels around the Highlands. The hero was Fingal (
Fionnghall
meaning ‘white stranger’) and they told:
    A TALE of the times of old! The deeds of days of other years.
    The murmur of thy streams, O Lora! brings back the memory of the past. The sound of thy woods, Garmaller, is lovely in mine ear. Dost thou not behold Malvina, a rock with its head of heath! Three aged pines bend from its face; green is the narrow plain at its feet; there the flower of the mountain grows, and shakes its white head in the breeze. The thistle is there alone, shedding its aged beard. Two stones, half sunk in the ground, show their heads of moss. The deer of the mountain avoids the place, for he beholds a dim ghost standing there. The mighty lie, O Malvina! in the narrow plain of the rock.
    A tale of the times of old! The deeds of days of other years!
    Who comes from the land of strangers, with his thousands around him? The sunbeam pours its bright stream before him; his hair meets the wind of his hills. His face is settled from war. He is calm as the evening beam that looks from the cloud of the west, on Cona’s silent vale. Who is it but Comhal’s son, the king of mighty deeds! He beholds the hills with joy, he bids a thousand voices rise. ‘Ye have fled over your fields, ye sons of the distant land! The king of the world sits in his hall, and hears of his people’s flight. He lifts his red eye of pride; he takes his father’s sword. Ye have fled over your fields, sons of the distant land!’
    What might seem like a fairly trite piece of pseudomythological arcana to our cynical modern ears appeared just at the right moment to be taken seriously. It was a time when all Europe’s young countries were madly trying to clothe their cultural identities with any tattered bits of history they could find, so the idea of an ancient Scottish Homer was too good to be true. This was Rousseau’s moment, and alongside his ‘noble savage’ stood Macpherson’s hero of the Highlands, a creature of windswept splendour imbued with an innate sense of chivalry and order. Here was an earthy soldier, schooled by mother nature, who would fight for the reputation of rural Scottish culture and