Tag Archive: 0Herder

German interest in folksongs began in the middle of the eighteenth century, stoked in no small part by the Europe-wide mania for Ossian.  Thomas Percy’s influential Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) was also much admired, and the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who had been sent a copy by Rudolf Erich Raspe (of Munchausen fame) […]

One of the connecting threads of our Anglo-German Cultural Relations catalogue is James Macpherson’s highly influential and notoriously fraudulent tales of Ossian. Another, as one might expect, is Goethe. Ossian’s reach was international, and soon made its mark on the young German writer (still only 23), who published his own four-volume edition, in English, in […]