Galway Bay fm newsroom – A multi-disciplinary team from NUI Galway and two universities in the UK have shed light on 250 year old literary controversy.
Since James Macpherson published what he claimed were translations of ancient Scottish Gaelic poetry by a third-century bard named Ossian, scholars have questioned the authenticity of the works.
It was also questioned whether the works were misappropriated from Irish mythology or, as heralded at the time, authored by a Scottish equivalent to Homer.
Researchers have revealed the structures of the social networks underlying the Ossianic corpus and their remarkable similarities to Irish mythology.
The researchers mapped the characters at the heart of the works and the relationships between them to compare the social networks found in the Scottish epics with classical Greek literature and Irish mythology.
The study revealed that the networks in the Scottish poems bore little resemblance to epics by Homer, but strongly resembled those in mythological stories from Ireland.
The research has been published today in the journal ‘Advances in Complex Systems.’