Usually the "I found and translated this old work" gimmick is presented within the text, not outside it. That aside, digital humanities work can be interesting, but I found a preprint of the actual paper ( https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.00142.pdf ) and their conclusion seems to be "Ossian is closer to these Irish works than it is to Homer". I'm not going to bother digging into their methods to see if they're plausible, b…
> Usually the "I found and translated this old work" gimmick is presented within the text, not outside it. This was such a common trope in 18th century fiction that I'm surprised anyone took it at face value.
I think in mediaeval and earlier times, there was a tendency for authours to pass of their own original works as newly found previously unknown works from antiquity so that it would be taken much more seriously.