Ossian

Ossian, an heroic poet of the Gaelic tribes, is said to have been the son of Fionn, who lived in the third century A.D., and his works consist chiefly of accounts of the doings of Fionn and his family, Ossian himself is said to have been carried off when young to fairyland, and, on his return in old age and blindness, to have recounted the legends to St. Patrick. Originally fragmentary, the Ossianic poems have become a generic term for ancient Gaelic literature, whether of Scottish or Irish origin. They possess little interest now, but in the eighteenth century excited a warm controversy, when (in 1760 and the following years) James Macpherson published the two epics Fingal and Femora, and shorter poems, which professed to be translations of Ossian. Macpherson was not a Gaelic scholar, and there seems much room for doubt how far the poems were not his own composition. Scott, in the Antiquary, bestows some good-humoured satire upon the question.