Victorian Kilts

[jfellrath]

I know someone who call 'Traditional' kilts 'Victorian" kilts.
I like the idea. It places the kilts at a specific time in history and gives back some respect due to kilts worn before Victorian times.
What do you guys think?

Bear (and all),

I dislike the Victorian attitude on most things, honestly. I've not heard this kilt thing before, but I've heard it plenty in one of my other hobbies.

I'm a rennaissance martial artist - studying the longsword, dagger, etc. of the medieval and rennaissance eras, based on the actual manuals of the period. This doesn't mean I'm a re-enactor or any such thing, I just study the thing as accurately as I can (without actually going out and cutting people up).

Anyway, a lot of the misconceptions people have about the sword of that era come from the Victorian writers. Victorian writers, in my humble opinion, are notorious for misapplying Darwin's theory of evolution and survival of the fittest to imply that all of history was leading to them as the rulers of the world. They saw themselves as the most advanced civilization of the age and therefore everything that came before them was to be regarded as less-important.

Therefore you get a lot of assumptions made about topics based on that feeling of Victorian superiority. Example from my hobby - the belief that the medieval sword didn't take anything but brute strength to wield and was only good for mindless hacking. Victorians believed that their swords - sideswords and cavalry sabers and the like - were the pinnacle of sword-dom. Everything before them must have been clumsy and not as good. And of course, more of the existing literature on the sword is from the Victorian era than any era except our own - which jaded the writers and historians of our era when they did their writing.

The truth, of course, is that swords of the medieval era were the pinnacle of technology for their era. They were light, strong, and metallurgically sound, and required great skill and technique to wield properly.

Likewise, I think the kilt of the Victorian age was given that title due to the penchant that Victoria herself had for Scottish fashion - it was her and George IV who brought the kilt back to prominence after the catastrophe of the Dress Act. The small kilt was just coming back into style at this point, and I think that Victoria's promotion of the kilt caused many historians to give it this name. Again, they saw the Victorian version of the kilt as the greatest since it not only occurred in that era, but was promoted by their queen.

Well, that's my two cents.