Curley completely ignores the oral tradition of the Highlands which Macpherson drew a lot of his tales from. They may not have existed in manuscript form but seem to have been passed down by word of mouth for quite some time. The Ossian characters themselves can be found in Irish folklore dating back hundreds of years (known as Oisin), and it is natural to expect cultural transference between the two countries considering the amount of migration between Scotland and Ireland over the centuries

Samuel Johnson's opposition to Ossian had less to do with some quest for the pursuit of truth and more to do with the fact that Johnson was an English chauvinist who thought that the Scots could produce nothing of actual value. His mind was made up well before there was actual evidence of forgery. Even though the Ossian cycle of epics were original to Macpherson, that doesn't delegitimize their literary merits and historical importance. They were an attempt to establish (albeit not 100% honestly) a Scottish national literature which could give Gaelic speakers pride in their culture and history in a time where they were being wiped out. You can acknowledge that Macpherson should've probably been honest about where his poems actually came from without attacking his work as a whole as though they produced nothing of value.

If he'd just said "I've written a book. I want you to read it". He would have saved everyone a lot of time.

I read his book - it's appallingly one-sided. I have never before seen a scholarly work from a university press where the author interpolates angry [Bracketed screeds] into every quotation from a contrary source! He sets up a straw man in the first chapter (he is right - every other interpretation is wrong) so he can just dismiss any contrary argument without even engaging with it. Macpherson and anyone who supported him is either complicit or gullible, everyone who opposed him (even the author of Curley's precious unearthed pamphlet, who seems to have been unhinged) no matter what they do, is automatically morally superior to Macpherson and his supporters. He skips over masses of scholarship and never even engages with the text itself as poetry. He completely undermines Macpherson's extraordinary influence on the Romantic movement, on literature, music, painting, the Medieval Revival, the arts & crafts movement & folklore studies. I only read the book book because I came across this video and thought, "The book can't be as one-dimensional as this short interview." It is. In the introduction he confesses that the book is nothing more than a loosely bound collection of ephemera left over from his other Johnsonian works - I should have stopped there - that's exactly what it is. Read Gaskill, Porter, Thomson and the scores of other better scholars out there if you want to go deeper into Ossian.

Bridgewater State University? I'm sorry but where tf is that?

I mean I read Samuel Johnson’s book first and decided he was a self righteous fanny. Constantly ridiculing and belittling the Scottish people. Made me determined to read Macphersons work.

Poor scholarship. He takes the classic Johnsonian position that the Scots were not capable of producing anything of value.

This is perpetuating a lie.

Being a Spaniard I think I can take a neutral look at this issue. User Tim Worth points out that Macpherson drew from the oral tradition of the Highlands, and that such oral tradition had probably not been written down in Macpherson's times. This is a hypothesis that needs to be proved. That is: we may assume the existence of such unwritten, traditional tales, but are there any traces of them, beside Macpherson's works? And, if there are any records of oral traditional tales where motifs, heroes, etc., of Macpherson's works can be found, but such records are later than Macpherson, one can easily argue that it was Macpherson's works what influenced oral tradition, but not the other way around. Anyway, leaving aside the authenticity problem, I think we should not forget that Macpherson's was a literary work, and we could ask whether it is worthy from the point of view of its aesthetic, artistic value. In any event, thank you for sharing this video.

He completely skips over the fact that the Scots will obviously have a shared history with Ireland, we're the same people. If he had really done extensive work on the language you would think he would at the very least say the scottish word Gaelic correctly when talking about it instead of using the irish way. Scotlands oral tradition is extensive, it's even commented on going back to the times of the Romans. Did MacPherson embellish, most likely, but there was already a framework of older stories already there for him to draw upon.

In Scotland it is pronounced Gallic, in Irish Gaellic

Is this supposed to be an actual scholar? Samuel Johnson famously hated Scottish people. You also managed to conveniently forget that both Scots and Irish are Gaels.