SOURCE: "The Myth of Fionn mac Cumhaill in Irish Literature," in Fionn mac Cumhaill: Celtic Myth in English Literature, Syracuse University Press, 1986, pp. 1-36.

In the following essay, MacKillop studies the long and varied tradition surrounding the Irish mythological hero Fionn mac Cumhaill.

Although the English people had shared the British Isles with several Celtic peoples for fourteen centuries, English writers, by and large, did not discover the Celtic world until the sensational success in the 1760s of James Macpherson's Poems of Ossian, a bogus rendering of Scottish Gaelic ballads. Despite a critical rebuke from Dr. Johnson and much general controversy over their authenticity, the poems were widely read all over Europe and provided an introduction to Celtic literature for a score of important poets, critics, and tastemakers, including such diverse talents as Goethe, Blake, James Fenimore Cooper, and Matthew Arnold. Not many were taken by the intrinsic...