Reviews for The magic of love

The average rating for The magic of love based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-03-30 00:00:00 Craig Davis Difficult to judge properly as the repetitive nature of the storytelling is not particularly attractive to the modern eye. Prose is often beautiful and memorable, and I can see why this inspired so many writers. The 'fragments' are in a way like our Scottish poetic Edda's, and I'm glad I've read them. I love the backstory and intrigue surrounding authorship as well. Whether ancient folk tales or written by MacPherson, a worthy and quick read.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-05-26 00:00:00 William Mcintyre Kudos to Google books for giving us access to a facsimile of a 1760 printing of this little volume. As we learn in Arthur Herman's How the Scots Invented the Modern World, the Scottish and English reading public would have got an early taste of the pleasures of historical fiction, and even fantasy writing, in this curious little collection of simple, earnest lyrics. It is amusing to think so many readers would ever have thought Macpherson's narrator was anything but a creation of the author, but it goes to show how much they wanted to believe in a vital heroic past for the Scottish highlands, even though they evidently had less historical consciousness per se than we do today. But if this is true, how much of our ability to picture the past is owed to efforts that began here, and snowballed with Walter Scott, and Thomas McCaulley, and James Mill, and so on? Even the eminent skeptic, David Hume, enjoyed this little book, and it might have left some influence on the tone of his later histories. The book's stories are stilted and at times unexpectedly funny, as when Duchomar hands over his sword to his beloved Morna, and she immediately stabs him, but also easy to read and full of the pleasures of the big fighting man, and the lovely lady of feeling, who sometimes stops a death, as with Minvane, sister of Gaul, who saves his life when he becomes Fingal's prisoner, but at other times is compelled to throw herself into the breach, as with Rivine, when her brother and her suitor are both killed in a duel over her. The total effect is to remind us of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, but set among the comic-fantastic past of the Scottish highlands. Addendum, after reading the introduction of John J. Dunne in the Project Gutenberg edition: I have gone from thinking of these as a minor lark to a much more important and delicious discovery, for two reasons. First, Macpherson's work points the way to establish the larger significance of being able to celebrate regional traditions in popular vernacular; it does not strike me as a stretch to connect Ossian and fires of imagination it stoked with Game of Thrones today. (In Game of Poems, people argue over what is the past, noble or savage.) Second, the introducer here illuminates the attractive free verse features of the poetry; showing that translation of regional language sponsored effectively the patterns of innovation that would lead to modern free verse, as with Whitman. Suddenly I have the plan for a course on world poetry.