/lit/ - Literature

it s because of the jews

>>20142789
>the jews
I think you mean "the Irish". You need to read more of Ossian autist's /lit/ posts. It's almost as good as the Scots Wikipedia autism scandal.

>Why have I not heard about him until discovering /lit/?
Because he was totally destroyed by firstly the mass deportation of all Scots to central belt slums and the Irish abroad and to Dublin removing all the native culture which held him.
King Arthur is still known because the English saved him by taking him into their culture but Ossian's protectors totally disappeared.
And further in Scotland when during the 1700s-1800s there was a massive campaign against Scotland and especially Gaelic Scotland to the point well known people like Samuel Johnson and even Fredrich Engels totally denied Scotland had any Ossianic songs or even any ancient songs at all.
>Even more weird is that I can't find any editions of it published by the big houses
That's how brutal the campaign was against it. You cannot actually buy any new copies of ANY Scottish Ossian poems. Even traditional ones collected by James MacGregor in the 1500s or 1800s collections are only available in PDF prints.

Just think of what else could easily have been suppressed like this that neither you or me knows about.

>>20142357
>>20143583
Does anybody know of any more works like this? By that I mean national epics that are genuinely good but almost forgotten

>>20142357
there are so many printings; someone, please help find me a copy, or at least tell me which publisher you read. many thanks anons

>>20144120
Ossian isn't a national epic since it only could have existed in manuscript form and went against the traditions in parts

>>20144120
Kalevala if you haven't already heard of it is the national epic of Finland
Țiganiada or Gypsy Camp is a romanian epic about gypsies and Vlad Țepeş, but it isn't romanias national epic.

>>20144213
>but it isn't romanias
Romanians aren't gypsies

>>20143583
>during the 1700s-1800s there was a massive campaign against Scotland
It was a time of change but there was a mania for all things Scottish during the 18th and 19th century, Ossian and the Waverley novels were huge hits all across Europe.
Here's a list of operas dedicated to Walter Scott alone
1819: Rossini's La donna del lago (based on Lady of the Lake)
1819: Sullivan's Ivanhoe (based on Ivanhoe)
1825: Boieldieu's La dame blanche (based on the Waverley novels)
1826: Rossini's Ivanhoe (based on Ivanhoe)
1829: Donizetti's Il castello di Kenilworth (based on Kenilworth)
1835: Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor (based on The Bride of Lammermoor)
1867: Bizet's La jolie fille de Perth (based on The Fair Maid of Perth)
and that's not an exhaustive list, there are many lesser known operas based on his novels from the same time period

we also have
Carl Czerny's Piano Fantasies, named after 4 Walter Scott novels
Schubert's Ave Maria, a setting and translation of a song from Walter Scott's Lady of the Lake
Mendelssohn's Scottish Symphony inspired by his visit to the Hebrides
Haydn and Beethoven's Scottish folksong settings
As well as the huge names coming out of the country: Burns, Boswell, Smollett, Hume, Fergusson, Adam Smith, Scott, Carlyle...foreign writers, poets, composers, everyone was making trips to Scotland, especially the Highlands. Wordsworth, Keats, Swinburne, so many of them were writing works inspired by Scottish culture.

>>20142357
>Why have I not heard about him until discovering /lit/?
Because Anglophone sense of literary history is incredibly myopic. I was taught about it literally in high school (southeast Europe) when I was 17. A fragment is also included within Goethe's "Werther", which is the cornerstone of the romanticist period in literature. But I don't think anyone on /lit/ reads Goethe, a few read Werther or Faust but he's mostly just namedropped.
You heard about it on /lit/ because there's a dedicated schizo/troll who claims it is indeed original Scottish poetry.

>>20144176
There's barely any legit modern edition - https://www.amazon.com/Poems-Ossian-Related-Works-Macpherson/dp/0748607072 is the only one, AFAIK. The rest are just on-demand prints of old editions' scans or the raw text that's available on exclassics (link in OP), which you can simply print out yourself.

>>20144333
The Scottish Romantic revival was in many ways a response to and continuation of the project that Ossian came to represent against the will of its creator, rather than what it original intended and pretended to be: an attempt to create a literary history of Scotland, rather than being an example of a rich ancient literary canon.

The reason Ossian is controversial and harder to come by in print is the context surrounding it’s publication, specifically what is was promoted as being as opposed to what it was. The poem was presented by its author, James MacPherson, as a translation of ancient Scottish manuscripts written by a Homeric style poet called Ossian. The reality of it was that it was an original work by MacPherson based on ancient Scottish, and more commonly, Irish poetic narratives. As someone else in the thread alluded to, Samuel Johnson kicked up a stink about the poems authenticity as translations of ancient works and MacPherson’s refusal to show the manuscripts he had supposedly based the poem on causes further scepticism. Johnson was overall right about Ossian, it’s purported story was a hoax, but the poems were excellent on their own, something that has been sadly understated thanks to interest in the controversy overshadowing the poems. While Johnson may have been right about MacPherson and the Ossian stories, he was wrong in his claim that Scotland had no written tradition, something that has been disputed vociferously since, though the reputation has still stuck.

Ossian’s lack of modern publications is both because of the above stated reasons, but more than anything else it a byproduct of a bigger problem caused by the canonical Big Six of Romantic Poetry, Wordsworth, Blake, Keats, Shelley, Byron and Coleridge, dominating academic interest in poetry of the late eighteenth and and early nineteenth centuries. MacPherson as a romantic, or proto-romantic poetic figure suffered the same fate as many of his contemporaries: he was simply drowned out by his later competition. The controversy was the first nail, but the domination of the above six was the last and most important as they blighted romantic poetry scholarship for nearly two centuries.

Ossian is still in print, though much like James Hogg’s seminal later works The Three Perils of Men and Women, it’s mostly though Scottish academic publishers. Here’s the edition I own:

The Poems of Ossian, Translated by James Macpherson https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01ERWJ4VW/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_04WQD4HM6DGJ0840815R?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

>>20144382
>it is indeed original Scottish poetry.
its rather crude to resort to insluts and the poems published by macpherson, there are many that are not, are old indeed
>works and MacPherson’s refusal to show the manuscripts
he showed his manuscripts and even messaged all his subscribers to have them printed
then in 1807 it was finally printed though corrupt from modernisation

>>20144333
>Adam Smith, Hume
>Scottish
lmfao

>>20144403
The poems translated by MacPherson weren't "fake" at all and were genuinely copied from Medieval manuscripts
Johnson
Who cares? Seriously. He doesn't have any authority at all on anything to do eith this.

>>20144879
They were loosely based on medieval Irish manuscripts about Fionn mac Cumhaill, with extensive revisions by MacPherson. While some of the narratives present in MacPherson’s Ossian cycle were taken from real Earse Manuscripts, the poems and narratives as presented in the Ossian manuscript published as translated by MacPherson had no foundation in any extant ancient text. The work presented in Earse as the original the translation was based off of was proven to have been translated back into Earse from English. While it’s undeniable that fragments from older poems are in the MacPherson Cycle there is no evidence of an original manuscript in that form containing that text. This is the scholarly consensus among modern specialist in Scottish literature. Anyone who argues otherwise is either brain damaged or arguing in bad faith. The Ossian poems are great, and their reputation has been irreparably damaged by being passed off as legitimate historical artefacts.

Well well well

WELL WELL WELL

If it isn't the Ossianfags again...

>>20144285
t. romanian (gypsy)

>>20144566
MEDS!

>>20146713
They are as Scottish as Tony Blair or David the First
Aka not at all except their ancestry

>>20145146
>medieval Irish manuscripts
MacPherson couldn't read Irish Gaelic and he never went to Ireland during this whole time.
>MacPherson had no foundation in any extant ancient text
Except the ones he translated all his work from
>The work presented in Earse as the original the translation was based off of was proven to have been translated back into Earse from English
No it hasn't

Reading what you've written you just sound like you're repeating what Wikipedia told you to think.

>>20142357
"Ossian" was invented by an 18th century seething Scotsman called Macpherson, whose forgeries were already highly in doubt in his lifetime and have been completely disproven since, who was angry that Irish people had at least some culture and folklore and the Scottish didn't.
The only people who believe that his forgeries were real are seething Scottish schizos like in this thread.

>>20147660
The irony of that post and that image

>>20147660
>>20146713
>>20145146
>>20144403
you're talking to a well known schizo known as ASF. he is a delusional scottish nationalist who believes that all scots are descended from picts, that the picts spoke gaelic, that the dal riata never happened and that the ossian cycle is totally real and not bullshit. he spends his time lurking on /his/ and /int/ and is instantly attracted to any thread that talks about scotland, ireland, gaels, picts, germanics in the british isles, etc. when he gets mad he will spam interracial porn. he refers to anybody who disagrees with him as "AIF" (autistic irish freak) or "AEF" (autistic english freak)
he's a well known schizo and should be ignored and ridiculed

>>20148511
Err right so how does this disprove MacPherson published medieval manuscripts?

>>20148511
Obsessed