Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
If you make a simple search for the founding year of the Kingdom of Scotland, you will find the seemingly satisfying answer of "843AD", the year when King Kenneth MacAlpin unified the three core regions of Scotland and joined their three peoples; those being the Picts of the Highlands, the Bretons ("Scots") of the Lowlands, and the Gaels of the Islands; forming the "Kingdom of Alba" and an unbroken line of Kings that extends all the way to Charles III. This places the unification of Scotland before even that of England in 886. However dig deeper and you will find that early Scotland was a vast and wild landscape of warlords and iron-age villages a far cry from the wealth and prosperity of the Anglosaxons to their South. The achievements of King Kenneth were undone within decades too. The Islands being taken by Danish vikings, and the Lowlands being split between the Kingdom of Strathclyde and the emergent English Kingdom. Edinburgh herself wouldn't even be held by Scotland until a century after Kenneth's death. The Highlands alone were the whole of Scottish territory during these years. Wild and lonely as they are. The major difference between the politics of mediaeval Scotland & England, and the thorn in Scottish statebuilding's side, was the existence of the "clan". Whilst in England each peasant held subject to the King, in Scotland the peasant-class were of their clan first, and Scotland only second. This strong allegiance to family persisted in the Highlands until the modern era, often crippling Scotland's ambitions as a player on the European stage, but retaining that fiercely martial independent streak Scotsmen are still known for today.
^Map of the ancient provinces of Scotland
Imagine a vision of the clan life. A small, tightly knit community living in a small settlement of dry-stone huts, nestled in a remote glen on the banks of some black loch. Around them loom the bare-crags of inhospitable mountains, their rugged peaks skirted by whistling winds and streaks of cloud. The dreary hum of village life: women scrape mussels from kelp-ropes for dinner, while tartan-kilted men fork up blocks of peat for the fire. A light drizzle which hasn't lifted in three weeks covers the landscape with a hazy mist, through which dark specks of a group of horsemen can be seen approaching along a muddy track. The warriors grow nearer, the villagers stopping their toils to watch their arrival. Claymore by his side and a flaming torch held aloft, the leader of the band declares that the village must move on from this glen. The neighbouring clan is on the march, coming to burn down the village in retribution for some blood-feud so old nobody remembers what it is over. The kirk-bell tolls ominously over and over as the villagers prepare for their long trudge over the moors and through the bogs, while the fighting men devise a plan for their retribution, no matter how long it may take...
The romance of the clans in widely popular, and forms the core of Scottish Idealism in the collective mind of the world. The literary tradition of a rugged Scotland first popularised by Shakespeare's Macbeth has been carried on by films like Gibson's Braveheart, Pixar's Brave (seems to be a theme), or the cult classic Highlander (which even has an anime adaptation). But as is often the case, these idealisations have come primarily from outside of Scotland herself, with a particular American obsession akin to that glorification of Ireland so common over there. Rarely do such stories stray from the socially acceptable period of vaguely mediaeval Scotland into the messier and emotionally charged latter years, with such eras being largely relegated within the confines of the Scottish borders.
As with many things in Scottish history, an end-date of the clan-led era of Scotland is elusive, but a sensible answer would be somewhere in the 18th century. In the period following the Glorious Revolution and the installation of King William of Orange to the throne of Britain, many of the pre-eminent Scottish clans would rebel against the King, wishing to instead install the Stuart pretender James. Following their defeat there were moves by the "Anglicised" gentry of the Lowlands (along with compliant clans) to quell the power of the highlanders, leading to a period in history known as the "Highland Clearances". During this time, the landed "lairds" of Scotlands started to enclose the farmlands of the highlands, forcing thousands to leave their ancient homelands and move into the growing cities down South. Many moved to the growing city of Glasgow, and many more still took the ships Westwards to America and the New World. In these new lands the strength of clans would persist like a ghost, producing many a statesman, inventor or businessman in lands far from their home-glen. In the USA Highland Scots are overrepresented in positions of power: President Trump is himself a close descendant of Clan Macleod, with his mother being a Macleod born on Lewis. Two other clans would carry their blood feud across the pond with them, battling it out over an unexpected field.
In the province of Argyll two clans would grow to be some of the most powerful in Scotland, clashing against one another through centuries of war and struggle for dominance over the Western Highlands and Islands. Clan Campbell and Clan MacDonald exerted waxing and waning control over large swathes of territory, with the Campbells eventually taking the entirety of the Argyll peninsula for themselves, burning down the Macdonald stronghold in Kintyre (Southern Argyll), building atop its ashes the modern town of "Campbeltown". The MacDonalds would retreat from the mainland, becoming "Lords of the Isles" in the periphery. As the centuries rolled on, the MacDonalds emerged as the leading faction in the Jacobite Uprisings of the 1600s, with the Campbells placing themselves on the side of the establishment and King William. This came to a head in 1692, when after the surrender of the rebels at the Battle of Cromdale, Campbell soldiers massacred the men, woman and children of MacDonald who were sheltering in Glencoe at the foot of Ben Nevis, marking a bitter climax to the conflict and still a point of contention between the two families.
We now flash forward to the latter stages of the Second World War. With the traderoutes strangled, the British had come to rely on processed and tinned food, such as those provided by the Fray Bentos Company. As America entered the conflict they took notes from this, and commissioned American companies to produce similar products for the American Military. Founded in 1869 by a remnant of the Scottish Clan in New Jersey, the Campbell Soup Company stepped up to the plate, providing canned delights to GI Joe as he marched across Europe. Fray Bentos itself would eventually be acquired by the still Scot-side Clan Baxter. Meanwhile in the roaring wartime economy of California, a revolutionary new restaurant was opened, poised to take the world by storm. McDonald's Fastfood blitzkrieged its way across America and eventually the globe. Again the Campbells sided with the establishment, propelled to power by government funding in the war, just as they had been during the Jacobite era. The Macdonalds of the peripheral "Island of California" instead aligned themselves with the independent and entrepreneurial spirit of the American West, perhaps echoing that fierce Scottish spirit so idolised by Braveheart and American culture as a whole. By the latter part of the century both companies represented American culture on the world-stage: capitalism, mass-production, consumerism. But while the massacres and pitched battles of their rambunctious youths may have passed, these two giants still battle it out across time like Connor Macleod and the Kurgan in a form of deep-seated ancestral allegory over "what shall I have for dinner?".
