Red pill me on the Scottish kilt
Riddle me this:
>was it a Scottish, English or French invention?
and these two contrasting opinions....
>"it was invented in Victorian times by Walter Scott in a manufactured attempt to romanticize the Scottish to impress the English during a royal visit!"
>"the kilt has been around for hundreds of years before the Victorians! the only thing that was romanticized was the romantic concept of attributing a tartan pattern by clan/family name!"
bump - I wanna know too
Haven't Celts always worn tartan-patterned clothes?
>>1366455
OP here -- yeah, I forgot to add the fact that some people believe it to be an Irish invention, which makes sense.
I really want to know about the Victorian era 'kilt' issue because so many people get salty over this.
Holy shit what kind of idiot pseudohistorians have you been talking to
Alright so
>was it a Scottish, English or French invention?
It wasn't really an "invention", it was a development. It originates from a Gaelic garment called a Brat, which is a type of cloak. The Brat developed differently in Ireland and Scotland. In Ireland it eventually evolved into a long shirt worn with a vest, while in Scotland it maintained its cloak shape, got longer, and was wrapped around the whole body, this being called a féileadh-mór.
>"it was invented in Victorian times by Walter Scott in a manufactured attempt to romanticize the Scottish to impress the English during a royal visit!"
Walter Scott popularised Highland Scottish Culture among Lowland Scots, but that's it. Marxist hacks like Trevor-Roper and Hosbawm claim that he invented Highland culture wholesale but that doesn't stand up to any actual historiographical scrutiny.
>"the kilt has been around for hundreds of years before the Victorians! the only thing that was romanticized was the romantic concept of attributing a tartan pattern by clan/family name!"
This is partly true. Attributing tartans to clans wasn't really an invention either, it was also a natural development. Tartans were usually associated with regions, not Clans. But since Clans owned the land they operated in they eventually became associated with the people rather than the region.
The kilt in its modern form is from the 18th century but it developed from a similar piece of clothing that has been around for centuries longer. Generally people think that the disenfranchised Jacobites were mostly reduced to manual labour jobs and the féileadh-mór really isn't suitable for that sort of work, so they cut off the top portion. Again there's debate whether this was a natural process or invented by an individual businessman employing a lot of Jacobites who wanted to make their work easier for them.
>>1366344
>Red pill me
Stop misusing this term retard
>>1366519
>Marxist hacks like Trevor-Roper and Hosbawm claim that he invented Highland culture wholesale but that doesn't stand up to any actual historiographical scrutiny.
Can you elaborate this to me? Both the historiographical scrutiny and also the thought-process and motivation of these 'marxist hacks'?
Because this is primarily the type I've been dealing with...
thanks for your response!
>>1366562
Yeah so Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote a book in the 1970s called The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History which was published after his death in 2008 because it was absolute horseshit that nobody would have bothered reading if he was still alive. The crux of the book revolves around the Ossian literature written in the 18th century by James MacPherson who claimed to have translated it from ancient Celtic texts. In reality he just wrote it himself, but it got super popular anyway because it was actually really good. There were always doubts of their authenticity and the fact that they were fake didn't really effect their popularity.
Trevor-Roper, being the absolute incompetent that he was, thought that this somehow proved that all of Scottish Highland culture was invented, and set about "debunking" a bunch of claims that nobody actually seriously believed. His book is basically the phrase "Scotland wasn't exclusively a Celtic nation and didn't exclusively invent kilts or bagpipes" stretched out to a couple hundred pages and published so his estate could make some money.
Not that they did make any money because Trevor-Roper's career was ruined shortly before his death when he claimed the Hitler Diaries were authentic when even most non-historians could tell they were duds.
He evokes the old 19th century Scottish Nordicist John Pinkerton when he claims that the Gaels are a race of no importance and that Scotland owes all of its fame to the Lowlands. In short he personally resented Scottish Highland culture for being more popular than Lowland culture and attacked it with all the meager venom he could muster. He never studied the period in any detail (he was a historian of World War 2) and repeated some debated aspects of Scottish historiography as if they were facts to support his argument.
>>1366624
Thanks for writing this response, I'll let you know that one of these pseudo-historians was a sociology professor at my university, who also said that tartan textures were influenced by Belgians...
>>1367187
>sociology professor
reeeeeeee
>>1366624
>the Gaels are a race of no importance and that Scotland owes all of its fame to the Lowlands
I'm just saying... all noted Scottish inventors were Lowlanders
>>1367208
Yeah, James Clerk Maxwell is buried only a few miles away from where I live.
I think what anon is trying is that Trevor-Roper and Pinkerton were just men out with catty agendas. Highland and lowland culture each have their place in the RICH TAPESTRY of Scottish history.
>>1367281
Aye, I live less than a mile from the home of Lord Kelvin, there's nearly always someone of significance here be it cultural or scientific, Burns ain't too far either
>>1367281
Yeah, exactly. I actually specialise in Lowland history, I wrote my BA dissertation on the history of the Scots language, but people who try to say Highland or Lowland culture are better than the other are just missing the point. The people who Trevor-Roper attacks, who think that anything south of Plockton isn't really Scottish, definitely do exist, but he goes too far in the other direction.
>>1366519 is mostly spot-on
>>1366344
the kilt there is a victorian creation. particularly the style of the belt buckle, the sporran, and the form of the dirk. (dirks are older, and trace back to the medieval bollock dagger, but are very different through into the 19th C, when they change significantly in form to become the Sgian Dubh.)
the bit that >>1366519 that guy missed is that the tartan itself is likewise a Victorian creation - lowlands scot and english woollen mills pushed the idea of "clan tartans" to the highland lairds in the early 19th century as sales pitch to ensure a captive market of sales at a point just after the end of the napoleonic wars, when the military use of wool uniforms was obviously reducing in volume, and the mills wanted to create new civilian markets. Combine the two fashions; a clan tartan, and a new form of the kilt, and there was a nice tidy profit to be made selling to the scots, and in the 1820's onwards, to the english too, as the over-romanticised scottish history generally became ultra-fashionable throughout the UK for quite some time - particularly after 1942 when Queen Victoria visited scotland, and the media had a feeding frenzy on all things scottish.
The older form of kilt in scotland, the fleadh mhor, is far older than the victorians, however - tracing its origins back to the brat, from the medieval era (at least.), and with plenty to indicate it was relatively unchanged into the early medieval at least.
wool weaving with chequered patters is older still - fragments of fabric as far back as the iron age exist with what would be considered tartan nowadays.
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Also, people who use the phrase "red pill me on..." are gobshite wankers.
>>1367704
>particularly after 1942 when
sorry, particularly after 1842, that should've said...
(Unless that was Zombie Victoria, shambling round Balmoral groaning for brains.)
>>1366344
>Red pill me
Why the fuck does every other goddamn thread start with this now? Fuck you /his/ you're as bad as /pol/ in the summer
