Fakes of the Future

NAPOLEON’S FAVORITE BOOK of poetry was a fraud. He carried it through the Italian campaigns and still had it with him, years later, in his exile on Saint Helena. Attributed to an ancient Celtic bard named Ossian, the poems were presented as translations of a recently “discovered” third-century epic cycle. Raw, melancholic, and untouched by Christian pieties, Ossian’s poetry swept across Europe, fueled nationalist sentiment, shaped early Romantic taste—Goethe was a fan—and, improbably, became Napoleon’s bedside read, even as many of Europe’s literary scholars suspected it of being a forgery. Today, Ossian is a curiosity with which hardly anyone bothers.