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Although the name of Ossian was heard a great deal during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it has since become little more than a historical curiosity. We are amazed and amused that so many intelligent, well-educated people could have sincerely believed that the works of Ossian were both completely authentic and (what is perhaps more astounding) aesthetically unsurpassed—even by Homer. 1 We have become accustomed to regarding this strange phenomenon as a case of deliberate deception: the public was simply fooled by James Macpherson, a brash young Highlander who cleverly tricked the literary world into accepting compositions that were in part distortions of genuine Gaelic poems and ballads, in part his own creation, as the original poetry of a legendary thirdcentury Highland bard called Ossian. The world of letters fell for the ruse, so the story goes, because Macpherson was …