SOURCE: “Celts, Goths, and the Nature of the Literary Source,” in Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-Century Canon, edited by Alvaro Ribeiro, SJ and James G. Basker, Clarendon Press, 1996, pp. 275-96.

In the following essay, Groom examines the relevance of James Macpherson's Ossian to Percy's work on the Reliques, pointing to contemporary eighteenth-century controversies regarding the importance of textual histories and sources.

This chapter examines James Macpherson's sensational Ossian (1760-5)¹ and its relevance to Percy's Reliques (1765), arguing that Thomas Percy's work, which began as a straightforward response to the Scotsman, was actually predicated upon a crisis within the evolving canon of English literature. I will show that accounts of ancient cultures were determined by problems caused by the nature of the literary source, whether oral or literate. The rival claims of Macpherson and Percy on the literary establishment reveal that the presentation of the...