SOURCE: "The Gateway to Innocence: Ossian and the Nordic Bard as Myth," in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Vol. 4, 1975, pp. 161-70.

In the following essay, Greenway offers a reinterpretation of Macpherson's Fingal, maintaining that the poem functions as a "mythic narrative."

Few now tremble at the dauntless heroism of Fingal, and none of us, I fear, are tempted to don Werther's yellow vest and share the misty signs of Temora. Indeed, the noble passions of this Last of the Bards have been treated with a neglect less than benign. Though we no longer read Ossian, we do read writers who, convinced of his authenticity, attempt to recapture what they imagine to be that synthesis of vigor and sentiment possessed by their Northern ancestors. As I have already implied, I propose to take Ossian seriously, and to suggest that he functioned as a mythic narrative for a modern era—"mythic...