Ullin

Ullin appears in the Ossianic poems within Werther’s translation, which Werther reads aloud from a manuscript at Lotte’s request. He is one of the remembered bards gathered on Lora, and the poem identifies him as gray-haired. His place in this company is defined less by action in the outer narrative than by the songs through which the dead and their grief remain present.

Identity and Setting

Ullin belongs to the poem’s legendary world of heroes, singers, and remembered loss. The gathering on Lora brings together figures from earlier days, but its celebratory memory is shadowed by change: the companions have grown old, fallen, or disappeared. Ullin’s gray hair marks him among these survivors of the past, while his role as a singer links personal remembrance to a larger communal history.

The frame makes that remembered world immediate for Werther. He takes up his own translation with a shudder and begins to read through tears. Ullin is therefore encountered not as a figure in the novel’s ordinary social world, but through a layered act of reading: Werther voices a poem in which singers recall other singers and mourn the dead.

The Harp and the Songs of Mourning

After Minona sings of Colma’s desolation and the deaths of Salgar and her brother, the poem says that the listeners weep for Colma and grieve with her. Ullin then comes with his harp and gives the song of Alpin. His appearance connects one lament to another: grief for Colma opens into a wider remembrance of fallen companions, and the harp gives that remembrance a shared form.

Ullin’s song recalls Morar, called the first of mortal men. Morar’s death has left his father mourning and his sister’s eyes full of tears; Minona, identified as Morar’s sister, withdraws from the song with tears in her eyes. The poem thus places Ullin’s music amid a chain of losses, where each account of the dead summons another bereaved voice.

The scene also associates Ullin with Ryno. After returning from the chase before the heroes fell, Ullin had heard the lament on the hill; later, he gives Alpin’s song, and the speaker says that he touched the harp with Ullin as the song of morning rose. Ullin is both the bearer of another singer’s lament and a musical companion in its performance.

Narrative Role and Significance

Ullin’s importance lies in the work of transmission. He does not interrupt the elegiac sequence with a new adventure; he carries Alpin’s voice into the present of the poem, just as the surrounding singers preserve the names and losses of Morar, Colma, and others. The harp makes memory audible, while the repeated movement from one mourner to another shows how grief passes through a community rather than remaining with a single speaker.

That pattern helps shape the passage Werther reads. The poem moves from the departing evening star to a vision of departed friends, from Colma’s solitude to Minona’s tears, and from Ullin’s harp to Alpin’s warning that even the living will fall. Ullin stands within this structure as a mediator between the dead and those who remember them. His song does not undo loss; it gives loss a voice that can endure beyond the moment of mourning.