My talk this morning on Highland kilts and tartan for the Mensa gathering went off well. I drew an audience of about twenty, which is good for a bunch of people who mostly aren’t morning people, at an event that tends to skew toward evening-dwellers anyway.
I started by saying that probably the most of what they thought they knew about kilts and tartan was wrong, because the amount of actual fact on the subject is dwarfed by the amount of legend and romance. I told them what ancient basis there was for postulating tartan dress in ancient times (a passing mention in Book VIII of the Æneid), and went into a few of the most common misconceptions including the failure of the Act of Proscription to kill off all the tartans because (1) it only lasted for 36 years, (2) it was unevenly enforced, and (3) there weren’t any “clan tartans” as such to be killed off anyway! After that I talked about the influence of Scott’s Waverly novels, which had an enormous impact, helped along by Queen Victoria and her mania for anything Scottish. After Waverly, EVERYbody wanted to have a noble Scots lineage of their own, much like the DAR and similar groups today. I finished up with the Vestiarum Scoticum hoax, possibly one of the most successful long-con games ever run. The hoax was so successful that of the seventy tartans first described and published there, fifty of which were made up—you should pardon the expression—from whole cloth by the authors, thirty are still accepted today as being legitimate clan tartans!
Once I cleared that ground, I gave the group a quick rundown on the huge variety of tartans (more than five thousand registered tartans exist, plus who knows how many unregistered ones), assured them that they weren’t stuck having to wear a godawfully ugly tartan if their clan’s tartan happened to be godawfully ugly, that there were alternatives, explained what made a kilt such an expensive item, and skimmed the surface of the various accessories.
Nobody was belligerent or tried to prove zie was smarter than I was (many of them knew I’d previously been a member), and none of the questions was completely idiotic or inane. I did hang around the hospitality suite for a little while after I was done, to visit with people I hadn’t seen since the last time somebody diedthe last time I went to a gathering, but L was waiting at home for me to get back so she could go to San Marcos to see her SO, so I picked up and came back home about 12:30.
