A question to stump the tartan experts.

[gilmore]

Methinks you are reading far too much into this, gilmore. Dreadbelly wanted a tartan with a gypsy connection, and this one had it, albiet a fictional one. And besides, Sir Walter was just as much as anyone "to blame" for many tartan myths, so why not chuckle at the irony of his connection to this supposed "gypsy" tartan instead of getting upset?

T.

Who is upset? I am wryly amused and saddened at the same time.

It is about more than irony. It is the perpetuation of myth at the expense of learning the truth about one's ancestors, their lives and their other now-living descendants, myths and distortions that were invented at the time to romanticize people---gypsies, travellers, Jews, and others---who were actually being demonized and persecuted by the powers that be.

Similar examples come out of the Clearances of the late 18th/early 19th centuries. Today, many of us in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc are the descendants of Scots emigrants who were thrown off the lands their families had lived on for generations by the landowners, who found it more profitable to raise sheep than have the land farmed. Both the landowners and tenants often had been of the same clan, albeit some centuries previous to this, when the clan system was actually a living entity, a way of life, and thus often went by the same surnames. Nonetheless, the cheifs and cheiftans who had become land owning aristocracy, forced many of our ancestors, who had become or remained peasants (or agricultural laborers, to use today's vernacular) to leave, and burning their homes so that they would not return.

These same cheifs and cheiftans often decided upon, or more usually acquiesed to, the tartan designs that the descendants of their evicted tenants and badly mistreated "fellow clansmen" so proudly wear today, totally unaware of their own history, of how the remnants of the clan system in Scotland played a part in their own ancestors forced migrations to the New Worlds.

Meanwhile, the Scots peasantry was being romanticized, by Burns, Sir Walter Scott and others, not unlike the romanticization of the gypsies and travellers.