I even dabbled in creating my own quasi-literary hoax once. I was 11 and was in the midst of a fearsome feud with my younger brother Andrew (I forget why). I decided psychological warfare was the answer, and sat down to write him a letter from an imaginary boy called Philip.
The letter was long and absurdly heartfelt, recounting Philip’s recent adventures, his frustrations with his younger sister, his fond memories of hanging out with Andrew at the skatepark. I drew a picture of Philip and Andrew together mid-kick-flip, for good measure.
After carefully disguising my handwriting and pilfering a stamp from my father’s study, I posted it. It was delicious waiting for the letter to arrive, and even more entertaining when it did. Andrew’s face was a study in wonder and confusion — a mixture of Who is Philip? Am I losing my memory? and Why does he love me so much?
Unfortunately, my own inability to keep a straight face brought the whole scheme down swiftly. Still, for 10 glorious minutes, I too was a great literary hoaxer — albeit one undone by laughter and theft (Dad was not too happy about the stolen stamp).
In the 1760s, the literary world was beside itself over the "discovery" of a lost Scottish epic from the mists of the Dark Ages. Scottish poet James Macpherson claimed to have stumbled upon the works of Ossian, an ancient Gaelic bard who supposedly lived in the 3rd century.
Macpherson "translated" these poems, publishing Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland (1760) and later works like Fingal (1761) and Temora (1763).
The Ossian Cycle tells of Fingal, a heroic warrior-king who leads an expedition to Ireland to help the young Irish king Cuthullin defeat invading Norse forces. Fingal is noble, stoic, and generous to a fault, the embodiment of moral heroism and melancholic virtue, often pausing between bloody battles to lament the brevity of life or the fading of youth.
Naturally, Europe went mad for it: Napoleon tucked a copy of Ossian into his saddlebags, Goethe translated bits of it between bouts of weltschmerz. Thomas Jefferson claimed that this "rude bard of the North" was "the greatest poet that has ever existed" and a city in Alabama was christened "Selma" after Fingal’s home.
And as for the Romantic painters? They loved it. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ The Dream of Ossian is perhaps the moodiest tribute ever inspired by a fake and it’s gorgeous.
To 18th-century readers, Fingal was a sort of "noble savage", a Highland Hercules, a national epic hero. He was a refreshing antidote to modern decadence, living by honour, courage and sentiment in the sublime wilderness of the North.
Macpherson claimed that Ossian was based on an ancient Gaelic manuscript. The problem was, the existence of his manuscript was never established.
While Ireland and Wales could point to medieval tomes bursting with sagas, ancient Scottish poetry and lore tended to be purely oral in nature, passed down from one generation to the next.
So when Macpherson claimed to have a full-blown epic cycle in written form, scholars began to smell a rat — and Samuel Johnson, certainly never one to mince words, denounced Macpherson as a "mountebank, a liar and a fraud". Johnson’s simultaneous dismissal of Gaelic as a "barbarous" tongue provoked a wave of Gaelic poetic satire in response, even as Scottish
defenders like Hugh Blair published glowing endorsements of Ossian’s supposed antiquity.
Throughout the late 18th and 19th centuries, scholars and antiquarians debated whether the poems derived from genuine Gaelic sources or were largely Macpherson’s invention.
Twentieth-century research, notably by Derick Thomson, concluded that Macpherson had indeed drawn on genuine oral and manuscript sources, but had freely reworked them into an invented epic of his own design.
The work still has its literary merits and historical importance. Despite, or perhaps because of, the scandal, the Ossian Cycle remains a fascinating artefact: Scotland’s romantic epic that never quite existed, but changed European literature, art and music regardless.
I’ve always been fascinated by literary hoaxes. To me, they occupy such a strange and revealing corner of human creativity — they’re the perfect mix of deceit, art and psychological subterfuge.
Literary hoaxes such as the Ossian Cycle are more than outright acts of fraud; they’re more fascinating than simple lies; they are complex and intriguing, a type of meta-literature, a story about storytelling itself.
I love the layered process of discovery that comes with unwrapping a good literary hoax: tracing the whodunnit of its creation, understanding the circumstances that allowed it to flourish, examining the reactions the work provokes and comparing the false text to the author’s authentic work (if such an author existed in the first place).
And then there’s that small spark of joy (tempered with frustration) in the moment of being fooled, in realising how artful the deception was.
But beneath it all lies a set of compelling questions: if a writer can tell a good story, why the disguise? Why risk exposure and censure? I don’t know. Perhaps the writer is intoxicated by the thrill of mastery, perhaps his attempt is a covert grasp at recognition, or perhaps he derives pleasure from knowing that illusion can triumph over truth, at least for a short time.
In a funny twist of fate, James Macpherson was buried in Westminster Abbey, mere yards from his biggest critic, Samuel Johnson.
In the end, Macpherson had the last word, or rather, the last resting place: he achieved the kind of immortality his poems promised, if not the kind his critic would have approved.
— Jean Balchin is an ODT columnist who has started a new life in Edinburgh.
