In 1760 James Macpherson published the first volume of a series of epic poems
which he claimed to have translated into English from ancient Scottish-Gaelic
sources. The poems, which purported to have been composed by a third-century
bard named Ossian, quickly achieved wide international acclaim. They invited
comparisons with major works of the epic tradition, including Homer's Iliad and
Odyssey, and effected a profound influence on the emergent Romantic period in
literature and the arts. However, the work also provoked one of the most famous
literary controversies of all time, colouring the reception of the poetry to
this day. The authenticity of the poems was questioned by some scholars, while
others protested that they misappropriated material from Irish mythological
sources. Recent years have seen a growing critical interest in Ossian,
initiated by revisionist and counter-revisionist scholarship and by the
two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the first collected edition of the
poems in 1765. Here we investigate Ossian from a networks-science point of
view. We compare the connectivity structures underlying the societies described
in the Ossianic narratives with those of ancient Greek and Irish sources.
Despite attempts, from the outset, to position Ossian alongside the Homeric
epics and to distance it from Irish sources, our results indicate significant
network-structural differences between Macpherson's text and those of Homer.
They also show a strong similarity between Ossianic networks and those of the
narratives known as Acallam na Sen\'orach (Colloquy of the Ancients) from the
Fenian Cycle of Irish mythology.Comment: Accepted for publication in Advances in Complex system