Tag Archive: 0James Macpherson

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 […]

James Macpherson (1736–1796) has been called ‘in literary and cultural terms perhaps the most influential of all forgers …  Rare among educated Scots of his era in his familiarity with the Gaelic language and its still primarily oral tradition, he drew largely on both in his early poetry (The Highlander, 1758), which brought him little […]