The tradition
The Sword dance is one of the best known of all Highland dances, an ancient dance of war. Performance of sword dances in the folklore of Scotland is recorded from as early as the 15th century. Related customs are found in the Welsh and English Morris dance, in Austria, Germany, Flanders, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Romania.¶
In Ghillie Callum or "Scottish sword dance" the dancer crosses two swords on the ground in an "X" or a "+" shape, and dances around and within the 4 quarters of it. The dirk dance involves either one or two dancers, each holding a single dirk.¶
The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Scottish sword dances”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.¶
Scottish sword dance is Dancing around two crossed swords, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition.1¶
The source record links this tradition to 1 external register, which can be verified through the citation.1¶
Images
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David Cunliffe · Public domain
What it mixes with
Artists and institutions
Sources
0 claims and 0 timeline entries on this page draw on 1 sources, deduplicated by publisher.
| Source | Type | Publisher |
|---|---|---|
| Wikidata: Scottish sword dance (Q117663) | database | Wikidata |
Do you practise or teach Scottish sword dance?
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