Report of the Committee of the Highland Society of Scotland, appointed to inquire into the nature and authenticity of the poems of Ossian

In 1797, the Highland Society of Scotland in Edinburgh put together a special committee, supervised by the novelist (and leading member of the Edinburgh literary scene) Henry Mackenzie. The committee was tasked with collecting a complete overview of the facts and documents which had made possible the work of James Macpherson. Macpherson had published the Ossianic poems in 1762, supposedly having collected their contents from early manuscripts and word-of-mouth in the Gaelic oral tradition before translating them into English.

After gathering its evidence, the committee was then to decide if the poems were translations from original manuscripts, as Macpherson claimed; or if they had been written by Macpherson himself — as many suspected. The inquiry lasted eight years and, upon reaching its conclusion in 1805, it published the report pictured in this image.

The conclusions of this report left many astonished. While it did not outline Macpherson as a liar or falsifier, the report highlighted the absence of any surviving original Ossianic manuscripts — this in itself made a resounding conclusion in favour of Macpherson's claim near-impossible. What the committee did conclude, however, was that if Macpherson had worked from original material - such as oral sources - he had (at the very least) heavily edited or diverged from his sources.

[Shelfmark Blair.74]