Quote Originally Posted by cajunscot View Post
But tell me...what traditions are you talking about that go back to the fifth century?

T.
OK, that was misleading...but not deliberately so. Nevertheless, I apologize. I was thinking about my own families history (which supposedly goes back to the 5th century) and seem to remember reading somewhere that there were people (clans?) in the Highlands that far back.

My point, though, was that there are traditions relating to Scotland and the Highlands that are older than the early 19th century. Tartan remnants have been dated to the 4th century, and the feilidh-mhor dates to the 16th century. And the feilidh-beag comes in in the early 18th century...before Culloden, certainly. All before any known association of tartans to clans. And this was the state of things all the way up to about 1815.

It wasn't until the early and mid 19th century that the notion of clan tartans even came up. Indeed, it wasn't until the Sobieski brothers published the Vestarium Scotium (which, BTW, was later proven to be a hoax) that the idea of clan tartans became widely accepted.

And that raises a further question...can a tradition based upon romantic nonsense and a perpetrated hoax even be considered a "tradition?"

If I can be so bold as to quote (and suggest further reading ) from Matt Newsome's very interesting essay at http://albanach.org/sources.htm, it may shed some light on what I've been trying to get at here.

We don’t really know the answer to that question, but several factors come into play. First of all, the uprising of 1745 was a distant memory, and was already starting to be romanticized. The government no longer feared a rebellion from the north, so interest in Highland Scotland was now “safe” to pursue. The Highlands were beginning to attract tourists. The plight of the Highlanders during and after the Clearances (both those who left and those who remained) had taken hold in the public conscience. Lowlanders no longer feared association with “those barbaric Highlanders” and since the tartan industry had effectively moved into the Lowlands during Proscription, tartan was now seen as “pan-Scottish.” Take all that into account with the formation of the first Highland Societies in Scotland and England, intent on reviving Highland culture (or their version of it), and all the ingredients are in place. The idea was at this time just starting to gel that the names born by the tartans represented an actual association with the clan. The fact that people knew so little information about this supposed clan tartan system was seen to be a result of suppression. In an attempt to “preserve” what he thought was an original clan tartan system before it was lost, in 1815 Col. Alasdair MacDonell of Glengarry began to urge all of the clan chiefs to submit a sample of their authentic tartan to the Highland Society of London.
This, of course, threw many clan chiefs into a tizzy, who by and large had no idea of what their “clan tartan” was supposed to be, nor had ever given it much thought. Many of these chiefs were just as ignorant of history as anyone else, and if enough people insisted that they once had a clan tartan, who were they to argue? The chief of the Robertson Clan set about asking all the older men in Atholl what the true clan tartan was. Many claimed they knew, but they all suggested different designs! The tartan ultimately submitted by the chief to the Highland Society is what we know today as Hunting Robertson, which was the tartan originally worn by the Loyal Clan Donnachie Volunteers (a kind of home guard) raised in 1803. Like most military tartans, it is based on the blue, green and black “government sett” – the Black Watch tartan – with colored stripes added.
It would seem that many chiefs simply wrote to the main supplier of tartan cloth, Wilsons of Bannockburn, asking them to send out a sample of “their” clan tartan. Looking back through Wilsons’ pattern books can unveil amusing stories regarding many of these “authentic” clan tartans’ origins. Perhaps most illustrative is the tartan that began life simply as “No. 43” in Wilsons’ record books.



Anyway...we're probably flogging a dead horse here but I have to agree with a previous poster who suggested that it's just fine to choose a clan tartan as long as you recognize the inherent historical contradictions and don't delude yourself.