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The Gateway to Innocence: Ossian and the Nordic Bard as Myth

1975; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 4; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sec.1975.0015

1938-6133

John Greenway,

Historical and Archaeological Studies

The Gateway to Innocence: Ossian and the Nordic Bard as Myth JOHN L. GREENWAY 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 North­ ern 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” not in the Enlightenment sense of “falsehood,” but in the more recent sense of “symbolic apprehension of reality.” But what can Ossian have to do with reality? Let us consider for a moment the nature and function of mythic narrative. The myths of a culture provide an orientation for man’s moral experience in that they bestow an objective status upon values of the present, preserving them from relativism.1 Myths of gods and heroes show that the paradigms for human action not only exist outside man, but can be a part of genesis itself; that is, present values are legitimized, transferred from the profane world to 161 162 / JOHN L. GREENWAY the sacred by projecting them in illo tempore (to use Mircea Eliade’s term): a static time of creation when a culture’s truths were established. I see Ossian and his imitators as doing essentially the same thing, and on a pre-rational level of cultural consciousness—legitimizing the values of sentimental primi­ tivism through a mythic narrative (the Ossianic poems) which showed that sentimental views of human nature, virtue, and vice were really present at the dawn of Northern, non-classical civilization. This brings us to a second point about myth, one which in a sense distin­ guishes modem myths such as Ossian from pre-scientific myths. The anthro­ pologist Malinowski has noted that while we see myth, rite, and ritual as symbolic, the believer does not: to him, the constructs of myth are empiri­ cally real.2 Modem man, however, defines truth in terms of rational thought, and either tends to see myth as falsehood, or as symbolizing an empirical or conceptual content. But, as Cassirer and others have shown, the impulse to myth-making is not negated by reason, for modern myths must maintain their objectivity in two realms: first, as narratives expressing spontaneously the world of feeling, and second, as historical, empirical fact. As an illustration of this, the assumed literary merit of Ossian was predicated upon his historicity; indeed, this was the most important single fact about the forgeries, in that Ossian’s status as historical document objectified values, much as ritual vali­ dates rites by presenting them to a receptive audience as reenactments of sacred paradigms of the illud tempus. As a means of organizing values, myth is neither true nor false—it is expressive or inexpressive. Ossian validated and gave factual status to several primitivist fantasies of the Nordic past. Basically, the Ossianic poems fused in one symbolic universe what had been a paradox since the first humanist attempts to build a national past upon Tacitus’ Germania, first edited in the fifteenth century. This para­ dox, simply stated, was that enthusiasts for Germanic valor such as Conrad Celtis could admire our heroic ancestors for their martial vigor and, at the same time, following Tacitus, point to tribes of chaste, democratic, freedomloving (Humanist) Teutons.3 Obviously, one part of this mythic construct ran counter to another, older view, which helps to give substance to the paradox; that is, this very martial vigor destroyed classical culture, and brought on what Renaissance scholars called those dark “Ages in the Middle.” In the eighteenth century, Shaftesbury was not alone in identifying “Gothic” with “barbaric,”4 and the dual nature of the myth continued even into the next century. Before Ossian, the “nobler qualities of the mind” necessary to complement the fascinating barbarity of the North in a primitivist myth had to...