Academic literature on the topic 'Poets, Gaelic'
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Journal articles on the topic "Poets, Gaelic"
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IRELAND, COLIN A. "VENACULAR POETS IN BEDE AND MUIRCHÚ A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF EARLY INSULAR CULTURAL HISTORIES." Traditio 71 (2016): 33–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/tdo.2016.5.
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This comparative study examines the treatment of named vernacular poets from the Gaelic and Anglo-Saxon worlds in the subsequent literary cultural histories of their traditions. Both societies developed sophisticated bilingual intellectual cultures. After a brief survey of historical poets and anonymous secular texts from both vernacular literatures, this essay examines two accounts that involve vernacular poets from Latin texts written by clerics. Muirchú maccu Machtheni wrote Vita Sancti Patricii (ca. 690) and briefly mentioned the presence of the poets Dubthach maccu Lugair and Fiacc Finn Sléibte at the pagan court of Lóegaire mac Néill in Tara in the fifth century. Bede devoted a full chapter of his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (ca. 731) to the poet Cædmon at the monastery of Whitby sometime in the second half of the seventh century. The presence of these three vernacular poets in the works of two clerics suggests their perceived potential contributions to the Church. But their treatment in later cultural history differs markedly between the self-referential Gaelic world and more reticent Anglo-Saxons. In the Gaelic tradition Dubthach and Fiacc are recorded in law tracts, hagiography, martyrologies, genealogies, prose narratives, and poems. In the Anglo-Saxon tradition Cædmon does not exist outside of Bede's account. It is suggested that the legally recognized social rank, formal training, and professional status of poets in Gaelic society helps explain the discrepancy in subsequent cultural acknowledgement.
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MacPherson, Chelsey, Brian James MacLeod, Lodaidh MacFhionghain, and Laurie Stanley-Blackwell. "Converses with the Grave: Three Modern Gaelic Laments." Genealogy 5, no. 1 (March 15, 2021): 22. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/genealogy5010022.
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Within Scottish deathways, the Gaelic lament has long served as a poignant and powerful outlet for loss. In this creative piece, three Canadian-born, Gaelic-speaking poets present their previously unpublished Gaelic laments along with English translations. This collaborative article is designed to demonstrate, in a creative rather than an academic format, that the venerable lament tradition continues to enjoy longevity and vitality in the present day as a literary expression of grief among Gaels. This article further demonstrates that modern Gaelic laments are not constrained by a strict fidelity to literary rules but strive instead to work creatively within tradition while reaching their audiences in a relevant and resonant way. For each poem, the author offers a personal contextualization for his/her lament, which serves to explain the source of inspiration and demonstrates how the work draws upon and reflects its literary roots. In recognition of the strong oral tradition present within Gaelic poetry, this article includes an audio recording of each of the three authors’ laments.
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Rankin, Effie. "‘Bidh mi Cumha mu d’ Dhéibhinn gu Bràth’ [I Shall Grieve for You Forever]: Early Nova Scotian Gaelic Laments." Genealogy 4, no. 4 (December 21, 2020): 118. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/genealogy4040118.
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Gaelic laments played an integral role in the deathways of the Highland Scots of Nova Scotia. These often passionate outpourings of grief served as lasting obituaries for the dead and epitomized the richness and vigour of the Gaelic language. As sincere emotional responses, they gave a poetic and performative dimension to the deaths of clergy and other noted community members, as well as beloved relatives and victims of sudden, unexpected deaths, such as drowning and even murder. A casual scan of Gaelic printed sources from newspapers and anthologies will immediately impress the reader with the prolific number of extant elegies. It is therefore necessary to confine the scope of this article to the earliest examples in Nova Scotia, focusing primarily on the creations of the better known, established poets. Several works by less familiar bards have also been included in this study.
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Frag, Asst Prof Dr Amal Nasser. "Irish Poets: Keepers of National Lore." ALUSTATH JOURNAL FOR HUMAN AND SOCIAL SCIENCES 58, no. 1 (March 15, 2019): 43–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.36473/ujhss.v58i1.834.
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This paper discusses three noteable Irish poets: Augustine Joseph Clarke (1896-1974), Richard Murphy (1927- ), and Patrick Kavanagh (1904–1967), who are considered as keepers of national lore of Irland. It explains these poets’ contribution to world literature through the renewal of Irish myths, history, and culture. Irish poets tackle the problems of Irish people in the present in a realistic way by criticising the restrictions imposed on the Irish people in their society.Augustine Joseph Clarke’s poems present a deep invocation of Irish past and landscape. While Richard Murphy offers recurring images of islands and the sea. He explores the personal and communal legacies of history, as many of his poems reveal his attempts to reconcile his Anglo-Irish background and education with his boyhood desire to be, in his words, “truly Irish”. Patrick Kavanagh was not interested in the Irish Literary Renaissance Movement that appeared and continued to influence many Irish writers during the twentieth century which called for the revival of ancient Irish culture, language, literature, and art. He, unlike the Irish revivalists who tried to revive the Gaelic language as the mother tongue of the Irish people like Dillon Johnston and Guinn Batten, uses a poetic language based on the day-to-day speech of the poet and his community rather than on an ideal of compensation for the fractures in his country’s linguistic heritage. The paper conculdes with the importance of the role of the Irish poet as a keeper and a gurdian of his national lore and tradition
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Caball, Marc. "Cultures in conflict in late sixteenth-century Kerry: the parallel worlds of a Tudor intellectual and Gaelic poets." Irish Historical Studies 36, no. 144 (November 2009): 483–501. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021121400005848.
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Demarcated to the north by the Shannon and its estuary and to the south by the Kenmare river and the Caha mountains, the south-western territories of Kerry and Desmond provide a microcosm of the tensions and interactions characteristic of early modern Ireland. Although historically divided into roughly two corresponding halves representing the outcome of thirteenth-century Gaelic/Anglo-Norman conflict, the area approximating to the modern administrative division of Kerry was defined by Gaelic cultural ascendancy and by the similar (though differing in scale) seigneurial ambitions of successive Fitzgerald and MacCarthy magnates. Significantly, a territorial division configured along ethnic lines was not replicated at a cultural level, where a remarkable level of homogeneity prevailed in terms of the currency of Gaelic language and literature. However, the defeat and execution of the fourteenth earl of Desmond and the distribution of his lands among English settlers under the auspices of the government-sponsored Munster plantation inaugurated profound political, social and religious turmoil in the province. In Kerry, also, consolidation of the New English military, social and legal presence in the wake of the redistribution of the earl of Desmond’s lands precipitated levels of political and cultural dissonance unparalleled since the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
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Patterson, Nerys. "Gaelic law and the Tudor conquest of Ireland: the social background of the sixteenth-century recensions of the pseudo-historical Prologue to the Senchas már." Irish Historical Studies 27, no. 107 (May 1991): 193–215. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021121400010506.
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Contemporary studies of the Tudor conquest of Ireland identify numerous interest-groups whose different political strategies produced a complex course of events. This paper examines the reactions of an influential segment of the Gaelic learned class, the traditional lawyers (brehons), to the threat of conquest. It offers evidence that some important brehon families supported administrative reforms within the Gaelic lordships, in accord with crown demands, and that they used native jural traditions to support legal change.As participants in the struggles of this period, the brehons have been viewed by scholars as part of the traditional cultural élite, which included poets and historians. Their indistinct appearance in the historical record partly accounts for such treatment. Brehons are scarcely mentioned in the Irish annals, while English sources tend to depict them as ultramontanists, practising ‘secret and hidden rites’, not as administrators with policies. Unlike the bardic poets, the brehons failed to leave behind a body of work that reflected their personal opinions; their literary monument, the corpus of Irish law-tracts, presents formidable barriers to interpretation, even as jural material, let alone as testimony to social history. These difficulties arise from the brehons’ deliberate attempts to preserve an appearance of antiquity and changelessness in the jural tradition. So successful were they in this, that many scholars believe that the later brehon schools copied the old law-tracts solely for their antiquarian interest and that the tracts had little relevance to contemporary affairs.
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Hughes, A. J. "An Dream Gaoidhealta Gallda : East Ulster poets and patrons as Gaelic Irish and English Crown personae." Etudes Celtiques 34, no. 1 (1998): 233–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.3406/ecelt.1998.2140.
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Riach, Alan. "Language, Poetry and Scotland: A Theory of Bi, Tri, Mono, Multi and Trans-language Literature." Tekstualia 3, no. 46 (July 4, 2016): 101–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.5604/01.3001.0013.4207.
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Scottish literature is not characterized by having been written in a single, evolving language such as is familiar in a lineage of English literature, English being the common language, notwithstanding the writer’s nationality. Rather, Scottish literature is informed by the understanding that literary expression arises in more than one language and, in Scotland, is created by writers most often working in at least two languages, with new work being published in Gaelic, Scots and English. This essay concerns the issue of multilingualism in Scottish literature, particularly poetry, offering a reading of Scotland’s work which sees this as a distinctive cultural characteristic, as well as a rehearsing of Scotland’s history of multilingual literature. It focuses on a small number of modern Scottish poets, such as George Campbell and Hay Aonghas MacNeacail, whose bilingual (sometimes trilingual) work shows this, challenging assumptions of unitary defi nition.
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Alsaeed, Nora Hadi Q. "Irish Poetry and Its Contribution to European Literature." English Language and Literature Studies 5, no. 4 (November 30, 2015): 27. http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ells.v5n4p27.
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<p>Irish poetry is considered one of the oldest and most enriched sources of poetry in Europe. As a small nation with a less prominent contribution to world literature, the Irish have benchmarked some of their brightest examples in the form of Gaelic writings, and present an outstanding account of oral traditions and oral poetry that have passed down the generations to the contemporary 21st century. Their literature represents various facets of Irish culture, history, and socio-cultural aspects reflected through magical verses of poems, the nature of which has transcended generations and established itself in the history of Europe.</p>
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Beard, Ellen L. "Satire and Social Change: The Bard, the Schoolmaster and the Drover." Northern Scotland 8, no. 1 (May 2017): 1–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/nor.2017.0124.
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Despite his lack of formal education, Sutherland bard Rob Donn MacKay (1714–78) left over 220 published poems, far more than any other contemporary Gaelic poet. During his lifetime he was equally esteemed for well-crafted satires and well-chosen (or newly-composed) musical settings for his verse. This article examines a group of related satires attacking the schoolmaster John Sutherland and the drover John Gray, comparing them to Rob Donn's views on other schoolmasters and cattle dealers, and considering both what conventional historical sources tell us about the poetry and what the poetry tells us about history, particularly literacy, bilingualism, and the cattle trade in the eighteenth-century Highlands.
Dissertations / Theses on the topic "Poets, Gaelic"
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Frater, Anne Catherine. "Scottish Gaelic women's poetry up to 1750." Thesis, Connect to e-thesis, 1994. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/701/.
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Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Glasgow, 1994.Ph.D. thesis submitted to the Department of Celtic, Faculty of Arts, University of Glasgow, 1994. Includes bibliographical references. Print version also available.
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Kramer, William. "FILID, FAIRIES AND FAITH: The Effects of Gaelic Culture, Religious Conflict and the Dynamics of Dual Confessionalisation on the Suppression of Witchcraft Accusations and Witch-Hunts in Early Modern Ireland, 1533 - 1670." DigitalCommons@CalPoly, 2010. https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/theses/327.
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The European Witch-Hunts reached their peak in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Betweeen 1590 and 1661, approximately 1500 women and men were accused of, and executed for, the crime of witchcraft in Scotland. England suffered the largest witch-hunt in its history during the Civil Wars of the 1640s, which produced the majority of the 500 women and men executed in England for witchcraft. Evidence indicates, however, that only three women were executed in Ireland between 1533 and 1670. Given the presence of both English and Scottish settlers in Ireland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the dramatic discrepancy of these statistics indicate that conditions existed in early modern Ireland that tended to suppress the mechanisms that produced witchcraft accusations and larger scale witch-hunts.
In broad terms those conditions in Ireland were the persistence of Gaelic culture and the ongoing conditions of open, inter-religious conflict. In particular, two artifacts of Gaelic Irish culture had distinct impact upon Irish witchcraft beliefs. The office of the Poet, or fili (singular for filid), seems to have had a similar impact upon Gaelic culture and society as the shaman has on Siberian witchcraft beliefs. The Gaelic/Celtic Poet was believed to have magical powers, which were actually regulated by the Brehon Law codes of Ireland. The codification of the Poet’s harmful magic seems to have eliminated some of the mystique and menace of magic within Gaelic culture. Additionally, the persistent belief in fairies as the source of harmful magic remained untainted by Christianity throughout most of Ireland. Faeries were never successfully demonized in Ireland as they were in Scotland. The Gaelic Irish attributed to fairies most of the misfortunes that were otherwise blamed on witchcraft, including the sudden wasting away and death of children. Faerie faith in Ireland has, in fact, endured into the twentieth century. The ongoing ethno-religious conflict between the Gaelic, Catholic Irish and the Protestant “New English” settlers also undermined the need for witches in Ireland. The enemy, or “other” was always readily identifiable as a member of the opposing religious or ethnic group. The process of dual confessionalisation, as described by Ute Lotz-Huemann, facilitated the entrenchment of Catholic resistence to encroaching Protestantism that both perpetuated the ethno-religious conflict and prevented the penetration of Protestant ideology into Gaelic culture. This second effect is one of the reasons why fairies were never successfully associated with demons in Ireland. Witch-hunts were complex events that were produced and influenced by multiple causative factors. The same is true of those factors that suppressed witchcraft accusations. Enduring Gaelic cultural artifacts and open ethno-religious conflict were not the only factors that suppressed witchcraft accusations and witch-hunts in Ireland; they were, however, the primary factors.
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Maciver, Ruairidh Iain. "The Gaelic poet and the British military experience, 1756-1856." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2018. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/30582/.
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This thesis examines Gaelic poetry and the military between 1756 and 1856. While previous studies have collated and analysed the poetry of two of the other major impacts on Gaelic society at this time, clearance and emigration, there has so far been no concerted attempt to examine and place in context the corpus of Gaelic military material of the period – despite this verse being widespread in the poetic record. This poetry has been largely neglected by scholars of Scottish history, and, though selected pieces have been examined by scholars of Celtic Studies, it has not received the fullness of attention that such a major concern in the poetic record deserves. This thesis therefore directly addresses this gap in previous scholarship. The study first considers the historical and literary context for this corpus of poetry, in order to establish the background to Gaelic military verse in the post-Culloden period. A chronological approach is taken to consider this poetry over the course of five chapters. The first period explored is that between the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War and the French Revolutionary War (1756-93). Two chapters cover the period of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815), focussing respectively on verse by soldiers and non-combatants. The next chapter has as its focus the period between the British Victory at Waterloo and the end of the Crimean War (1815-56). The last chapter takes a different chronological approach to those which preceded it, examining women’s poetry and the military across the one-hundred year time period. Each of these chapters explore the background to, contemporary context for, and content of this corpus of Gaelic military verse from 1756 to 1856. A full database of the corpus of 178 poems is also included. There is a focus throughout the thesis on the manner in which poets drew from and utilised their poetic tradition to contextualise the British military and its influence. Another major strand of the research is its examination of loyalty as expressed or revealed in the poetic record. The thesis contends that this corpus of poetry deserves a central place in the military historiography of the Highlands and Gaelic literary criticism.
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Mac, Lochlainn Antain. "Aindrias Mac Cruitin : Danta." Thesis, University of Ulster, 1995. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.241992.
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Byrne, Michel. "Bàrdachd Mhic Iain Dheòrsa : the original poems of George Campbell Hay : an annotated edition." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1992. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/10549.
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George Campbell Hay (1915-1984) is acknowledged as one of the towering figures of 20th c. Gaelic poetry, and also respected outwith that linguistic tradition for his work in Scots and English, yet since the appearance of his three poetry collections shortly after the war, the greater part of his work has been unavailable, and its appreciation limited to a handful of Gaelic poems. Even the 1970 anthology which brought his non-Gaelic poems to wider attention has long been out of print, and his master-work - the unfinished long narrative poem Mochtar is Dughall - only emerged from almost forty years' obscurity in 1982. In short, there is an urgent need for the totality of Hay's work to be made available again, both for the enjoyment of the poetry-reading public and to enable a proper assessment of his contribution to Scottish literature. This thesis aims to provide the basis for such a Collected Edition. As a scholarly edition, however, it does not seek to provide single ideal texts or an editor's anthology, but to present the development of each poem through all its variants (shown in a critical apparatus), and bring some light to bear on the creative process. The poems are given in a separate volume, in chronological order, with no interfering classifications (such as by language, or publication status). In the way of introduction, I first give an account of Hay's life. This is based primarily on the man's own correspondence, to complement already published portraits drawn in the main from personal reminiscence. I have stressed the socio-political context in which Hay operated up till the war, as his passionate evangelical nationalism held such a dominant place in his poetry throughout his life. The following chapter looks in more detail at Hay's poetic activity in the 1940s, marked by his growing reputation and his association with the Scottish Renaissance of Hugh MacDiarmid, and culminating in the publication of Fuaran Sleibh, Wind On Loch Fyne and 0 Na Ceithir Airdean. A third chapter surveys the principal themes which exercised Hay's poetic imagination. In view of the edition's eschewal of categorisation, such a thematic classification may be of help in giving an overview of Hay's poetry; its aim however is not to create artificial segregations, but to stress both the diversity and the underlying philosophical unity of the poetry. Hay was a poet of virtuosic technique, and a final chapter examines both his own professed attitudes to poetic technique and his practical craftsmanship; this includes the linguistic and musical aspects of his work. The edition proper is preceded by a statement of editorial policy, illuminating some of the problems posed by the differing nature of the sources, and by Hay's inveterate tendency to revise his work. There follow notes to the poems, appendices of material which did not find a place in the main body of the edition, and an illustrated index of the Argyll place-names which so copiously populate Hay's poetry. An index to the poems is also supplied.
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Moore, Dafydd R. "James MacPherson : romancing the Gael : the literary, cultural and historiographical context of "The Poems of Ossian"." Thesis, University of Strathclyde, 1998. http://oleg.lib.strath.ac.uk:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=21404.
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This thesis locates James Macpherson's The Poems of Ossian (1760-1763) within a range of contexts in order to come to a more fully integrated conception of text in context than has frequently been the case previously. It argues that Macpherson scholarship has been dogged by issues of authenticity and cultural identity one step removed from the works Macpherson wrote. This has led to a situation in which Ossian is viewed as an important cultural artefact but one whose textual source, and therefore significance, has frequently been misrepresented and misunderstood. Having delineated the critical heritage of the Poems in these terms I shall offer four interrelated contextualised readings of Ossian which aim to reconcile and reunite the text and its most valuable contexts. I locate Macpherson's poems within what I shall argue is their most compelling contemporary aesthetic context, that of the discourse of Sentiment and Sensibility by suggesting that the grand compromise the poems offe r between action and sentimental virtue proves an illusion. I then place Ossian within the generic context of romance, arguing that current understanding of romance offers compelling ways of understanding both Ossian's relationship to its sources and the world of the poems. In reaching an understanding about why Macpherson was unable to assent to the romance label himself, the chapter discusses the state of scholarship and ideological status of romance at the time. A historiographical context is offered by an analysis of Ossian and Macpherson's more theoretical prose in the light of that of Adam Ferguson in order to define more clearly Ossian's relationship to the Scottish Enlightenment's dominant historiographical paradigms and their ideological significance. Finally a wider cultural context is explored by considering Ossian as writing about defeat, and about the formulations of defeat created by both victors and losers. This chapter ties together many of the dimensions discussed in earlier chapters and comes to a subtly articulated conception of Ossian's cultural locale, one which stresses the instability and ambivalence of Macpherson's position.
Books on the topic "Poets, Gaelic"
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Whyte, C. Uirsgeul =: Myth : Gaelic poems with English translations. Glasgow: Gairm, 1991.
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Coille an Fhàsaich: The Gaelic songs and poems of Donald MacKillop. Dunlop, Alba: Brìgh, 2008.
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Warrack, Alexander. The concise Scots dictionary: Serving as a glossary for Ramsay, Fergusson, Burns, Scott, Galt, minor poets, Kailyard novelists, and a host of other writers of the Scottish tongue. Poole: New Orchard, 1988.
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1956-, MacInnes John, ed. The voice of the bard: Living poets and ancient tradition in the Highlands and islands of Scotland. Edinburgh: Canongate, 1999.
Find full textBook chapters on the topic "Poets, Gaelic"
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Baoill, Colm Ó. "‘Neither Out nor In’ : Scottish Gaelic Women Poets 1650–1750." In Woman and the Feminine in Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing, 136–52. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2004. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9780230502208_10.
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Black, Ronald. "Gaelic Verse." In Scottish Literature and World War I, 100–121. Edinburgh University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454599.003.0005.
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Coira, M. Pía. "Greek Gaels, British Gaels." In Celts, Romans, Britons, 97–116. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198863076.003.0006.
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This chapter explores the use of Classical allusions in early-modern Scottish Gaelic poetry, and the two distinct ways in which they connected with the Scottish Gaels’ understanding of Britishness. Gaelic Scotland and Gaelic Ireland shared the same field of literary reference, with Ireland as the fountainhead. Consequently, Classical reception in Scottish Gaelic literature owed much to Classical reception in Ireland. However, once Scotland became part of the kingdom of Britain, and particularly in the Jacobite period, poets began to deploy new Classical allusions, in which a shift in type and purpose can be detected, designed to address contemporary political circumstances. A sense of Gaelic Britishness, and a specific understanding of what it meant to be British, developed in Gaelic Scotland in the seventeenth century. Classical allusion played a meaningful role in its expression through poetic discourse right up to the aftermath of Culloden, the final Jacobite defeat.
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"How Inauthentic was James Macpherson’s “Translation” of Ossian?" In Who Wrote That?, edited by Donald Ostrowski, 190–208. Cornell University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501749704.003.0009.
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This chapter talks about the Scottish poet James Macpherson. It analyzes Macpherson's publication of the “Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland,” which he claimed was his own translation into English from old Gaelic manuscripts he discovered in the Scottish Highlands. It also looks into “Fingal,” an Ancient Epic Poem or cycle of poetry presumably sung by the legendary Scottish bard Ossian, which Macpherson also claimed was a translation from the Gaelic. The chapter examines the Ossian cycle that stimulated investigations and searches for ethnic folk literature, particularly for national epics throughout Europe and Russia that represented the mystical spirit of the nation. It looks into skeptics, such as Samuel Johnson, David Hume, and Horace Walpole who expressed doubt about the authenticity of Macpherson's translations.
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Montgomery, Alan. "Forging a nation: the spurious histories of Charles Bertram and James Macpherson." In Classical Caledonia, 149–67. Edinburgh University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474445641.003.0009.
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Chapter eight examines two texts which would have a dramatic impact on early modern attitudes towards ancient Scotland. The so-called De Situ Britanniae, ‘discovered’ by Englishman Charles Bertram in Copenhagen, purported to be a medieval manuscript copy of an ancient Roman source that radically rewrote the Roman history of Scotland. Widely disseminated and cited in antiquarian circles, it was only in the nineteenth century that the text was identified as an elaborate forgery. The 1760s saw the publication of poetry attributed to an ancient bard named Ossian and ‘translated’ from the Gaelic by James Macpherson. The verses told of the heroic deeds of Fingal and recounted tales of Caledonian battles against the Romans. Immediately denounced as a forgery by many, the poems would nevertheless become a worldwide sensation, reframing the ancient Caledonians as courtly and cultured figures whilst perfectly satisfying the growing taste for the Romantic and sublime.
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Leask, Nigel. "Conquering Caledonia." In Stepping Westward, 61–96. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198850021.003.0003.
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This chapter focuses on the influence of two ‘literary’ sources on eighteenth-century Highland travel: Tacitus’s Agricola and Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian. The historical analogy between Agricola’s victory at Mons Graupius and Culloden provided an ideological template for the final defeat of Jacobitism in 1746, explored here in travel accounts written by antiquarians, Hanoverian soldiers fighting in the Forty-Five, and post-war tourists like Bishop Pococke. The second part of the chapter argues that the popularity of Ossian after 1760 remapped Highland topography as a site of Caledonian resistance, stimulating enthusiasm for Gaelic culture which ironically coincided with official attempts to extirpate the language. Macpherson’s English ‘translations’ provided a new incentive for tourists to visit the Highlands, persuading them to collect fragments of ‘authentic’ Ossianic verse, and also inspiring a series of hallmarks sites for tourists in quest of ‘Fingalian topography’ like ‘Fingal’s Cave’ on Staffa and ‘Ossian’s Hall’ at Dunkeld.