¹Bold, Valentina. "'Rude Bard of the North': James Macpherson and the Folklore of Democracy." The Journal of American Folklore 114.454 (2001): 464.
The quotation is from a letter Jefferson wrote to James Macpherson's cousin Charles in February, 1773, asking for copies of the original source material in order to study the language. Jefferson maintained his admiration for Macpherson all his life, even after the author's deceptions had become widely acknowledged and he had authored papers unfavorable to the cause of American independence. According to one author, Jefferson was intrigued by the "noble savage" in the Ossian tales. congruent with his romanticized vision of the aboriginal Americans. He also appreciated the Homeric and Virgilian resemblances in Ossian. (McLaughlin, Jack. "Jefferson, Poe, and Ossian." Eighteenth-Century Studies 26.4 (1993): 629+.)

²Porter, James. "'Bring Me the Head of James Macpherson': The Execution of Ossian and the Wellsprings of Folkloristic Discourse." The Journal of American Folklore 114.454 (2001): 398.

³McCraith, Michael. "The Saga of James MacPherson's Ossian." The Linen Hall Review 8.2/3 (1991): 8.
According to McCraith, when Napoleon was drawing up a list of books to be used in French schools, Ossian was one of the few foreign texts to be included. Shakespeare didn't make the list.
Fingal was translated into Italian soon after its publication. Gennan, Dutch, Swedish, Russian, Czech, Polish, and Hungarian versions followed later. New translations appear still, with a Japanese translation in 1971. (Porter, James. "'Bring Me the Head of James Macpherson': The Execution of Ossian and the Wellsprings of Folkloristic Discourse." The Journal of American Folklore 114.454 (2001): 412.)

⁴"Battle of Culloden." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Web. 20 Oct. 2011. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Culloden>.
The Battle of Culloden (April 16th, 1746) marked the final, failed effort of the Jacobite forces of Charles Stuart to defeat the Hanoverian forces of the Duke of Cumberland.
According to James Porter, "Macpherson had caught the mood of the age, exploiting a folk tradition that impinged on English consciousness as a result of the Jacobite army's sudden and terrifying arrival in Derby in 1745, a consciousness that later, despite Culloden and the brutal repression of Highland dress and music, continued to regard Highlanders as "barbaric." With the military threat removed, the poems of Ossian became safe for readers who would formerly have found them not merely politically unacceptable, but menacingly so." (Porter, James. "'Bring Me the Head of James Macpherson': The Execution of Ossian and the Wellsprings of Folkloristic Discourse." The Journal of American Folklore 114.454 (2001): 405.)

⁵"Gaelic Place Names in the Glens of Antrim (Continued)." Ulster Journal of Archaeology Second 11.4 (1905): 180-89.

⁶Wilson, David A. Ireland a Bicycle and a Tin Whistle. Montréal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1995. 33.
According to Wilson, "[Oisín] took one look at Scotland and promptly dropped dead."
Michael McGrath quotes Edmund Burke saying that "when Fingal was published all the Irish cried out, 'We know all these poems, we have always heard them from our infancy.'" (McCraith, Michael. "The Saga of James MacPherson's Ossian." The Linen Hall Review 8.2/3 (1991): 6.)
There is some evidence that a purported ancient ogham stone, with an inscription to a warrior called Conan, was in fact placed in position in the late eighteenth century "to strike a blow for the Irish provenance of the antecedents of Macpherson's Ossian." (Ní Chatháin, Próinséas. "Sir Samuel Ferguson and the Ogham Inscriptions." Irish University Review 16.2 (1986): 166.)
In Scotland it is claimed bones were found underneath "Ossian's Stone." Sir Walter Scott wrote of the spot: "In this still place, remote from men, / Sleeps Ossian in the narrow Glen."

⁷The plaque on Hewitt's simple stone cairn reads "John Hewitt / 1907-1987 / My Chosen Ground." A photograph of the cairn may be seen in the gallery at the bottom of the Lubitavish page.

⁸Killanin, Michael Morris, and Michael V. Duignan. The Shell Guide to Ireland. London: Ebury P. in Association with George Rainbird, 1967. 165.
Weapons made from stone quarried here were found as far away as the southeast of. England.

⁹"Oisín." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Web. 20 Oct. 2011. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ois%C3%ADn>.
In a 1945 article, J.W. Delargy explains that "'Whistling at night or Fianna Focht by day' were considered unlucky." He also asserted that the telling of these tales was usually restricted to men. (Delargy, H.H. "The Gaelic Story-teller." Proceedings of the British Academy 31 (1945): 7.)

¹⁰Cross, Tom Peete, and Clark Harris Slover. Ancient Irish Tales. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1936. 454-56.

¹¹Ó hÓgáin Dáithí. Fionn Mac Cumhaill: Images of the Gaelic Hero. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1988. 313.
Thomas M. Curley delivers a concise indictment of Macpherson: "To be sure, the Ossian volumes were principally Macpherson's own contrivance, whether he deceived himself into believing in superhuman editorial powers for restoring a nonexistent primordial corpus of Gaelic literature or deliberately deceived others into accepting this impossibility. Composing Ossian mainly from his imagination and then calling it historically true were bad enough, even if a doubtful hypotheses of overweening self-delusion might serve to mitigate the deed. Equally damaging to his reputation was masterminding an ingenious history of early Scotland lending credibility to the bogus Ossian. This he did in his elaborate, sometimes spurious, critical apparatus accompanying his texts..." (Curley, Thomas M. Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2009. 39-40.)

¹²Curley, Thomas M. Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2009. 42.
In a 1983 magazine article, Paul Gray wrote, "So ripe were the times for the Ossianic poems that if they had not existed, someone would have had to invent them. And Macpherson chiefly had." (Gray, Paul. "Fakes That Have Skewed History." Time (5/16/1983).)
Other literary works for which their contemporary authors claimed unproven or clearly fraudulent historical sources include the pseudo-medieval verse of Thomas Chatterton in the 1760s, and more infamously, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the early twentieth century.

¹³Macpherson, James. The Poems of Ossian. Edinburgh: Grant, 1926. 142. This book may be read in its entirely here or here.
Joep Leerssen describes Macpherson's writing thusly: "Described in the ponderous and sublime diction of prose-poems, Macpherson's Ossian evoked mountains, dark and stormy nights, tragic heroes and hoary sages sadly strumming the harp - in short, and iconography evoking... sublimity rather than beauty, and harkening back to medieval Romance as well as foreshadowing the onset of Romanticism." (Leerssen, Joep. Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame in Association with Field Day, 1997. 40.)
Macpherson's publications: Fragments of Ancient Poetry, collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and translated from the Galic or Erse Language (1760); Fingal, an Ancient Epic in Six Books, together with several other poems, composed by Ossian, the son of Fingal, translated from the Galic language (1762); Tem- pora, an Epic in Eight Books (1763); The Complete Works of Ossian, the Son of Fingal (2 v. 1765); The Poems of Ossian (1771).

¹⁴Boswell, James, Georges Birkbeck Norman Hill, and Lawrence Fitzroy Powell. Boswell's Life of Johnson: Together with Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson's Diary of a Journey into North Wales : in Six Volumes. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975. I: 396.
According to Thomas M. Curley, "...Johnson was the arch-enemy of falsehood in the Ossian business, not only for offending against morality but also for violating authentic history and the simple human trust that makes society possible...truth in literature and life is a perennial human concern inextricably tied to the survival and fulfillment of the race." (Curley, Thomas M. Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2009. 42. 2-3.)
Scottish philosopher David Hume was said to have told Boswell that "if fifty bare- arsed highlanders should say that Fingal was an ancient poem, he would not believe them. He said it was not to be believed that a people who were continually concerned to keep themselves from starving or from being hanged, should preserve in their memories a Poem in six books." (Porter, James. "'Bring Me the Head of James Macpherson': The Execution of Ossian and the Wellsprings of Folkloristic Discourse." The Journal of American Folklore 114.454 (2001): 414-15.)

¹⁵Boswell, Life of Johnson. This particular passage may be read online here.
Johnson continued: "What would you have me retract? I thought your book an imposture; I think it an imposture still. For this opinion I have given my reasons to the publick, which I here dare you to refute. Your rage I defy. Your abilities, since your Homer, are not so formidable; and what I hear of your morals, inclines me to pay regard not to what you shall say, but to what you shall prove. You may print this if you will."
After a trip to Scotland, in part to conduct his own investigation of the Ossian sources, Johnson reported: "t is said, that some men of integrity profess to have heard parts of it, but they all heard them when they were boys; and it was never said that any of them could recite fix lines. They remember names, and perhaps some proverbial sentiments; and, having no distinct ideas, coin a resemblance without an original." (Johnson, Samuel. A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. London: J. Williams, 1775. 190-91. Read online here.)

¹⁶McKean, Thomas A. "The Fieldwork Legacy of James Macpherson." The Journal of American Folklore 114.454 (2001): 460.
Since 1800 some 135 books and 150 articles on Macpherson, wholly or in part, have been published. (Curley, Thomas M. Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2009. 3.)

¹⁷McKean 447.
The author maintains that Macpherson's putting Ossian in "English dress" has the effect of removing "...the graphic edge of truly ancient Gaelic songs. He draws on first hand experience of them, but skillfully emphasizes elements that would appeal to a non-Gaelic audience. In so doing, incidentally, he contributed to the foundations of mist-laden Celticism exploited so fully by Yeats and his contemporaries, and latterly by today's music industry in the marketing of misrepresented 'Celtic' music."
Thomas M. Curley argues from another position, that Macpherson ought to be appreciated as the original poet that he was: "Overestimating Macpherson's indebtedness to genuine Gaelic literature not only misstates the case seriously but also robs him of the distinction of authorship...Giving Macpherson his due, by telling the whole truth about Ossian and taking the bitter with the better, would make him more than a bard standing on the shoulders of predecessors merely reworking Fenian conventions. He would emerge more or less as a self-created genius of self-invented myth whose enduring inspiration for Romantics is a matter of historical record." (Curley, Thomas M. Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2009. 18.)

¹⁸Murphy, Gerard. The Ossianic Lore and Romantic Tales of Medieval Ireland. Dublin: Three Candles, 1961. 6.

¹⁹Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York: Knopf, 1988. 6-17.

²⁰Porter 406.
The author quotes from Gentleman's Magazine (1796): "...the hearse 'was met by 8 gentlemen's coaches and 6 mourning coaches.'"

²¹Hewitt, John. Collected Poems. Ed. Frank Ormsby. Belfast: Blackstaff, 1991. 94-95.
The reference in the final stanza to a "white horse" refers to the traditional tale "Oisín in Tir na nÓg,” in which Oisín's beloved Niamh gives him her white horse, Embarr, and warns him not to dismount on his journey back to his homeland. He forgets her admonition, and then ages 300 years and dies. The line "tinker's son" may be from a traditional ballad with that title, regarding a poor-born maker of "potcheen" (poitín), the very potent Irish moonshine.