Fair winner of women’s love,
MacDoon of the witching eyes;
In courtship he’ll ne’er engage,
For there ’neath the sod he lies.
Nor with steed nor with hunter shall Diarmad
Go forth for the chase again;
The loved son of beauty and valour
Is left there, alas, in the Glen!
The Death of Diarmad, like the Death of Oscar, has been a great favourite with reciters. But believers in the authenticity of Macpherson’s “Ossian” regard the former as inferior poetry. The author of the version translated above, Allan Macrorie, lived probably in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Glen-Shee, mentioned in the poem, is a well-known locality in Perthshire, and Ben-Gulbin is a hill in Glen-Shee. But this is not the only place that is said to be the scene of the slaying of the boar and of Diarmad’s death. The district around West Loch Tarbert, Kintyre, also affords topographical indications of the famous hunt having taken place there. Nor can the claims of our friends, the Irish, be forgotten; they also have their Sliabh Gulbin.
When some of the ballads are described as Ossianic it is not to be understood that they were composed at the time that Ossian is supposed to have lived, but that the theme is Ossianic. Of this class is a eulogistic poem on Finn in the Book of the Dean of Lismore. Although written nearly 400 years ago it has yet a modern ring about it as compared with many of the other ballads. The earlier versions of these Ossianic ballads were composed probably in Pagan times, but as the Pagan reciters of them were dying off, the minstrels nominally Christian would take their place, and adapt the old ballads to the new state of things. The elder productions would be undergoing continual transformations in the hands of every new class of reciters. While the theme is the same, sometimes the versions are so different that no single verse in the one can be found in the other. It is in this manner that their chronology becomes a puzzle. Anachronisms abound. Ossian, who flourished upwards of two hundred years before, is introduced by the Christian and post-Ossianic reciters as holding converse with St. Patrick.