Clan Gunn

The clan's own account is Norse. The society says the name comes from Gunni, a grandson of Sweyn Asleifsson, and the chief says Gunni's name means "war" and that he came to Caithness at the end of the twelfth century when his wife inherited land from her brother, a Jarl of Orkney. Wikipedia adds names: the wife was Ragnhild, her brother was Harald Maddadsson, and Gunni's grandfather Sweyn was killed raiding Dublin in 1171.

These accounts are not identical and none cites a document in the pages read. The society puts the roots in the tenth century and the Jarls of Orkney, the chief puts the arrival of Gunni at the end of the twelfth, and Wikipedia reports that the nineteenth-century writer Smibert held the Gunns to be of Gaelic origin. Sir Robert Gordon's seventeenth-century history, quoted by Wikipedia, records the Gunns saying they came from Denmark, which Wikipedia reconciles by noting that Norway and Denmark shared a crown by then. The first chief who appears definitively in the record, according to Wikipedia, is George Gunn, a fifteenth-century coroner of Caithness.

Wikipedia's account of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is mostly feud: the Battle of Harpsdale against the Mackays in 1426, a long quarrel with the Keiths of Ackergill that it says ended in defeat at Tannach in 1438 or 1464, and support for the Earl of Sutherland against the Mackays in 1517. It says the clan did not support the Stuarts in 1745 and that Alexander Gunn, as chief, was a captain in a government Independent Highland Company, though some Gunns fought for Prince Charles independently.

The chief says the senior line moved to the Strath of Kildonan in the fifteenth century. The society says its first formal body was founded in Thurso in 1821 and the present society in 1960.

No Gunn tartan is held as a record on this site, because the register threadcounts are behind a login and no open primary source could be read. Wikipedia captions an image with the 'Clanngvn' tartan as published in the Vestiarium Scoticum of 1842, which would make the earliest known pattern a nineteenth-century clan tartan; the register entry was not checked.

Gunn has the longest sept question of the clans added here, and the sources read do not settle it. The society says anyone bearing Gunn or a sept name historically associated with the clan, by birthright or by marriage, may join, but its membership page does not list the names. Wikipedia's infobox lists dozens of names, but the list is tagged as lacking a citation, and a note there says the society's list is longer than the one in Adam's Clans, Septs and Regiments revised by Innes of Learney. Because neither list was seen at its source, no sept is recorded here. The Standing Council of Scottish Chiefs says there is no central register of septs and that each chief decides.

The Standing Council of Scottish Chiefs says there are no strict rules on who may wear a tartan and that wearing a clan tartan signals allegiance to the chief. The Clan Gunn Society says people who bear the name or an associated name, or whose ancestors did, are welcome to join, which is an invitation to join the society and not a rule about tartan.

The Gunn surname page is at /surnames/gunn/. The link to the clan is rated probable: the clan bears the name and the society welcomes people who bear it, but the name is a Norse personal name that other families could have taken independently, and the sources do not show that every Gunn descends from the clan. No sept surnames are listed, so a person named Robson, Henderson or Williamson is not shown to belong to the clan by these sources.