St Kilda Kilts & Scottish Gifts

Here we have the crest of the Dalziels, which is a dagger with the motto ‘I dare’. This is attached to the rather garbled arms of a naked man with his arms extended, although this had previously been a man being hanged on a gibbet. The story given in Nisbet’s 1724 System of Heraldry is that this supposedly relates to an incident in the time of King Kenneth II, when one of the king’s kinsmen was captured by enemies and hanged from a gibbet. When the king asked someone to venture out on a dangerous mission to retrieve the body, one answered ‘I dare’. Being successful, using a dagger to cut the body down, the man took this saying ‘I dare’ as his name (Dalziel being closer in pronunciation to this in old Scots apparently).

Sadly, this story is probably false in most counts. The Dalziel name comes from a placename, which derives from the Gaelic 'dal-gheail', meaning 'white meadow'. The ‘I dare’ motto will have emerged on its similarity to Dalziel, punning essentially, not the other way around. Then the Kenneth gibbet story will have emerged to explain the very weird arms of the hanging man. The origins of that are another story altogether, although it’s likely to have been a herald completely misunderstanding another symbol. Altogether this is a real testament to the power of storytelling! 

MKP 4 August 2023