OS'SIAN, more correctly OISIN, or OSSIN. A character of Irish literature, whose exploits are connected with historical events of the last days of heathendom in Ireland. As time went on poems about Ossin spread over Ireland and Scotland. The whole cycle underwent changes in individual poems. The tradition was embel lished. and more and more it grew to resemble fairy lore. According to the evidence of these largely fragmentary or late poems and of the prose. romances, Ossin belongs to the third century A.D. and to Ireland. King Cormac MacArt had a son in-law Finn (or Finns), who commanded the Fi anna or Fenians, a sort of praetorian guard of the royal chieftain. among whom were Finn's son (fssin, his grandson Oscar, and another grandson Caoilte (or Caillte). Cormac is said to have died in 266. His successor, Carbery, thought the Feni ans a danger to his throne. Civil war arose. Car bery slew ()sear. The Fenians were crushed in 293 at the battle of Gabhra. Ossin and his cousin Caoilte fled, and we find them, only 150 years later, in the company of Saint Patrick, through whose ministrations they die baptized, according to some forms of the legend. The "Story of Ossin in the Land of the Young" makes him pass long years in fairyland. It is possible to distinguish three periods in the Ossin cycle: The ancient. recorded in fragments older than the twelfth century. of which there may be alto gether some 100. (2) The mediaeval, containing documents chiefly of the twelfth century, of which the most important is the Agallainh na. Senoraelt nr Colloquy of the Elders. a chaos of local legends, of prose and verse, the latter apparently the more ancient, and bearing somewhat the relation to the former, in diction, that the Elder Edda does to the Younger. The work of this period is more patriotic, chauvinistic even. than are the ancient fragments. It. expresses hatred for the foreigner. under the guise of Fenian opposition to the Loehlannaeh. Another noteworthy char acteristic is that woodcraft plays a greater part and there is more appreciation of nature than earlier. (3) The post-mediceval Ossinic documents are mainly in verse. The wilder forms of nature become prominent in them. and many of the songs are defiantly and dramatically pagan. as though in scorn of the sour fanaticism of Patrick, who is quite transformed from the genial saint of the earlier period. The first examples of the cycle
in this stage are to be found in Dean McGregor's Book of Lismore, a compilation of 1518, or per haps earlier. But Irish and Scotch tales of Ossin and the Fenians continued to be sung and told in the seventeenth, eighteenth, aml even in the nineteenth century. The last deliberate contribu tion to the Ossin cycle was _Michael Comyns's oisin in Tir na -C-0y, which, as it was written about 1750, is by an odd coincidence almost exactly contemporary with Macpherson's (q.v.) dislocated mosaic of phrases from Ossinic poems coupled with those of other cycles and set in a modern and rather cheap paste, which he published as Yet the reaction against Macpherson's poems has been too strong. In Macpherson's work landscape plays a very great part ; in the Ossin cycle a very small one. It may be noted too that Macpherson confounds he roes of the cycle of Cuchullin with the Fenians and makes both contemporaries of the Northmen of the eighth century. (See MAcritEasox.) It is doubtful if any fragment of verse by Ossin re mains. Poems are first attributed to him in twelfth-century manuscripts. Indeed. the origin, authorship, date, historical background, and even the existence of the hero. are all matters of un certainty and debate. Consult: Ossianie Society publications (Dublin. 1854-61) ; Simpson, Poems of (Asian. (London, 1857) J. F. Campbell, Popu lar Talcs of the West Highlands, Orally Collected, with a. Translation (ib., 1860-62) ; Mac Lauchlan, The Book of the Dean of Lismore (ib., 1862); Clerk, The Poems of Ossian, with a Disserta tion and Translation lib., 1870) ; Campbell, Leabhar na Teinne (ib., 1871) ; Academy for 1873—letters by Hennessy; Windisch, Die al tirische Saye und die Ossianisehen Gediehte(Lcip zig, 1878) ; Windisch, I risehe Texte (Leipzig, 1881-1900) ; Arbois de Juhainville, La litterature anrienne (Pi donde et l'Ossian de Macpherson. (Paris, 1880) ; K. Meyer, Cath Finntraga, or the Battle of Ventry (Oxford. 1885) ; Campbell, Pions (London, 1891) ; O'Grady, Silra Gadeliea (London, 1892), and Silva Celtiea (London, 1805) ; Texte, J. Rousseau et les clue eosmopolit isnie litteraire sieele(Paris, 1895, translated London, 1899) ; Nutt, Ussian and the Ossianic Literature (London, 1899) ; also the Revue Celtique (Paris, 1870 et seq.). See MACPHERSON, JAMES.