In 1763, Europe was full of ghosts, of military dead. That year saw the end of the disastrous Seven Years’ War—involving all the great powers, Austria, Britain, France, Prussia, and Russia, and with around one million fatalities—in the Treaty of Paris and the Treaty of Hubertusburg. Britain was one of the victors, though at a cost of perhaps 20,000 combatants. But it was ultimately from an earlier, smaller, but significant local conflict in Britain, the Jacobite Uprising of 1745–76—in essence a dynastic quarrel between supporters of the Stuarts and the Hanoverians over the succession to the throne—that there emerged a poet who caught Europe's imagination in celebrating its ancient hero-warriors and their ghosts. A Gaelic bard apart, a rival to Homer, James Macpherson's Ossian seduced a continent. Napoleon, an enthusiast for Ossian, and his battlefield opponents alike carried the poems in their saddlebags, despite heated accusations among literary critics of the time that they were literary forgeries.

As a young boy, however, Macpherson had experienced the savage reprisals of Hanoverian troops against his fellow-Highlanders in the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden (1746) that ended the Stuart claim to the British throne. Exposed from birth to the oral traditions of the Gaelic-speaking Highlands, he later attended the lectures of the noted Homer scholar Thomas Blackwell at the University of Aberdeen. Struck by the stirring episodes of the Homeric epics, and with encouragement from Edinburgh intellectuals such as Hugh Blair (1718–1800), professor of rhetoric and belles lettres at the University of Edinburgh, who contributed an important and influential “dissertation” to the 1765 edition, he claimed that the poems he published were “translations” from Gaelic. The tone of the poems, with their dwelling on feeling, heroism, and transitoriness, appealed to readers tired of clever but arid neoclassical verse. But critics such as David Hume and Samuel Johnson, tied to the classical world of literature and current French literary fashion—at the same time ignorant of the Highlands and Gaelic poetic traditions—demanded that Macpherson produce the “originals” from which he had made these.