John Francis Campbell was a Scottish author, mostly known as a collector of folklore. Inspired by the work of the Grimm brothers and by Scandinavian scholars, John Campbell used his fluent Gaelic to study the Gaelic oral tradition. He spent years in the field eliciting these stories from people in all walks of life. This was a salvage project, as the stories and the storytellers were rapidly dying out under the impact of the dominant British culture and the inroads of the industrial revolution. It is because of Campbell's pioneering effort that we have a comprehensive record of this rich vein of folklore.
The story plunges the readers into the fairy atmosphere. It shews one of the Ossianic heroes in a very mythological character.
