As an elegiac portrayal of a lost, Scottish heroic age, Macpherson’s work invented a sense of continuity among the distant past, recent Jacobite defeats, and a beleaguered Gaelic culture in Macpherson’s present. His fabrications underscored the fragility of his culture even while perpetuating it in a new form. Viewed in a sympathetic light, Macpherson’s actions look forward to similar acts of cultural preservation in both Scottish and Canadian contemporary literature. In his comparative study of Neil Gunn’s novels and Alistair MacLeod’s short stories, Christopher Gittings focuses on Scottish writers and writers of Scots descent, but his observations can be applied to nineteenth-century emigrant writers as well. Writers in Canada and Scotland, countries "where the cultural past has been obscured by the exclusive historiography of English imperialism," return in their fiction to "moments of disjunction" that result from emigration (Gittings 93). The characters in these short stories and novels attempt "to recover parts of themselves and their cultures through a reconstruction of the lost peoples in their ancestral pasts from the remnants of oral narrative, music, and the ruins which mark the landscape" (Gittings 95). For Scots, Irish, indigenous, and Metis cultures in Canada, history becomes less a verifiable narrative than "an absent presence" containing "intersecting and dislocating moments" (Gittings 103). In Canadian literature, Macpherson’s Ossian becomes the site at which writers can explore the intersection of cultures. The ancient bard demonstrates how an imported literary form can underscore a writer’s need to establish parallels between his or her own ancestral culture and any familiar detail in the new landscape in order to overcome a sense of alienation.

The imaginative reconstruction of the Scottish Ossian or the Irish Oisín in Canadian literature establishes common ground not merely between the Old and New Worlds, but between colonial and post-colonial literatures, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing. In order to illustrate the continuity of some themes illustrated by the presence of Ossian/Oisín in the literature of the past two centuries, it will be useful to look at the treatment of Macpherson and his Celtic bard in the following works: Standish O’Grady’s The Emigrant (1841), Adam Kidd’s The Huron Chief (1830), Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s poem, "The Celts" (1869), James McCarroll’s novel, Ridgeway: An Historical Romance (1868), Agnes Maul Machar’s For King and Country: A Novel of 1812 (1874), Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners (1975), and Jane Urquhart’s Away (1993).

The poetry and legends associated with Ossian came from a number of written and oral sources, particularly the Irish Fionn Cycle that originated in Munster and Leinster, but eventually became part of the Gaelic oral culture of Scotland. Macpherson borrowed freely from both Scottish and Irish folk tales and from medieval manuscripts, including the twelfth-century monastic compilation of Fionn tales, the Acallam na Senórach (Colloquy of the Ancients), in which Ossian encounters the Christian St. Patrick, and defends the world view and ethos of his defunct civilisation (Oxford Companion to Irish Literature 5). Heroes such as Cú Chulainn from the unrelated Ulster Cycle were then added into the mix. Existing simultaneously in oral and written form, in Gaelic and English translations, Oisín’s appearance in Canadian literature raises complex questions of origin and authenticity for students of colonial and post-colonial literature in Canada.

Whether they are aboriginals or ancient Celts, Butler admires non-literate peoples for their presumed ability to convey the "peculiar significance" of a place through its name or description. One of the sources Macpherson studied also provided examples of the way that the history and character of a specific place could be portrayed. The Acallam na Senórach featured an Irish literary tradition called the dinnshenchas, essentially "the lore of prominent places." The dinnshenchas was a poetic tradition based upon "a mentality in which the land of Ireland is perceived as being completely translated into story: each place has a history that is continuously retold" (Oxford Companion to Irish Literature 150). Ossian’s poetry thus may have provided some of the inspiration for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists seeking "local colour" in their own literature.

The translations Macpherson published between 1760 and 1763 appear at a crossroads of history and culture. The very success that England had in imposing its mercantile system and laws on supposedly less civilised Gaelic societies in Ireland and Highland Scotland ironically left readers nostalgic for the imagined freedom and simplicity of those same societies. As Fiona Stafford notes, "in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe, the need for an alternative to the polite urban society of the Enlightenment was very real" (50). Macpherson’s fabrications were rapturously received because they filled this need. Stafford suggests that Macpherson’s work fulfilled pressing personal and cultural needs as well.

His work was, in fact, partially a response to recent historical events that had pitted the English against the Scots:

Macpherson’s fear that the oral tales he collected might eventually survive only in English translations may even account in part for the sustained melancholy of the works. According to Hugh Blair, who wrote a critical introduction to the poems, "Ossian is perhaps the only poet who never relaxes or lets himself down into the light and amusing strain. . . . One keynote is struck at the beginning and supported to the end . . . the events recorded are all serious and grave, the scenery throughout, wild and romantic" (859). Blair thought this was a good thing, though other critics have taken issue not only with the authenticity but also with the all-too-pervasive Celtic gloom. Nevertheless, Ossian’s dwelling on fallen chieftains and vanished glory not only provided "wild and romantic" scenes for Canadian writers wishing to present their own local regions in an interesting light, but also seemed an apt model for nationalists in Scotland and Ireland, and for emigrants from those countries who were smarting from recent English victories.

While sharing nationalist aims with the Scots, the Irish were nevertheless the loudest voices denouncing Macpherson’s translations as inauthentic. They had the most to lose from Macpherson’s success. Worse than the abduction of Oisín was Macpherson’s gibe that "it would be as ridiculous to think that Milton’s Paradise Lost could be wrote by a Scottish peasant as to suppose that the poems ascribed to Ossian were writ in Ireland" (qtd. in Mere Irish 343). Irish critics were quick to point out that Ossian, "the Scottish Homer," was not Scottish at all, but Oisín the Irish poet-warrior, the son of the legendary hero, Fionn MacCumail. They insisted that any claim to Scottish origins for the poems was based on a confusion arising from the medieval Latin term for Ireland, Scotia (O’Halloran 74). To prove the Irish origin of Oisín became "a matter of national honour" in Ireland (Mere Irish 346). Consequently, Macpherson’s public claim that the Irish were too primitive to conceive such poetry became as much a goad as an insult. He inadvertently encouraged scholars to take a second look at Ireland’s vast wealth of manuscripts and folklore that until then was regarded as the recondite preserve of a few aristocratic Irish-speaking scholars. Irish antiquaries now set about translating and publishing folklore and manuscripts to establish Oisín’s lineage.

As an irritant introduced into the body of Irish scholarship, the Ossian controversy ultimately produced pearls of varying quality, in Charlotte Brooke’s Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789), the translations of Theophilus O’Flanagan, founder and contributor to the Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy (1807), in Thomas Moore’s early Ossianic "effusions," Lady Morgan’s novel The Wild Irish Girl (1806), and, ultimately, in W.B. Yeats’s first published book of poetry, The Wanderings of Oisín (1889). The works of Moore, Owenson, O’Flanagan, and Brooke are particularly relevant to Canadian literary nationalism, as their works are acknowledged, directly or indirectly, in the Canadian writing of O’Grady, Kidd, and McGee. Moore’s influence particularly was acknowledged by a significant number of writers in nineteenth-century Canada. Kidd dedicated The Huron Chief and Other Poems to him, McGee and McCarroll credit him with founding a literary tradition in Canada in Canadian Ballads and Madeline and Other Poems respectively, and he is an indirect influence in O’Grady’s work.

Neither Moore’s famous poetry nor Kidd and O’Grady’s writing could have existed without the work of pre-Romantic eighteenth-century antiquarians such as the Anglo-Irish Brooke and the Gaelic-speaking O’Flanagan. The cultural gap created by the very different backgrounds of these two scholars was bridged through their involvement with a particular early form of Irish nationalism, Patriotism. Conservative in nature, and primarily Anglo-Irish in origin, this movement both preceded and in some ways evolved into the Romantic nationalism of the nineteenth century. Patriots were committed to responsible citizenship and the active improvement of society, and a moderate defence of Anglo-Irish privilege (providing the responsibilities that accompanied privilege were fulfilled) (Mere Irish 300). Encompassing the ideas of writers and thinkers such as Swift and Berkeley, Irish Patriots rejected traditional and Anglo-centric Tory/Whig factionalism and called for "virtue in public affairs" (Mere Irish 122) as a way to distinguish Irish interests from those of England. In 1782, Patriot ideas were given form in a nominally independent Irish legislature known commonly as Grattan’s Parliament. To feel a sense of political responsibility to one’s country presupposed a strong national identity; the writers aligned with the Patriot movement used their work to inspire the sort of local and national affection that they believed was the first step towards assuming self-government. The translations of poems attributed to Oisín in the work of Charlotte Brooke and Theophilus O’Flanagan had a specifically nationalist aim. Brooke published her work as "a Patriot endeavour in the service of her country: hoping to instil some appreciation for native Gaelic culture among the lettered Irish, and hence, to raise Ireland and its culture in the British estimate" (Mere Irish 363). One way of rehabilitating Irish culture after centuries of colonization was by reclaiming Ossian from Macpherson.

While O’Grady’s poem supports Irish ownership of Ossian, or Oisín, he does not resist exploiting his reader’s acquaintance with Celtic gloom, popularly associated with Macpherson’s fallen warriors. As a supporter of Henry Grattan and the aims of the Patriot party, O’Grady mourns the dissolution of the Irish Parliament. His elegiac treatment of former Anglo-Irish patriots echoes the cadences in which Macpherson honours fallen heroes:

By wrapping his description of the parliament in a cloud of Ossianic gloom, O’Grady implies that Ireland had lost not simply its independence but, more precisely, the voices of eloquent and disinterested Patriots who could defend Ireland’s well-being to Britain and the world beyond by using words rather than violence

Coinciding with and in fact supported by the Patriot movement was a resurgence of pride in national Irish identity as distinct from the larger British state. One manifestation of this renewed interest in Irish culture was a mid-eighteenth-century call "to create a literature distinguishing itself by its couleur locale from the ‘mainstream’ English literature" in which "Ireland’s ‘natural beauties’ and the ‘genius of its inhabitants’ rose in close conjunction with each other" (Mere Irish 352). O’Grady seemed willing to follow this directive in celebrating the distinctiveness of both Irish and Canadian society. His descriptions of the landscape of Quebec suggests that he continued to be disturbed by the idea that Scotland had taken the credit for Irish innovations, even while Ireland laboured to free itself from the stereotype of backwardness and rebelliousness. Contrasted to the "gigantic crags" that are "fair Scotia’s boast" (813-815) is the more rolling, cultivated landscape surrounding the Quebec Ile de Orléans in the St. Laurence River, in O’Grady’s day a popular recreational retreat for "care worn Cits" (695).

Like Ossian, and like the orators of Grattan’s Parliament, the Irish musicians commemorated by O’Grady are now silent. The Emigrant reflects a period in Ireland characterised by a lack of nationalist direction, sectarian politics, the death of Grattan and the rise of the Catholic populist politician Daniel O’Connell. O’Grady’s dwelling on the ascendancy of Scottish culture makes the silencing of a coherent Irish Patriot voice more poignant:

O’Grady thus tries to associate a Canadian landscape with the local colour and social pleasures of the new life he was attempting to build for himself in Quebec. However, in his own admission, the Canadian landscape lacked "objects . . . to engage that attention and effort of genius which might otherwise awake something of more engaging matter" (Preface). He remained too firmly attached to his native region and its heroes and artists, and so even the most beautiful Canadian landscapes merely reinforce a sense of alienation, while the Irish and Scottish rivalry over the ownership of Ossian provides an imaginative hook upon which he hangs a lengthy comparison of Ireland’s lost glories and his present exile. As he assesses both the present and the past culture of Ireland, O’Grady’s mood remains melancholy, since he is forced to recall not only the eclipse of the values he shared with the Patriots, but also his sense of cultural disjunction when portraying Canadian culture and politics.

Oisín was a cultural source that straddled Classical and Romantic views of culture and politics. Conservative patriots alluded to him in order to mourn the loss of a parliament controlled by the protestant ascendancy. The more radical United Irishmen alluded to Macpherson’s fallen heroes to commemorate comrades lost in the bloody conflicts that flared up in several regions of Ireland in the spring and summer of 1798. The ferocity on both sides of the conflict, and the especially nasty official retaliation in the form of pitch-cappings, floggings, and gibbets challenged the concept that the Irish were living in the Age of Enlightenment, and encouraged them to look to their past for a model of Irish society free from sectarian violence. Irish interest in Ossian implied "a turning away from contemporary English civilisation and the bitter religious identities of the recent Irish past" (Hutchinson 56).

The Irish-Canadian poet Adam Kidd was born in Ulster within memory of a time when his region, historically the most Gaelic province in Ireland, had borne the brunt of the United Irish rebellions and loyalist yeoman reprisals in 1798 (Campbell 89). As with O’Grady, the Canadian landscape provided moments of cultural disjunction for Kidd, who found an "imaginative correlative" between what had happened in Ireland and what was happening to the Huron in North America (Edwards 376). According to the rhetoric and ballads of United Irish writers, Britain had benefited from the sectarian divisions it had imposed between the Catholics and Dissenters who were disenfranchised in Ireland, but played off against each other by the established church and government (Thuente 239). In The Huron Chief, Kidd’s main satirical targets are the American and English missionaries, whose attempts to convert the Huron—whom Kidd perceptively calls a "nation"(67)—introduced the fallen world of sectarianism to what he sees as a North American Eden. Allusions to Macpherson’s Ossian allow Kidd to draw symbolic parallels between ancient Celts and native Canadians, who in his portrait resemble the polite warriors of Macpherson’s translations. For the epigraph to The Huron Chief, Kidd uses Macpherson’s translation of an "extempore composition" recounted to him by a highland "chief": "Where are our Chiefs of old? Where our Heroes of mighty name? / The fields of their battles are silent—scarce their mossy tombs remain!" (Explanatory Notes, 69). The choice of quotation calls attention to the ignored or neglected cultural and archaeological sites that remind European settlers of the presence of an older culture in America, while casting over the poem an elegiac gloom suitable to both Ossian’s fallen heroes and a beleaguered native culture.

Although his writings about both Ireland and Canada are largely neglected, today Thomas D’Arcy McGee is widely recognized for taking the next necessary steps in bridging the gap between emigrant and Canadian-born writers in order to develop a national literature in Canada. Born in Carlingford, Co. Louth, McGee began his career as a protégé of the Irish painter, scholar, and journalist George Petrie (1790-1866), whose portraits of round towers and monastic ruins created a visual counterpart to Macpherson’s poetry. McGee then joined the Irish revolutionary and cultural organization Young Ireland, which was greatly influenced by the work of German nationalist philosophers, including Karl Friedrich Schlegel. When McGee paraphrases Schlegel’s dictum, "no national literature, no national life" (The New Era, June 17, 1857), he anticipates Yeats’s phrase, "there is no nationality without literature, no literature without nationality" by nearly forty years (Remembrance 209). The author of The Irish Writers of the Seventeenth Century (1846), McGee was committed to popularising the Irish intellectual and cultural history that went on independently even in the most active era of English colonisation. In his researches into the work of Irish antiquarians, and his publicizing of their material in nationalist verse, McGee restores Ossian to the Irish by establishing what he considers the poet’s correct cultural and historical context. Unlike Macpherson’s Ossianic poems, "The Celts" portrays the ancient Irish as learned and moderate, rather than primitive and wild, emphasizing their artistic accomplishments rather than their martial exploits.

"The Celts," which was written after McGee left Ireland but not published until after his death, may have been influenced by German philosopher Johann Gottfried Von Herder’s critical writing on Macpherson. Herder’s own interest in Ossian arose out of a concept of nationality based on the organic distinctions arising from the environment, language and history that shaped a culture. Believing "a nation’s earliest most spontaneous poetry [to be] the true voice of the nation" (O’Neill 101), Herder used the example of Ossian to persuade German poets to turn away from classical French models and draw instead on the folklore of their own country for poetic subjects. McGee’s concept of the modern national poet’s role is also modelled on Ossian, whom he portrays as an "inspired giant" whose art preserved an image of an Irish golden age that would provide the model for "one pupil of the past, as mighty soul’d / As in the prime / Were the fond, fair, and beautiful and bold— / They of your song sublime!" (177). McGee’s belief that poetry enlarged the soul and inspired the actions of would-be nationalists may have come from his Young Ireland mentor, Charles Gavan Duffy, who wrote that "Poetry has been named the ‘sister of religion’" (The Ballad Poetry of Ireland xxix). In McGee’s poem, the forces of religion, nation, and art are united when he portrays the Celts as "western shepherd-seers" who pray "with fire-touch’d lips" (176) to the Goddess Bride, patron of fire and the hearth, and more significantly, of art and poetry.

Young Ireland leaders Duffy and Thomas Davis had argued that it was not sufficient for the Irish to know their history; they needed to imaginatively re-live significant moments in the development of their nation through painting and literature. This is likely why McGee invokes Ossian, while calling for a modern poet who could restore their history and culture to the Irish people. More than versified history, "The Celts" uses the example of Ossian to address a cultural crisis in the writer’s "own time," namely a colonial occupation that has erased nearly all memories of native Irish institutions, language, and culture. Like the work of Celtic and Anglo-Irish antiquarians in the eighteenth century, "The Celts" is an act of cultural recovery. Even though the language in which Ossian wrote is inaccessible to most of McGee’s readers, the poet’s fame has survived "two thousand years of mist and change." Moreover, McGee’s claim that Ossian survives in Irish popular culture supports his point that poetry can preserve the essential identity of a nation where history and monuments cannot. "The very name of Finn and Gaul sound strange," McGee writes, anticipating the subject of Brian Friel’s play Translations (1981), "yet thine the same— by miscall’d lake and desecrated grange—remains and shall remain" (177). Even though "The Celts" was written after McGee emigrated, it still outlines Young Ireland’s role for the poet: to achieve "the moral regeneration of the national community" and to restore "historical memory" so that he could "inspire his community to ever higher stages of development" (Hutchinson 9).

When Young Ireland split into cultural and paramilitary factions, McGee reluctantly supported the belligerent side. After their failed uprising in 1848, McGee fled arrest in Ireland. Among his emigrant compatriots in America and then in Canada, McGee continued the Young Ireland cultural program of popularizing Irish history and culture. He set up a pro-Irish newspaper, The American Celt, in Boston, wrote a history of Irish settlers in North America, and chronicled Irish intellectual, military and material contributions to American and Canadian life. His writing suggests he was growing less interested in liberating Ireland from the British than in liberating Irish emigrants from ignorance and poverty in North America. Attracted to Canada after a speaking tour, McGee soon became a prominent advocate of Canadian literary nationalism. As early as the eighteen-fifties, he repeated his call for a national poet, this time one who could unite disparate nationalities within Canada through a shared historical past. He asserted that poetry had more profound and far-reaching effects than military might in preserving a nation’s integrity and culture, and develops this theme in the preface of his Canadian Ballads (1858) when he writes, "it is, indeed, glorious to die in battle in defence of our homes or altars; but not less glorious is it to live to . . . preserve the traditions of our country" (vii-viii).

Canadian Ballads celebrated not only the Irish, but also the French, English, Scottish, and First Nations people who built the nation. Far from threatening to supplant a fledgling Canadian culture, the imported cultures of Ireland, Scotland, England, and France provided imaginative models for uncovering and immortalising defining moments in Canadian history. Even before Confederation, McGee wrote in his New Era article, "An Exception Answered":

For McGee, the foundation of Canadian traditions on Old World cultures prevented the harmful deracination that Herder predicted would be the fate of emigrants torn from their native soils (Berlin 177). The gradual transformation of settlers into Canadian patriots came, McGee believed, from a mutual respect that arose from shared historical moments.

Like O’Grady and other Irish-Canadian writers, McCarroll dismisses Ossian’s Scottish ancestry in his novel, Ridgeway: "Mac Pherson’s [sic] Poems of Ossian . . . are not the real poems of Ossian, but mostly fictions fabricated by Mac Pherson himself, and containing some passages from the ancient poems" (68). Unlike McGee, who emphasized the culture and the spirituality of Ossian and the ancient Celts, McCarroll takes pains to emphasize their military skill. He portrays Ossian, "the celebrated warrior and bard," as commander of the Fenians, "a famous military force, forming the standing national militia" (68, 67). Even so, McCarroll remains more poet than soldier because he views the recovery of history and culture as the primary force uniting or inspiring Ireland to military action against a foreign aggressor. The name "Fenian" was chosen deliberately by organizations in Ireland and America who, though committed to change through force rather than words, valued its cultural associations. McCarroll values Ossian and the Fenian warriors he commands because their history is "free from any unpleasant reminiscences" (70); that is, they are distanced from sectarian division and from historically unsuccessful nationalist movements. "The name "Fenian is of very remote antiquity. . . . There seems to be nothing sectional in it. It is national in the broadest sense of the term, and primitive and forcible to intensity" (66).

Ironically, an ancient name becomes associated with a group that McCarroll hopes will set a new political course for Ireland. McCarroll writes that the "rarity of the name" was valued because it "stimulated enquiry on the part of the curious or weak nationalists . . . and moved the inquiring patriot to look into Irish history in relation to it; and in this matter a knowledge of much of the ancient greatness of Ireland became the common property of those who were formerly but slightly acquainted with such lore. The result was, thousands of the Irish became interested in relation to the past of their race; for, in connection with this name there was that which was calculated to arouse a spirit of patriotism within them and lead them on to a further perusal of the annals of their country" (70). McCarroll’s novel follows earlier cultural programs in Ireland: the ownership of Ossian vindicates Irish character, while stimulating cultural recovery and local affection in Irish readers. Still, Ridgeway contains a paradox that reveals the "complex and difficult" situation of both McCarroll and of any emigrant with a strong love of his home country and an active engagement with the new (Peterman 32). While a disillusioned McCarroll turned his back on Canadian politics, in his novel, Ossian once again becomes an unwitting sojourner in the New World, as Irish nationalist aspirations are played out in part on Canadian soil.

Ossian is among the common cultural elements and historical events that unite a collection of emigrants with equally conflicting loyalties in Agnes Maule Machar’s 1874 novel, For King and Country: a Story of 1812. Ossian appears in the novel as a source of pride to Scottish immigrants, but Machar downplays the controversies surrounding his origins, unlike McCarroll and O’Grady. While sectarian battles and agrarian unrest were less serious concerns in Canada than in Ireland, tensions caused by factors such as the rise of Orangeism in Canada still existed. Other rivalries between Canada’s "founding nations" were indicative of the newly-confederated country’s growing pains, which was perhaps why Machar chose an earlier historical crisis as the focus of her patriotic novel. In it, the distinct traditions of each culture become a foundation for Canadian nationalism. Like McGee, Machar argues that emigrants’ attachment to their countries of origin contains the seeds of local affection in Canada. Where McGee proposed a "new patriotism" as a "solvent" that would blend different nationalities, Machar proposes blood: the War of 1812 demands the ultimate sacrifice of several of the novel’s characters. However, as in McGee’s preface to Canadian Ballads, the transformation of emigrants into Canadians is also achieved by creative means, as seen in the character Marjorie McLeod, the over-imaginative daughter of a Scottish officer. Marjorie’s enthusiasm for Macpherson’s poetry inspires her to write unintentionally parodic Ossianic effusions. When General Isaac Brock, the object of Marjorie’s infatuation, dies in battle, she cries herself to sleep, "her favourite Ossian beside her, open at Malvina’s lament for her lost hero" (250). An example of the type of "old-time heroine" deplored by novelist Sara Jeannette Duncan, Marjorie nevertheless possesses an imagination powerful enough to transform "old nationalities" into "native forms." Her interest in the lore associated with the Canadian landscape helps redirect her hereditary Jacobite loyalties. While "as intensely Highland in her feelings and sympathies as any chieftain’s daughter" (133), she has an emotional attachment to any aspect of her surroundings that reminds her of sublime and storied landscapes described in "her treasured copy of Ossian":

Machar’s treatment of Macpherson in this passage supports McGee’s theories of national literature and also Herder’s assertion that the earliest voice of a nation survives in Ossian’s poetry, its authenticity easily recognised even by those born in another country. While not quite ready to allow the indigenous cultures to speak for themselves, Marjorie, as first-generation Canadian, is at least able to use Ossian to draw imaginative and sympathetic parallels between her absent hereditary landscape, and the genius loci of Canada. Through the example set by Macpherson, a landscape that many Canadian writers had deplored as bereft of cultural memories or local spirits becomes imbued with historical and heroic associations by a first-generation Canadian whose perceptions have been shaped by her knowledge of her family’s original home.

While necessary to a fledgling tradition of nationalist literature written in Canada, the adoption (or appropriation) of Old-World and indigenous myths and legends could crystallize into a less benign form of nationalism. When a sense of belonging becomes a sense of entitlement, a once-marginalized culture may forget both its past and the dispossessed people in its present. This cultural amnesia is of concern to many contemporary writers and critics, and is a preoccupation in two late-twentieth-century Canadian novels, The Diviners and Away. Both writers are well aware of the dark side of exclusionary nationalism characterized by twentieth-century genocides and "ethnic cleansing," but their works also endorse the acts of remembrance, imagination, and creativity necessary to a national identity. However, each writer deliberately destabilizes that identity even as she imagines it. Where nineteenth-century writers were often more concerned with establishing Ossian’s authenticity in order to stake a claim for their chosen national literature, Urquhart and Laurence emphasize the multiplicity of forms in which Ossian’s poems exist, and the impossibility of tracing these multiple versions to one agreed-upon source.

In The Diviners, allusions to the Ossianic controversy again seem appropriate in a work in which the novelist heroine interrogates her own past and her place in Canadian history: "Who has been real and who has been imagined? All have been both, it seems" (268). Among the intricate threads of the novel run the narrative of the Highland clearances that displaced Morag’s ancestors, the oral history of the Metis who were in turn displaced by the emigrant Scots, and the embroidered tales that Christie and Morag create from painfully excavated family histories. Initially, Ossian’s example helps Morag much as it had helped Marjorie in Machar’s novel, by allowing her to feel her way towards a sense of belonging in her community and culture. As Lynn Pifer notes, "Morag gleans elements of truth from the oral accounts that she cannot find in the printed authorities." The tales that Christie tells Morag help her identify "with her own ethnic group, the Scots" and allow her to develop "pride in her family history and herself" (Pifer 148). While the poems of Ossian come to Morag in a book belonging to Christie, he treats them as "performative" works by reading them aloud (Pifer 144). He also establishes a sense of continuity between their life and the life of their Scottish ancestors by insisting that the poems he reads to her are the "real old songs" as they had been "recited" by Highland crofters and "handed down over the generations" (73).

Morag discovers Ossian’s poems just at the moment when she is in serious need of her own vindication of character. She has become increasingly aware of her low status in the narrow-minded community of Manawanka. Her teachers’ disapproval of her impoverished home life is subtly linked in the novel with the school’s English-dominated literary syllabus. Christie’s book of Ossian’s poems is rescued, like his other treasured objects, from oblivion in the town dump, where it has been consigned by the more prosperous descendants of the Scots, English, and Irish settlers who were the beneficiaries of nineteenth-century imperial expansion in Canada. But Christie dismisses the claim in the book’s preface that the poems are "forgeries" by asserting that "the English were bloody liars then as now" (73). His refusal to allow an English writer the final say on what is authentic and what is forged is correct in both fact and spirit: Macpherson’s first publication, Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland contained his translations of the Fionn and Ulster cycles that he collected from the inhabitants of the Scottish Highlands and outlying Islands. More important, the tales remembered and preserved by Scottish crofters present Morag and Christie with eloquent and heroic reflections of their distant past, when the official versions of events contained in school textbooks and military histories barely mention them at all. The poems Christie recites may not be exact transcriptions of oral tales. Moreover, even though the histories he recounts sometimes contain exaggerations and inaccuracies, they help to teach Morag, the apprentice novelist, the importance of what ordinary people experience and feel in their lives (Pifer 144).

The ambiguities surrounding the origins of Ossian’s poetry may even help to prevent Morag’s own renewed pride in her origins from becoming an exclusive, xenophobic vision of the world in which the weak merely switch places with the oppressors when they gain strength. Even Christie’s version of historical events harbours unexamined racist views of the Metis, but Morag begins to see the connections between her history and the history of all marginalized and silenced peoples. Unlike Christie, she is less interested in Ossian’s poetry as a record of the martial prowess of the ancient Scots, and more in its use as a creative model for her own work. Looking at "the strange words, unknown now, lost, as it seems to all men, the words that once told of the great chariot of Cuchullin" (74), Morag is initiated into a sense of the gaps and silences in her own personal history, a realization that later helps her empathize with others.

In a manner that has fortuitous parallels with McGee’s poem "The Celts," Morag’s chariot is converted from an instrument of war to a poetic vehicle that enables the emigrant to orient herself and negotiate her way through the new land. The imaginary chariot is as much a product of the Canadian landscape as it is of Scottish culture with its "seat covered in green moss (she said velvet at first but where would they get it?)" and "carvings of deer and foxes and bears . . . meadowlarks . . . tall grasses . . . spruce trees and spruce cones . . . polished stones for jewels" (97-98). Both Wordsworth’s and Ossian’s legacy to Morag is the realisation that poetry can be created as readily from the indigenous materials of Manitoba as it can from the Highlands or the Lake District. The transformation from emigrant to native is accomplished, as McGee asserted, as much through imagination as through politics.

McGee, Oisín, and the power of poetry (both good and bad) are at the centre of Jane Urquhart’s novel Away. As in The Diviners, the presence of Oisín reveals the intersections and displacements of several cultures. Urquhart consciously connects the Romantic nationalism of the nineteenth century with contemporary concerns by juxtaposing the history and mythology of nineteenth-century Irish emigrants with what Herb Wylie calls a "twentieth-century narrative that . . . illustrate[s] the dangers of historical myopia, an expedient and fetishized preoccupation with the immediate" in "our present global capitalist era" (43). The vulnerability of the Irish culture preserved in the O’Malley family’s history is emphasized by the fact that the novel is narrated by the aged Esther, the last surviving family member. At the same time, the narrative suggests the tenacity and power of oral history. As in The Diviners, oral culture is seen as both subject to erasure and as an important corrective to a sometimes-distorted official history of imperialism. Esther herself is aware of both the conservationist intent of her narrative and its part in a continuity of even older narratives when she compares herself to "an Irish poet from a medieval bardic school. She is aware that those men and women lay in their windowless cells for days, composing and then memorising thousands of lines, their heads wrapped in tartan cloths, stones resting on their stomachs. Esther has neither rocks nor plaids with her in this bed but shares with the old ones a focused desire. Nothing should escape" (133). The oral histories in the novel not only reveal experiences outside the margins of imperial narratives but also provide an analogy for both the fragility and persistence of memory. Memory is ultimately portrayed as more enduring than landscape itself, which can be "demolished, burned, ripped apart, or buried" (155), often in the name of commercial interests.

Oisín becomes an appropriate motif for the novel, as the oral histories, poetry, and lore of Aboriginal and Gaelic cultures are continually aligned with ecological concerns in Away. Moreover, Gittings’s definition of emigrant culture as both familiar and disorienting anticipates one of the novel’s more suggestive images of two worlds connecting: the Venn diagrams that Esther recalls drawing at school, shading in "the place where the two circles intersected; a small dense area with white empty pools on either side" (133). Like the diagram, the O’Malley family history causes "one circle of experience to edge into the territory of another" (133), making sense of and redeeming Gittings’ "empty spaces of history." The recalled absences, the "mourning for abandoned geographies" (128), become the common ground between Irish and Aboriginal cultures in the novel. Significantly, the symbol of intersecting worlds takes on the shape of "a single willow leaf lying on the page," a natural and living image of shared remembrance, which offers cultural defence against the imperialist and commercial activities that threaten both identity and environment in the novel’s present.

Local affection for a specific place becomes the point at which the emigrant and native circles of experience intersect in Away. As a young woman, Mary was "away"—possessed by the memory of an Irish "demon lover," whose spirit, she believes, has followed her to Canada and occupies a small lake. Dismissed as superstition by her husband, Mary’s reverence for the genius loci of her new home wins her the respect of the local Ojibway people who help hide and protect her when she abandons her family. In Ireland, Mary possessed an inborn gift for poetry and imagination, the ability to "twist a sentence into song" (75). That Mary is reunited with her supernatural lover in Canada suggests that those who are perceptive to the spirit of a place can learn to love and appreciate the inherent uniqueness, or essence, of a new land.

Like The Huron Chief, Away deplores non-reciprocal proselytising, and offers in its place a more respectful and tolerant means of sharing narratives. Exodus Crow’s father had explained his people’s mythology to European missionaries, but while he was expected to accept the missionaries’ world-view, the missionaries scoffed at his, and thus blinded themselves to the lore that animates the country for the Ojibway. It is not by chance that Exodus recounts this experience after Mary tells him "about the poet Oisín who had disappeared into Tir na nOg, the land of the young, and who had returned centuries later to argue for the old ways and the old beliefs with he whom Oisín called Patrick of the Crooked Crozier"(179-180). The allusion to Oisín becomes a bridge between Irish and Amerindian, a connection that eventually encourages Mary to recount the "time of the stolen lands of her island, and of the disease, and of the lost language and the empty villages and how the people who once sang were now silent, how the people who once danced were now still" (184). The Irish famine thus becomes a chilling counterpart to the smallpox and influenza epidemics, the official abolition of Aboriginal religious ceremonies, and the residential schools that became the legacy of European/Aboriginal contact. Sharing their histories allows Mary and Exodus to acknowledge "that the same trouble stayed in the hearts of both our peoples" (184-185). As in The Huron Chief, the oral stories that have survived all attempts at eradication allow Irish poets to establish sympathetic parallels with an equally threatened culture.

Urquhart is more explicit than Kidd is in showing the danger of idealizing Celtic or Amerindian culture. Presumably, Mary’s stories of Oisín and Fionn are the direct oral inheritance of the peasants of Rathlin Island. As Christie realizes in The Diviners, when folklore is set down in writing it is in danger of having its authenticity judged and its forms determined by a dominant culture. Urquhart implies that the translated and written versions of Ossian’s poetry helped to perpetuate a viewpoint that saw the waning of Huron and Gaelic culture as historically inevitable. For instance, the Anglo-Irish landlords Osbert and Granville Sedgewick are collectors of folklore much in the way that their father was a taxidermist of their region’s fauna. They visit the homes of their tenants, who obligingly make up new ancient tales so as not to disappoint the young masters, much like Macpherson did for his eager readership. Granville composes laments no doubt influenced by Macpherson’s Ossianic gloom, unintentionally "support[ing] this delicate balance of injustice and defiance on one hand and sorrow and poetry on the other" (44).

Urquhart implies that it is easier for emigrants to transform themselves into landlords than into lovers of the new land; the former transformation is caused when the Irish forget the incidents of loss that are preserved in much of their oral history. Ironically, it is the sense of past vulnerability that causes a partial failure of imagination in Liam and Eileen, Mary’s children. Liam literally experiences a form of historical amnesia, recalling little of his grisly time in the coffin ships and fever sheds that were his introduction to the New World. His first memory of the new country is the imposing white "Canada House" that he sees upon disembarking (136-137). In his eagerness to deny a past that caused his family to lose their foothold on their native land, he is in danger of transforming the suggestively named Canada House into the traditional "Big House" of the Irish landlord, even though Eileen reminds him of the hidden history of aboriginal settlement and English confiscation that allows the lakeside property to pass into his hands (279).

Brian redeems himself when he marries an Irish-Ojibway squatter instead of evicting her family, but Eileen’s errors are more complex and more devastating. Her predicament in some way reflects the difficulties faced by Irish nationalists in recovering a usable tradition after being separated from what Edward Said calls the "generative lineaments of the national identity" by conquest or emigration (Said 237). In Remembrance and Imagination, Joep Leersson acknowledges the historical and cultural voids that "invented traditions" attempt to fill: "Such phenomena testify to the scantiness of hard factual knowledge concerning the Irish past and to the deep-seated need to glorify and embellish that past, to see it in the rosy hues of romance and exoticism. . . . It is an attitude which seems to prosper in a climate where the continuity of history has been disrupted and stigmatised, and people attempt to reconstitute and revalorise it on the basis of scant data" (84-85).

Born in Canada, and knowing Ireland primarily from the images and stories she learned from her disillusioned Irish father, the lonely and lovesick Eileen succumbs to a militaristic fantasy of Fenian warriors:

Fionn’s band of outlaw warriors, the Fianna of Oisín’s poems, would have been local heroes to the inhabitants of Rathlin Island. Like Granville Sedgewick’s limited appreciation of local legends, Eileen’s image of Irish heroes has been imaginatively divorced from the real tribulations and poverty of the people for whom they were a living oral tradition. Her image of Irish culture is derived from the back issues of the pro-Fenian paper The Irish Canadian. Its printed form reminds the reader that Eileen is relatively privileged when compared to her lover Aidan, a famine refugee raised in the slums of Montreal who cannot read. Eileen has re-fashioned Aidan as an exotic revolutionary, when it is actually McGee’s vision of an inclusive future for all Canadians that fires his imagination. Her inability to see the real Aidan, and his inability or unwillingness to communicate his true ambitions to Eileen causes her to be an unwitting participant in the assassination of McGee.

Paradoxically in the novel, McGee’s concept of nationhood demands that his listeners relinquish the past by picturing a country in which "there would be no factions, no revenge for old sorrows, old grievances" (337). Instead, he envisions "a sweeping territory, free of wounds, belonging to all, owned by no one" (337-338). This vision is not the same as historical amnesia, however; it requires a form of imaginative empathy that does not value the history of one culture above others. Urquhart’s novel features the final public speech of D’Arcy McGee, in which he addresses his audience "not as the representative of any race and province, but as the forerunner of a generation that would inherit wholeness, a generation released from fragmentation" (338). In the novel, the speech reflects McGee’s historical connection with a literary and cultural nationalism in Canada that depended upon the experiences and the diverse traditions of many founding nations, a nationalism that he described in "The Mental Outfit of the New Dominion" as "ready to learn from every other people on the condition, that the lesson when learned has been worth acquiring" (2). In "The Celts," the poet Ossian had challenged the Irish to see what was in front of their eyes: a rich cultural inheritance that had been obscured or distorted in English versions of their history. In Away, McGee’s nationalism helps to orient Canadians in their new land: McGee, Eileen claims, "put me in my place" (350).

Even if McGee is seen as a positive force in the novel, Away departs from the confident construction of myths that was sometimes characteristic of nineteenth-century literary nationalism. McGee has a dream of unity that is undermined by the fact that the novel’s portrait of Canadian settlement is part of a larger, age-old narrative of "the world’s great leavetakings, invasions and migrations, landscapes torn from beneath the feet of the tribes. . . . And all the mourning for abandoned geographies" (128). Rather than inheriting wholeness, Esther discovers that her generation will only find its footing in the present by putting together the fragments of the past. As in The Diviners, the multiplicity of sources for Ossian helps to introduce indeterminacy into the novel, forcing the characters, as well as the reader, to re-examine their own notions of origins and place.

A member of the Pictou Literary and Scientific Society. The Pictou Indians: an Original Poem. Pictou, N.S.?:n.p., 1847.