[HN Gopher] Ossian, the 'Homer of the North', the greatest liter...
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Ossian, the 'Homer of the North', the greatest literary hoax (2016)
Author : drjohnson
Score : 43 points
Date : 2024-01-25 07:19 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.independent.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.independent.co.uk)
| sramsay wrote:
| Read it in grad school (for an English PhD). And honestly, that's
| the only context in which I'd recommend doing so. It's a dreary
| slog of a book; we were reading it more for its historical
| importance than for any particular literary quality.
|
| But I don't recall anyone at the time (mid 90s) doubting that the
| book was a forgery -- a somewhat inept mish-mash of Celtic
| literary figures and motifs. The interesting part was that people
| went absolutely wild for it. To the point that one can now speak
| of "Ossianism" as a significant literary movement.
| nottorp wrote:
| Well it's a real work of fiction. No matter who the actual
| author is, the work exists as (not so great, you say)
| literature, it's not a fake roswell alien. Why wouldn't it have
| fans or imitators?
| cafard wrote:
| Nabokov spoke with respect of it in the introduction to his
| translation of the epic of Prince Igor. (Or so I recall--it has
| been a while since I read it.) He knew perfectly well that it
| was a forgery, but the translations into Continental languages
| may have been better than the English. Clearly they answered a
| felt need.
| zetalyrae wrote:
| >Now scientists have used mathematical techniques to compare
| patterns in the "social networks" of characters in Ossian with
| those in two key Irish stories - and discovered they are almost a
| perfect match, virtually ending any remaining debate.
|
| Seems like a flimsy argument, irrespective of the other evidence.
| jhbadger wrote:
| Not really. If I write a series of stories about Herlock Solmes
| and his friend Dr. Wohn Jatson and everything maps up one-to-
| one with the Sherlock stories, it's pretty clear I copied them
| even if I changed the names. Or to give a real example,
| consider the famous silent movie "Nosferatu". While it was
| theoretically about a vampire named Count Orlock being visited
| at his castle by a lawyer named Thomas Hutter and how Orlock
| ends up moving to Hutter's city and attacking his family, it is
| pretty obviously the story of Count Dracula and Jonathan
| Harker, and the widow of Dracula's author sued the makers over
| it.
| munchler wrote:
| Yes, but you don't need a social network graph for the cases
| you describe. As you say, they're obviously the same story
| with some names changed.
|
| This article seems to claim that two stories had the same
| social graphs, but _weren 't_ obviously the same story. I
| find that a bit hard to believe.
| justrealist wrote:
| Even if they were, how would they know the Irish stories
| weren't derivative?
| bigbillheck wrote:
| Usually the "I found and translated this old work" gimmick is
| presented within the text, not outside it.
|
| That aside, digital humanities work can be interesting, but I
| found a preprint of the actual paper
| (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.00142.pdf) and their conclusion seems
| to be "Ossian is closer to these Irish works than it is to
| Homer".
|
| I'm not going to bother digging into their methods to see if
| they're plausible, but it's not clear to me why you'd expect
| anything else, or be able to conclude much of anything from that.
| If Ossian were real, then you'd expect later sources like
| "Acallam na Senorach" to either have been inspired by it or
| similar sources; if Ossian were not real then you'd expect it to
| have been inspired by "Acallam na Senorach" or similar sources.
|
| That is, they've found correlation, but from all hitherto
| existing analyses we already know there's substantial
| correlation, and what we care about is causality.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| > Usually the "I found and translated this old work" gimmick is
| presented within the text, not outside it.
|
| This was such a common trope in 18th century fiction that I'm
| surprised anyone took it at face value.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| It is similar to what folklorists like the Grimm brothers
| did, or the publisher of the Arabian Nights, Antoine Galland,
| so not necessarily suspect.
| slibhb wrote:
| From wikipedia:
|
| > Johnson also dismissed the poems' quality. Upon being asked,
| "But Doctor Johnson, do you really believe that any man today
| could write such poetry?" he famously replied, "Yes. Many men.
| Many women. And many children."
| felipeerias wrote:
| What was the original source that Macpherson was supposed to be
| translating from? An ancient book? Oral tradition? Something
| else?
| bazoom42 wrote:
| He claimed he had collected and recorded orally transmitted
| verse, just like other folklorists did at the time. It is still
| unclear whether he made it all up or whether some of the
| material was indeed based on now lost oral sources.
|
| An interesting comparison is Finnish folklorist Einar Lonnrot
| who collected the "national epic" Kalevala. We know Lonnrot
| largely used authentic oral sources, but he combined fragmented
| songs into a long narrative with his own edits and additions to
| make it more epic.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| On a slightly different topic, I was reading about other greek
| epics beyond Homer, and I knew there were things like the Theban
| Cycle and a broader Trojan War cycle, and it turns out that some
| of them may have never existed, they almost certainly weren't any
| kind of "cycle", the ones that did exist weren't very good, and
| that they may never have been written down at all outside of
| summaries.
|
| https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2020/02/epic-cycle.html
| digging wrote:
| > that they may never have been written down at all outside of
| summaries.
|
| That is normal for preclassical literature. Even the works of
| Homer weren't standardized until several centuries after they
| were created.
|
| > some of them may have never existed
|
| Actually, this is not uncommon for anything ancient, too. I
| believe most scholars doubt the existence of, for example,
| Homer himself.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| I'm fascinated by the Ossian affair. But I don't get the premise
| of this article. The "social network" of characters in Ossian is
| closer to characters in Irish legends than to Homer? You would
| expect that even if it had been authentic ancient legends. I'm
| sure if you compare Volsung Saga to Nibelungenlied you will also
| get closer matching networks, since they are based on the same
| ancient body of legends.
| digging wrote:
| Huh. Yeah, I thought there would be more substance. But this
| seems completely meaningless. Or perhaps even like it
| _supports_ the ancient origin story.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| I guess it's a hoax? And not just a pen name, writing under the
| guise of a fictional person?
|
| Not the first or best time that's been done. A long and proud
| history, up to and including 'The 13th Warrior' and 'The DaVinci
| Code'.
| saucymew wrote:
| When Ridley Scott's Napoleon came out, I picked up Napoleon: A
| Life by Andrew Roberts. Turns out Napoleon kept a copy of Ossian
| on him at all times during his war campaigns. Going deeper into
| the rabbit hole, I bought a copy of Ossian.
|
| My pet theory is that he cribbed a lot of inspiration from Ossian
| for his famous harangues to his army before pivotal moments in
| battle.
|
| "Farewell, thou bravest of men! Thou conqueror in the field! But
| the field shall see thee no more; nor the dark wood be lightened
| with the splendor of thy steel. Thou hast left no son. But the
| song shall preserve thy name. Future times shall hear of thee;
| they shall hear of the fallen Morar."
|
| As Will Ferrell said, it gets the people going.
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