Napoleon's Favorite Poet was Actually a Sophisticated Literary Hoax

How did the future Emperor of the French come to consider Ossian, the enigmatic ancient bard of the Celts, as a superior and more heroic figure than Homer?

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Sometimes, you come across a text that not only reveals new insights but also articulates thoughts and feelings you've had but couldn't quite express. This was the case with David Bell's excellent article on Napoleon, which I discovered while completing the final draft of my novel about Napoleon's invasion of Egypt. The essay, titled "When the Barracks Were Bursting with Poets: Napoleon's Life Writing," is a critique of Andy Martin's book Napoleon the Novelist (Polity, 2001).

What I (re)discovered in Bell's poignant essay was the fact that the man I transformed into a literary character and dedicated a novel to—just like Tolstoy and countless other, much better writers than me—the great Napoleon I, also thought of himself in those very terms. As a young officer in the Royal French army, Napoleon Bonaparte dreamed of being an author. He wrote fictional short stories, a few essays, and even began working on a history of Corsica, his native land, and its people. He showed considerable talent in this endeavor. What's more, as Bell demonstrates in the essay, dreams of a literary career were not peculiar to Napoleon but were quite common among military men in the 18th century.

Later, as Napoleon plunged headlong into his military career, the pamphlets he composed became masterpieces of propaganda. Though not always the most convincing—such as his repeated claims in Egypt that he was the Messenger of Allah and the successor of the Prophet—they were usually written with passion and electrifying rhetorical skill.

During the journey to Egypt, Napoleon organized an intellectual literary salon that met every evening after dinner on the flagship L'Orient. This salon was attended by senior officers and scientists accompanying the expedition. As befitting a commander who was both intellectually inclined and authoritative, Napoleon would divide the participants into two groups, pose a question, and task each group with defending or attacking the idea. According to his private secretary Bourrienne's memoirs, among the topics explored were questions like whether the planets were inhabited, the age of the world, and how to best interpret dreams. After the debate was concluded (with Napoleon picking the winning side), the general would usually recite passionately from the cycle of poems by his favorite poet, Ossian, claiming that these poems captured true historical heroism—unlike the works of classical poets like Homer, whom Napoleon regarded as a great braggart.

Bonaparte Before the Sphinx, aka Œdipe, 1886, by Jean-Léon Gérôme

The first volume of poems by the legendary Celtic poet was published in 1760s London. These initial fragments introduced the world to an ancient Scottish bard who, two volumes later, would be recognized as Ossian. When the complete works of Ossian were published in 1765, readers in England—and soon after, across much of Europe—could immerse themselves in the firsthand account of a warrior-poet, the son of the legendary hero Fingal (Fionn mac Cumhaill in Irish mythology) and the last survivor of his warrior society in the Scottish Highlands. According to his translator, James Macpherson, Ossian lived around the 3rd century CE, though Macpherson was not always consistent with his dating of the ancient poet's life.

In an era eager to be dazzled and influenced by new and exciting ancient sources, the words of Ossian spread across the British Isles and then to the continent, as if they were taken from a newly discovered work by Homer or Virgil. The geography may have been unfamiliar to most readers, and the heroes less known than Achilles or Aeneas (though not entirely unknown), but the tone was familiar, and the tales no less epic.

Ossian, or rather Oisín, was a figure primarily known from Irish mythology. In the newly published poems, he was transformed into a Scottish hero—a blind poet who sings of the life and battles of his father, Fingal. Seventeen-year-old Napoleon acquired his first copy of Ossian in 1786, in the first full Italian translation by Melchiore Cesarotti. Napoleon, of course, knew that the authenticity of the poems was contested, but he dismissed the matter, as he often did when he chose to believe something.

Napoleon was so enthralled by the poet that in 1800, while still consolidating his regime as the First Consul of France (a position he created after seizing power in a military coup), he commissioned two Ossianic paintings for his palace at La Malmaison. Both were prominently displayed in the reception room.

François Gérard painted Ossian Awakening the Spirits on the Banks of the Lora with the Sound of his Harp.

While Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson painted Ossian Receiving the Ghosts of French Heroes.

“I like Ossian for the same reason that I like to hear the whisper of the wind and the waves of the sea,” Napoleon would later say of his favorite poet. For the rest of his life, the French leader never forgot his love for Ossian. When he met a Scottish woman on St. Helena, the island where he was to die, he proudly told her, "It was I. I made Ossian the fashion. I have even been accused of having my head filled with Ossian’s clouds.”

So how is it that even with such passionate "official" backing from the emperor, and with Goethe, William Blake, and a host of other great literary figures of the 18th and 19th centuries comparing Ossian's works to those of the best and most beloved poets of the past—some even calling him the "Homer of the Scots"—his work is now largely forgotten? Why have most of us never even heard his name or know anything about what he wrote?

Postmodernist thinkers often talk about the "death of the author," but I don't think we can really separate the author of the poems of Ossian from the history of their remarkable adoption and subsequent abandonment.

According to his own account, James Macpherson—the translator of Ossian—rescued these poems from oblivion by taking two long trips to the Scottish Highlands in 1760 and 1761. There, he claimed to have collected a few manuscripts, but mostly oral versions of ballads still sung by local bards.

However, several elements in the poems perplexed critics. First, the form of the poems seemed modern—more like something composed in recent times than in the Celtic Dark Ages. Second, most of the stories were unknown, perhaps even wholly original, while familiar tales were altered in strange ways. The poems were gloomier, more melodramatic, and much less specific in detail.

Macpherson did his best to alleviate all doubt, claiming he only translated and transcribed (from ancient Gaelic) the newly discovered poems of an ancient bard named Ossian. But in truth, as scholars and literary critics have proven repeatedly over the past 200-plus years, Macpherson wrote most of the work himself—around 75%, according to Professor Thomas M. Curley. The rest was merely inspired by, but not translated from, oral and written Gaelic ballads.

It's true that James Macpherson was able to persuade most readers, including his editor and publisher, that the poems were authentic. But when a storm of controversy erupted around his work (with his claims contested by luminaries such as Samuel Johnson, the great moralist of his age), Macpherson seemed to lose interest. A volume of the Gaelic sources of Macpherson's "translations" was published posthumously, but it is now seen as a translation from English to Gaelic, not the other way around. Macpherson did receive a hefty sum of money to publish the original Gaelic material he had supposedly gathered in 1760-61, but as scholar Dafydd Moore writes in his introduction to The International Companion to James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian, "In 1764 he traveled abroad as secretary to George Johnstone, governor of the newly acquired British colony of Florida. The trip was notable for an unfortunate, if convenient, episode during which Macpherson supposedly lost many of the original Ossianic manuscripts in a Florida swamp."

Macpherson didn't invent the literary hoax he was engaged in. Pseudepigraphy—attributing a text to a much older source, usually a famous person supposed to have written the newly discovered text—is an ancient practice. Nonetheless, Macpherson was very successful in his hoax—perhaps the most successful literary hoax of the modern age. To this day, you can find scholars and lay readers who maintain that the poems are mostly authentic. Some, in an effort to rescue Macpherson's tarnished reputation and rehabilitate him as a great poet, go so far as to claim that the authenticity of Ossian's poems is irrelevant.

This sentiment is echoed in Macpherson's preface to the 1773 revised edition of Poems of Ossian. From it, we learn that only a genius translator could translate a genius work into his native tongue. If he is truly a genius, then not much is lost in translation:

Through the medium of version upon version, they [the poems] retain, in foreign languages, their native character of simplicity and energy. Genuine poetry, like gold, loses little, when properly transfused; but when a composition cannot bear the test of a literal version, it is a counterfeit which ought not to pass current. The operation must, however, be performed with skilful hands. A translator, who cannot equal his original, is incapable of expressing its beauties.

James Macpherson, translator of genius, by George Romney

As I delved deeper into the controversy surrounding Ossian, one question kept coming up: Can the poems—largely crafted by Macpherson—be considered good literature?

Napoleon obviously thought so. I, on the other hand, am not so convinced.

Even Macpherson's staunchest critics, especially among modern historians, don't deny that he had real literary talent. Scholars have rightly pointed out that if he hadn't, the poems of Ossian wouldn't have become so famous and influential—they would have been glossed over and forgotten. And yet, this particular reader (me) finds them extremely boring.

Just for fun, let's compare a few passages from Homer and Ossian.

Here are the opening lines of the Iliad, in Emily Wilson's translation:

Goddess, sing of the cataclysmic wrath of Peleus’ son Achilles,
cause of so much suffering for the Greeks,
that sent many strong souls to Hades.

And here’s Ossian, from the opening lines of the poem Fingal (I’ve quoted more lines from Ossian than from Homer’s opening, but we need even more to just get our bearings):

Cuchullin sat by Tura’s wall; by the tree of the rustling leaf.——His spear leaned against the mossy rock. His shield lay by him on the grass. As he thought of mighty Carbar, a hero whom he slew in war; the scout of the ocean came, Moran the son of Fithil.
Rise, said the youth, Cuchullin, rise; I see the ships of Swaran. Cuchullin, many are the foe: many the heroes of the dark-rolling sea.
Moran! replied the blue-eyed chief, thou ever tremblest, son of Fithil: Thy fears have much increased the foe. Perhaps it is the king of the lonely hills coming to aid me on green Ullin’s plains.
I saw their chief, says Moran, tall as a rock of ice. His spear is like that blasted fir. His shield like the rising moon. He sat on a rock on the shore: his dark host rolled, like clouds, around him.—Many, chief of men! I said, many are our hands of war.—Well art thou named, the Mighty Man, but many mighty men are seen from Tura’s windy walls.——He answered, like a wave on a rock, who in this land appears like me? Heroes stand not in my presence: they fall to earth beneath my hand. None can meet Swaran in the fight but Fingal, king of stormy hills.

Of course, you can’t fully grasp what I’m talking about without reading more of the work and even then you might come to a different conclusion than me—that fine. I can only share my feelings: once the allure of the dark Celtic world fades, you can see the poems for what they are.

Pondering this led me to think of a short story by my favorite writer, Jorge Luis Borges. In Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, Borges tells the fictional tale of a French symbolist poet who decides to recreate Don Quixote from scratch. Not to translate it, but to write complete sections of it as if it were an original work. Because three hundred years separate Cervantes' novel from Menard’s version, the meaning of the same exact words changes, sometimes even becoming opposed.

We might see a similar phenomenon with Ossian and Macpherson. At the age of 10, James Macpherson witnessed the Battle of Culloden, a horrific scene that took place on April 16, 1746, near his hometown of Inverness in the Scottish Highlands. In less than an hour, the Jacobite army was decisively defeated by British forces, ending the Jacobite rising of 1745. Was the figure of the dying bard, singing of a long-lost race of brave men (a figure Macpherson inherited from Gaelic literature), made even more tragic and melancholic by his own experiences? Was the pathos that permeates the Poems of Ossian his own? And could Napoleon Bonaparte, born in Corsica and only adopting France after fleeing the island with his family years later, a man who spoke French with a thick Italian accent until the end of his life, have picked up on any of that while declaring Ossian the greatest poet the world over?

I have no answers to these questions. But what I do feel—perhaps wrongly—is that the Fenian Cycle, a body of early Irish literature centered around the mythical hero Fionn mac Cumhaill and his warrior band the Fianna (narrated by his son Oisín), is a much more interesting epic cycle than anything found in Macpherson's Ossian. Is it because these are real and authentic works composed between the seventh and fourteenth centuries, rather than a literary hoax devised by a young poet in 18th century London?

Probably yes—which means that, for this reader at least, the context of the work and not just its theoretical literary value matters (a conclusion which I find a bit disheartening to be honest). But at the same time, no. From the small selection of Irish myths I’ve read, I think they’re genuinely great.