James Macpherson was born in 1736 in Ruthven in the Scottish Highlands. He later published the Ossian poems, claiming to translate ancient Gaelic epics. His work drew on Highland oral tradition, antiquarian collecting and creative reconstruction in a politically charged post-Union Scotland.

Macpherson's later Ossianic project profoundly influenced Romanticism, even amid controversy over authenticity. His birth marks a path by which oral Gaelic materials entered European literary fashion and changed ideas of the sublime, primitive and national past.