Macpherson’s Fingal and the Welsh Arthur (2023-2025)

Project: Macpherson’s Fingal and the Welsh Arthur

Macpherson’s Fingal and the Welsh Arthur

Author: Ian Blyth 

A comparative study of the respective historical fates of the early mediaeval Welsh Arthur and the character of Fingal in James Macpherson’s Ossianic translations in the early 1760s, examining: 

• How the early mediaeval Welsh Arthur gets reconfigured in an Anglo-French chivalric mode in the twelfth and fourteenth centuries.
• How the character of Fingal, and the form of ancient Highland (Gaelic) identity which Blair and Macpherson see him embodying in the 1760s, is reconfigured in the nineteenth century into the Anglo-Scots North British Highlander.