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Tartan Symbolism
Matthew Newsome, GTS, ©2006
Many of my readers know that I am the curator of the Scottish Tartans Museum in Franklin, NC. A big part of what we do at the museum is to look up tartans for people, based on family name, location, what have you. And I’ve noticed that often when I show someone their tartan for the first time, they want to know what the colors “mean.”
They imagine that there is some codified system of color symbolism in tartans, where one can say, “red means courage,” or “white means purity,” or some such. The reality is that no such codified system exists. That certainly doesn’t stop people from trying to make one, however!
Perhaps most common is the association of Scottish tartan with the ancient Irish Brehon Laws, which contained a system of displaying rank by means of the number of stripes in a ceremonial cloak. The more stripes (the more colors), the higher ranking the wearer. I don’t know how many web sites on tartan I’ve seen that make some reference to the Brehon Laws. This is completely anachronistic! Not only were the Brehon Laws Irish, not Scottish, they became obsolete after the Norman invasion of Ireland in the twelfth century, some six hundred years before the advent of the clan tartan system in Scotland.
The thought doesn’t really make sense, anyway. What is the significance in counting colors? The Robertson tartan has three colors (red, blue and green). The Robertson hunting tartan has five colors (green, blue, black, red and white). What does this tell us about the Robertson clan? Absolutely nothing.
There was even one gentleman who used to make a curious spectacle of himself at Highland Games in the southern US by approaching people and claiming to be able to “read” their tartan. He claimed that there were hidden Ogham messages in the tartan designs. No doubt these hidden messages would tell him that Jesus was married, that Elvis is alive and well, and reveal the identity of the gunman on the grassy knoll. There is no shortage of conspiracy theories, so it’s hardly surprising to see them make their way into tartan lore.
The reality is that we truly don’t know why certain colors were used in the designs of traditional Scottish tartans. Some people try and make connections. The tartans of the seven clans of the Siol Aplin (the clans claiming descent from King Kenneth MacAlpine) are all red (Grant, MacGregor, MacKinnon, MacQuarrie, MacNab, MacFee and MacAulay). Some have tried to draw significance from that fact, but it’s quite a stretch. About every other clan tartan is red, and the MacAlpine tartan itself is green (though dating only to the late nineteenth century).
When speaking of the use of tartan historically, we can draw some conclusions from color, but nothing like the symbolism that many today imagine. For instance, red was a very expensive color to obtain with natural dyes. Therefore someone wearing tartan with a lot of red in it was more likely to have wealth. One might also wear a bright colored tartan in an attempt to show off one’s status. A dark, earth-toned tartan might be chosen to blend in with the environment, by someone on the hunt (or who just wanted to stay hidden).
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More meaning can usually be found in the tartan design itself, rather than in the colors used. It is possible to show relation by similarity in tartan design. For instance, the MacDonald of Clanranald and the MacDonnell of Glengarry tartans are simply variations of the Clan MacDonald tartan with white stripes added into the design to difference them. In this way they show relation to the larger pahttps://media.8kun.top/file_store/29edde4809dec252b11288519819d7bd189251d4d8250650a1718b0e677adcc3.pngrent clan.
The MacKay tartan and the Gunn tartan are likewise related. The Gunn tartan is in essence the MacKay tartan with a red line added on the green. This makes sense as the two clans occupied neighboring territory in the Scottish north. The Morrison green tartan also is based on the MacKay (this time with the red line added to the blue). This was done quite deliberately when the Morrison tartan was designed in the early twentieth century, to showcase the historic links between the two clans.
And it is when you get into the more modern era that you can start to identify meaning behind the colors of the tartans. The MacGregor tartan has been around for 200 years, and no one really knows why it is red. But when a tartan was designed only 20 years ago, or perhaps just 2, then the reasons for the color selection can be found out.
This is especially apparent in many of the new district tartans. The Connecticut state tartan, for instance, designed in 1994 by three professors at Three Rivers College, contains blue for the Long Island Sound, green for the forests, red and yellow for autumn leaves, gray for granite, and white for snow. They even made the tartan asymmetric, offsetting the white stripe in order to symbolize the irregularity of snowfall in that state!
In the Nova Scotia tartan, designed in 1953 by Bessie Murray, blue represents the ocean, light and dark green the evergreen and deciduous trees, white the surf, gold the Royal Charter of Nova Scotia, and red the Lion Rampant on their provincial flag.
Notice that in each case the meaning behind the colors is particular to that tartan. White may mean snow in Connecticut, but it represents the surf in Nova Scotia. The white in the Ottawa tartan is for the white pine. And just because the colors in many modernly designed tartans were chosen for symbolic meaning, don’t assume this is always the case. It could also be that white was just chosen for aesthetic purposes, which is a very traditional thing to do.
Our museum’s home town of Franklin has its own town tartan, adopted in 2005. The colors are red, yellow, blue and black. The designer of the tartan, local hand weaver Virginia McSween, chose the colors for economic reasons. In other words, she had extra yarn in those colors lying about that needed using! Sometimes there really is no greater hidden meaning. I wonder what our “tartan Ogham reader” would make of that!
https://albanach.org/tartan-symbolism-3b165f62b2d2