SOURCE: "Ossian: The Voice of the Past," in The Making of History: A Study of the Literary Forgeries of James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton in Relation to Eighteenth-Century Ideas of History and Fiction, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986, 73-100.

In the following excerpt from his book-length study of literary forgeries, Heywood examines the evolution of Macpherson's fictitious historical vision.

To understand fully Macpherson's making of history, it is necessary to look at his forgery as it evolved. Like Chatterton, the historical vision manifested itself accumulatively with each new item. The forgeries were a process. The focus of our analysis in this [essay] will be on method: the mode of access to the past; the authenticating procedures used. The manner in which each new forged work related to previous ones and in hindsight to later ones was a crucial aspect of this method. Both forgers were extremely skilled in using...