‘Caledonian plagiary’

In 1763 the Irish antiquarian Sylvester O’Halloran described James Macpherson’s Fingal and Other Poems as the greatest example of ‘Caledonian plagiary’ in the long, sorry history of Scottish attempts to hijack Irish culture and history.1 O’Halloran was one of a number of Irish writers who responded to Macpherson’s relocation of Fionn/ Fingal and Oisin/Ossian from Ireland to Scotland, the reversal of the historical relationship between the two countries, and his denigration of Irish poetry as a travesty of ‘real’, Scottish-Celtic literature.2 O’Halloran did not know the half of it. That same year Macpherson’s Temora and Other Poems appeared, and O’Halloran’s worst imaginings could not have prepared him for what it contained. Irish history consists, says Mac p hers on, of ‘undigested fictions’, ‘mere fiction and idle romance’, ‘improbable and self-condemned tales’ that are ‘puerile to the last degree’ and the work of ‘idle fabulists’.3 He informs readers that the Irish language is a bastardised version of the mother tongue of Scotland, and, in a comparison that neatly captures the value framework of poetry, culture and national prestige within which he operates, Macpherson claims that Irish is so different from the Gaelic of Ossian that ‘it would be as ridiculous to think, that Milton’s Paradise Lost could be wrote by a Scottish peasant, as to suppose, that the poems ascribed to Ossian were writ in Ireland’.4