Ossian's the narrator, and supposed author, of a cycle of poems which the Scottish poet James Macpherson claimed to have translated from ancient sources in the Scots Gaelic. He's based on Oisín, son of Finn or Fionn mac Cumhaill, a character from Irish mythology. The furor over the authenticity of the poems continued into the 20th century. The poems In 1760 Macpherson published the English-language text Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and later that ye… (More on Ossian)