Abstract
Derick Thomson had a lifelong interest in the Ossian controversy and related topics. His 1952 book The Gaelic Sources of Macpherson's Ossian, based on his Cambridge dissertation, was the first study on the subject which actually identified the specific Gaelic ballads James Macpherson was drawing on.
Throughout his long and prolific career as an academic, Thomson published a number of other contributions to the debate, including "Bogus Gaelic Literature c. 1750 - c. 1820" (1958); "Ossian, Macpherson, and the Gaelic World of the Eighteenth Century" (1963); "Macpherson's Ossian: Ballads to Epics" (1987); "Macpherson's Ossian: Ballad Origins and Epic Ambitions" (1990); and "James Macpherson: The Gaelic Dimension" (1998). These are not only important scholarly contributions to the topic but they also show an interesting development of approach on Thomson's part.
As the Gaelic dimension of the Ossian controversy still tends to be overlooked and many contributors to the debate exhibit very little awareness of it, a survey of Thomson's scholarship provides many relevant impulses for further research. Furthermore, since numerous aspects of Thomson's career have not received due attention, this talk attempted to provide more understanding of Derick Thomson as a scholar.