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Forging the Romantic and the Gothic

Forging the Romantic and the Gothic

Last updated on: November 12, 2026 at 12:34 am by Philip Jenkins

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Forging the Romantic and the Gothic 2026-11-11T20:09:44-04:00 Philip Jenkins

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I am working on the idea of forgery in history, the creation of false documents, with an emphasis on scriptures broadly defined, and on texts intended to transform religion. Some eras were very rich in such products, and I have written several posts on one period in particular, the Late Renaissance. I am now turning to another period when people were making things up, often with extravagant success.

I Want to Believe

There is a critical theme in all this, namely, why are forgeries of this kind such a big thing in some periods but not others? Partly, it is a matter of fashion and imitation, as the success of one sensational “ancient find” inspires other people to go off and make their own supposed finds. But there is another much more central idea, namely that forgeries and alleged discoveries only have an impact if they speak to particular needs of the larger society at the time. People buy into these “finds” because they are expecting something like them, and these exactly fit the profile of what they are seeking.

A famous bit of political analysis says that “Leadership is a function of followership,” which is also a terrific way of understanding cults and religious movements. In my present case, the principle might be “Forgery is a function of audience,” and more specifically, “(Successful) forgery is a function of credulity.” Understand the audience and what it passionately wants, and you will understand the forgeries that are produced to satisfy its presumed needs. If you ever watched The X Files, do remember that UFO poster that Agent Fox Mulder had on his wall: “I Want To Believe.” Or another relevant phrase: “The Truth Is Out There.”

In the next couple of posts, I will be looking at one historical era when people evidently wanted to believe in something, and documents were created to fill those needs. The period in question is the 1760s in Great Britain, but with effects spilling over very substantially into Continental Europe, and for about a century to come. That is the definition of a revolutionary moment.

The Scottish Bard

The first and best known example of forgery and deception was definitively Scottish. In the 1750s, James Macpherson traveled the still Gaelic speaking areas of the Scottish Highland and Islands, collecting Gaelic poetry. He certainly found some genuine items, but he massively embellished his achievements in the book he published in 1760, the Fragments Of Ancient Poetry, Collected In The Highlands Of Scotland, And Translated From The Gaelic Or Erse Language. (He was only 24 at the time of writing),

all images are in the public domain

Briefly, Macpherson claimed to have found and translated a whole epic cycle of Homeric dimensions. He took the medieval Irish epic of the Fenians or Fianna, the warrior followers of Fionn mac Cumhaill (Finn McCool), and he now focused on the figures of Ossian (Oisín), son of Fionn, and also of Ossian’s own son Oscar.

Notionally, Ossian was a blind bard who lived in the third century AD. All these characters existed at least as names in Irish tradition, but Macpherson invented virtually everything he reportedly found in his epics. These were wholly his own creation, and within a short time after the work appeared, plenty of scholars and critics were denouncing Ossian as sheer forgery. For one thing, Macpherson’s Gaelic was less than stellar.

Having said that, in trying to describe the full impact of these “discoveries,” you would need a sizable book, probably in multiple volumes, and you would soon run out of superlatives. From the 1760s onward, and well into the 1820s, Ossian became far more than a mere fad, inspiring countless imitators. In 1773, Thomas Jefferson wrote that

I am not ashamed to own that I think this rude bard of the North the greatest poet that has ever existed. Merely for the pleasure of reading his works, I am become desirous of learning the [Gaelic] language in which he sung, and of possessing his songs in their original form.

Thoreau compared the work to the Iliad, and such Homeric comparisons were embarrassingly common.

The whole phenomenon laid an essential foundation for the later triumphs of Sir Walter Scott, and through him a very large portion of the Scottish tourist industry. It also supercharged the Gaelic revival.

Ossian in Europe

Less known in British literary memory, Ossian also had a phenomenal impact in Europe. Goethe discovered Ossian in 1770, at the ideal age of 21, and he loved it as pure Naturpoesie. Ossian plays a critical role in Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (from 1774):

Ossian has superseded Homer in my heart. To what a world does the illustrious bard carry me! To wander over pathless wilds, surrounded by impetuous whirlwinds, where, by the feeble light of the moon, we see the spirits of our ancestors; to hear from the mountain-tops, mid the roar of torrents, their plaintive sounds issuing from deep caverns, and the sorrowful lamentations of a maiden who sighs and expires on the mossy tomb of the warrior by whom she was adored. I meet this bard with silver hair; he wanders in the valley; he seeks the footsteps of his fathers, and, alas! he finds only their tombs. Then, contemplating the pale moon, as she sinks beneath the waves of the rolling sea, the memory of bygone days strikes the mind of the hero, days when approaching danger invigorated the brave, and the moon shone upon his bark laden with spoils, and returning in triumph.

Just follow the link to the Wikipedia entry to see the amazing volume of Ossian-related painting produced over the following century. When in 1805 the Napoleonic loyalist Anne-Louis Girodet painted the fallen French warriors arriving in a kind of Elysium, then of course Ossian was there to welcome them.

In the nineteenth century, Ossian paintings were a whole genre within French art, not to mention that of other countries. In 1813, Ingres painted his famous Dream of Ossian.

And then there was all the music composed in this era. (Cue Mendelssohn’s “Fingal’s Cave”). Actually, Ossian was less a genre than a cultural explosion.

Some of the impacts are downright weird. One key name in the Ossian cycle was Oscar, which now became commonplace. One of Napoleon Bonaparte’s close followers was Count Bernadotte, who had a son in 1799. Napoleon personally chose the name Oscar for the new arrival, reflecting his personal passion for the stories, which he knew in Italian translation. In 1810, the Bernadotte house became the royal rulers of Sweden, where that child became the beloved King Oscar I (1844-1859). Oscar II ruled from 1872-1907, and like his father, he also controlled Norway. A great many patriotic Swedish families likewise chose the name Oscar: “Oscar was the third most popular name for males born in Sweden in 2013.”

Anyway, Jefferson, Goethe, and Napoleon… Now that is fandom.

Creating the Romantic

Forged the poems might be, but by common consent, Macpherson was a very good poet in his own right. But much more was going on, in a culture that was beginning to invent the Romantic movement, with its distinct sensibility. Ossian translated its readers to a world that was quite as worthy and heroic as the Classical eras of Greece and Rome, but it was more primitive, more turbulent, charged with distinctively European landscapes of remote forests and crags, with all their ghosts, all their melancholy. Stark Nature ruled supreme, and humanity stood close to its authentic ancient purity, before the curses of civilization had arisen. In German literary history, the Sturm und Drang movement is normally dated from the late 1760s, with The Sorrows of Young Werther as one of its scriptures.

The epics had a massive political significance. In a time of growing nationalism, Ossian allowed rising countries to identify with those north and west European roots. In the French context, the leaders of the French Revolution were utterly obsessed with ancient Rome, and with restoring the values of the Republic of Virtue. But when the original regime collapsed in the mid-1790s, there was a crying need for literature to glorify the heroic emperor, a new manifestation of that ancient warrior chieftain.

Europe was primed for Romanticism, and Romantic nationalism, although few would yet have been able to identify those deep-laid urges. Ossian gave those Europeans the cultural mythology they never knew they needed.

The Marvelous Boy

If Ossian stood in a category by itself, there were some striking parallels, in which underlying needs and interests led substantial audiences to accept bogus writings. One well known English example was Thomas Chatterton, who from the early 1760s was peddling the alleged poetry of the medieval monk Thomas Rowley. (Chatterton himself was very young at this point, being born in 1752). By way of comparison, this was only a few years after the Ossianic sensation. Chatterton too adopted a pseudo-ancient guise, and wrote in what he presented as fifteenth century English:

Mie love ys dedde,
Gon to hys death-bedde,
Al under the wyllowe tree.

Waterre wytches, crownede wythe reytes,
Bere mee to yer leathalle tyde.
I die; I comme; mie true love waytes.
Thos the damselle spake, and dyed.

Chatterton’s work achieved great success, and even more so after his forgeries were exposed. His poems had a freshness and a simplicity that was so lacking in the very formal, cerebral, Classical poetry of Georgian England, and he was idolized by the Romantic poets who emerged in the next generation: William Wordsworth called him “the marvelous boy.” Like Ossian, Chatterton became a cultural superstar across the contemporary European Continent.

Adding vastly to that reputation was his very romantic death by suicide in 1770, aged just seventeen, which became the subject of a very well known painting by Henry Wallis (1856). He became, literally, the original young artist starving in a garret.

But again, as with Macpherson, it was not so much the characteristics of his own (forged) writings that gave him so much glory, it was the social and literary environment in which they appeared. The world was ready.

The Gothic Castle

Typically for his time, the very poor boy Chatterton was desperate for a wealthy patron to support him, and he made vigorous efforts to win the favor of the superstar author Horace Walpole. Walpole was initially delighted by the pseudo-medieval offerings he received from Chatterton, but he turned sharply against him when he realized they were bogus. Walpole was shocked – shocked! – to think that a modern author might try to pass such writings off as if they were genuine. That rejection set Chatterton on his road to ruin.

All of which was very ironic indeed, because of just why Walpole was such a massive presence in the England of his day. In 1764, he had published the novel The Castle of Otranto, which was the founding work of the Gothic genre that would become such a phenomenal presence in European culture over the next couple of generations – precisely the decades in which Ossian was also at his height. If it was not a good book, it was incredibly influential. Like a thousand imitators, the book concerned medieval castles, ancient curses, doomed lineages, apparitions of skeletons, bold knights, and lethal prophecies. All dialogue is in fluent medieval-speak.

And here is the twist: at least in its first edition, Walpole claimed the book was the discovery of an ancient manuscript, exactly like Chatterton’s poetry. The first edition bore the full title The Castle of Otranto, A Story. Translated by William Marshal, Gent. From the Original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas at Otranto. The introduction declares that:

The following work was found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England. It was printed at Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529. How much sooner it was written does not appear. The principal incidents are such as were believed in the darkest ages of Christianity; but the language and conduct have nothing that savours of barbarism. The style is the purest Italian.

The second edition abandoned the (false) claim to being a rediscovered manuscript, but Walpole was in shifty territory, which made his condemnation of Chatterton look all the more dubious. Among many critics, the poet John Clare later complained that “When his gossiping fribble had discovered [Rowley’s poems] to be forgeries why did he not discover the genius of the author – no because they surpassed his Leadenhall forgery of “Otranto”.’ Note the flat word “forgery,” and the suggestion that Walpole was just jealous. I quote a recent review by Camille Ralphs: “Clare sensed, as John Goodridge put it, that ‘the respectability of one and the notoriety of the other had more to do with social class than literary ethics’.”

Reading Walpole, the same points that we have seen above emerge. The readers who made Walpole’s novel such an epochal success did so because they were avidly in search of the themes and ideas it presented, and which contrasted so starkly with the polite conventions of the day. That meant medieval settings, nightmarish images, extreme emotions, omens and curses, the manipulation of terror, the thin frontier separating natural and supernatural, and a glorification of the wild, the fantastic, and the irrational. Commonly, such books revealed their ghastly secrets through the discovery of some ancient manuscript or letter, of what we would today call “found footage.” Only if you read the sober and rational novels of the decade or two before 1764 do you realize what a stunning contrast this was. Reason and Enlightenment have their limits.

Walpole’s book also implied a whole chronology. We are used to hearing “Gothic” as a kind of style or sensibility, but in its origins, the term was strictly chronological. In the common view of the time, there was the glorious Roman era, then the Fall and the Dark Ages, which were characterized by the rule of barbarians such as the Goths. This age produced “Gothic” architecture, which fell so far short of pure Classical taste. When the “Gothic” Middle Ages ended, we moved into the Renaissance, and true civilization could get moving once again. But Walpole’s work suggested the powerful appeal of that “Gothic” Middle Age, together with its architecture and its aesthetic, which soon became very fashionable. Very much like the medieval world of the imaginary Thomas Rowley, or indeed the Celtic realms of Ossian.

People wanted a new world – well, a new/medieval world – and they were very happy to accept the bogus documents on which it was based. They wanted to believe. If they had not believed it, they would not have seen it with their own eyes.

Successful forgery is a function of credulity.

Do check out the substantial bibliography I have put together on ideas of forgery and imagined documents in the Early Modern era. For English fakes, scams and sensations in the 1760s, see Madeleine Pelling, Hoax: Truth And Lies In The Age Of Enlightenment (London: Profile, 2026).

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