IF St Columba is widely known as an adopted Scot arriving from Ireland, it’s less widely acknowledged that St Patrick was quite possibly a Scot who moved to Ireland. Both turn to face the future. Both help bring into being new worlds by resolutely moving away from the old. And yet that affinity across difference, the sense that the old world never really lets us leave, the lands of youth always beckon and are always yearned for, is an essential part of the human story.

In the cycles of tales and songs relating Celtic myth and legend, the dialogues between St Patrick and Ossian refer back to the heroic days of the Celts and describe a confrontation between the ancient, secular, pagan world and the modern, pious, sacral world. Accounts differ and verification is always dubious but at the heart of the whole thing is a sharp sense of retrospective grief, not nostalgia but despair at what’s lost and never to return.

The old world is viewed with more than merely sentiment: it’s a land of youthful self-confidence, stamina and appetite, as any old person might recollect. The new world gives little comfort to this act of aged remembering. But the evocation of the old world in some of the poems from these dialogues remains crystal clear.

The power of this evocation rests on the myth of “Ossian after the Fianna”, returning after the world of heroes has disappeared, to tell his stories to the enquiring St Patrick in the new dispensation of

Christianity. Ossian’s world is gone. But St Patrick’s questioning prompts the telling of the stories and the songs that will continue to commemorate that lost world, and make it a living imagery for the future. The power of literature and music, poetry, story and song, is always subversively at work like this.

The stories of Ossian and Finn, and preceding them, the stories of Cuchulain and Deirdre, and the old gods, have been retold many times, notably in Marie Heaney’s Over Nine Waves: A Book Of Irish Legends (1994). But of all the versions of the tales of Ossian, the most lastingly controversial are those by James Macpherson (1736-96).

So who was he? And what are they? A blunt answer to the first question would be that James Macpherson was a descendant of a Jacobite clan who became a sycophantic Hanoverian toady, a man for the main chance. The conventional answer to the second is “forgeries” pretending to be translations of ancient Gaelic poetry. Neither answer is good enough.

Macpherson was born and grew up in a rural, Gaelic-speaking area of Badenoch within half a mile of Ruthven Barracks, a British Army fort established in 1719 to enforce London rule after the 1715 Jacobite rising. He was surrounded by the traditional oral Gaelic culture of stories and songs about Finn and Ossian, and by Hanoverian military authority.

Mountains, rivers, caves were named for figures from Celtic myth and legend. James was only nine years old in 1745 when his uncle Ewan Macpherson joined the Jacobite army on their march south. They returned, burned the barracks and retreated north to Culloden. The survivors came back to Ruthven before dispersing as fugitives, while the local community was destroyed by the victorious Hanoverian troops. His uncle remained in hiding for nine years. So up to the age of 18, Macpherson lived through, and in close proximity to, one of the most cataclysmic events in modern Europe prior to the 20th century.

HE studied at Aberdeen University, reading Caesar’s Commentaries, where the opposition between the native German tribes and the soldiers of imperial Rome was detailed, and taking in contemporary ideas about the relation between “primitive” and “enlightened” societies.

He became a teacher back in Ruthven, then a private tutor, growing acquainted with the Enlightenment literati, and was introduced to the idea that local folk lore could be drawn upon for use in sophisticated contemporary literary works.

The minister and playwright John Home prompted Macpherson to produce a translation from traditional Gaelic tales and the result was The Death Of Oscar, which appeared in Macpherson’s first publication, Fragments Of Ancient Poetry, Collected In The Highlands Of Scotland (1760).

This was a slim pamphlet of 15 short pieces, few more than a page in length, each a lament for fallen warriors. Extracts published in The Scots Magazine and The Gentleman’s Magazine were immediately popular and the idea that they were only glimpses of an unrecorded epic took hold. Macpherson set out to find it.

What happened then? Find out next week.