Up-Helly-Aa
If you’d like to dress as a Viking, carry a burning torch in a procession through villages and towns, and then throw the torch into a replica of a Viking longship to set it alight before sending it out to sea to burn, you’ll want to be in the Shetland Islands, in the north of Scotland, on the last Tuesday of January. Up-Helly-Aa, the largest fire festival in Europe, has been celebrated as an end to the old Yule season in Shetland for over 100 years, though its exact origins are obscure.
The Shetland Islands, lying off the northern coast of Scotland, have a rich Viking heritage with a distinct dialect and culture from mainland Scotland. They joined the Scottish Crown in 1471, when they were transferred from Norway in place of a dowry for Margaret’s marriage to the King of Norway.
The highlight of the Up-Helly-Aa festival is a spectacular torchlight procession, which begins at 7.30 pm in Lerwick, the largest of the sparsely populated islands’ settlements. Hundreds of “guizers” (people in disguise) carry burning torches through the streets of central Lerwick, accompanied by the Guizer Jarl (Chief guizer) in his dragon-headed longship. Although only men are allowed to participate in the procession, many use the carnival atmosphere as an excuse to cross-dress. The many ballerinas, school girls and short-skirted pop icons in the parade are why some locals to refer to the festival as “Transvestite Tuesday.”
The procession culminates in the ceremonial burning of the galley, symbolizing the Viking funeral tradition of sending the Viking chief on his final journey to Valhalla in his burning longship.
After the burning and the singing of the traditional Up-Helly-Aa songs, the rest of the night is spent with music, dances and performances at various halls around the town. The guizers divide into squads, with the main squad, the Guizer Jarl’s Squad, dressed in splendid Viking costumes. This squad spends the day before the procession visiting schools, hospitals and participating in receptions prior to the torchlight procession. The islanders spend the night dancing and drinking until dawn, or until they fall down, whichever comes first.
Origins of Up-Helly-Aa
Up-Helly-Aa is a relatively modern festival, though some sources say that its origins go back to ancient yuletide fire festivals that had been celebrated in the Shetland Islands since the days of the Vikings. There is evidence that people in rural Shetland celebrated the 24th day after Christmas as “Antonsmas” or “Up Helly Night,” but the emergence of the current Yuletide and New Year festivities in the town of Lerwick seems to date to the Napoleonic Wars, when soldiers and sailors came home with rowdy habits and a taste for firearms.
As Lerwick grew in size, the celebrations became more elaborate. Sometime in the 1840’s the participants introduced burning tar barrels into the proceedings. Since the main street of Lerwick in the mid-19th century was extremely narrow, rival groups of tar-barrelers frequently clashed in the middle, and the proceeding were often dangerous and always dirty.
Around 1870, a group of young men with intellectual interests injected a series of new ideas into the proceedings. They improvised the name Up-Helly-Aa, and gradually postponed the celebrations until the end of January. They also introduced the element of disguise - “guizing” – and the idea of a torchlight procession. The first signs of Viking themes appeared in 1877, but it was not until the late 1880s that a Viking longship appeared, and the tradition of a squad of Vikings in the procession evolved some time after the First World War. Up to the Second World War, Up-Helly-Aa was primarily a festival of young working class men, run on a shoestring. In 1949, the BBC recorded a radio program about Up-Helly-Aa, and the festival become larger more organized from then on.
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