Up Helly Aa Fire Festival _ Lerwick _ Scotland
Up Helly Aa
Up Helly Aa (/ˈʌpˌhɛliə/ up-hel-ee-ə; literally "Up Holy [Day] All") refers to any of a variety of fire festivals held annually in Shetland, in Scotland, in the middle of winter to mark the end of the yule season. The festival involves a procession of up to a thousand guizers in Lerwick and considerably lower numbers in the more rural festivals, formed into squads who march through the town or village in a variety of themed costumes.
Origins
The current Lerwick celebration grew out of the older yule tradition of tar barrelling which took place at Christmas and New Year as well as Up Helly Aa. Squads of young men would drag barrels of burning tar through town on sledges, making mischief. After the abolition of tar barrelling around 1874–1880, permission was eventually obtained for torch processions.
The first yule torch procession took place in 1876. The first torch celebration on Up Helly Aa day took place in 1881. The following year the torchlit procession was significantly enhanced and institutionalised through a request by a Lerwick civic body to hold another Up Helly Aa torch procession for the visit of the Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh.
The first galley was introduced and burned in 1889.The honorary role of the 'Jarl' was introduced to the festival in the early twentieth century.
The first yule torch procession took place in 1876. The first torch celebration on Up Helly Aa day took place in 1881. The following year the torchlit procession was significantly enhanced and institutionalised through a request by a Lerwick civic body to hold another Up Helly Aa torch procession for the visit of the Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh.
The first galley was introduced and burned in 1889.The honorary role of the 'Jarl' was introduced to the festival in the early twentieth century.
The modern event
There is a main guizer who is dubbed the "Jarl". There is a committee which a person must be part of for 15 years before one can be a jarl, and only one person is elected to this committee each year. The procession culminates in the torches being thrown into a replica Viking longship or galley. The event happens all over Shetland and is currently celebrated at ten locations – Scalloway, Lerwick, Nesting and Girlsta, Uyeasound, Northmavine, Bressay, Cullivoe, Norwick, the South Mainland and Delting. After the procession, the squads visit local halls (including schools, sports facilities and hotels), where private parties are held. At each hall, each squad performs its act, which may be a send-up of a popular TV show or film, a skit on local events, or singing or ,.
Meaning
According to John Jamieson's Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1818), up is used in the sense of something being at an end, and derives from the Old Norse word uppi which is still used in Faroese and Icelandic, while helly refers to a holy day or festival.
The Scottish National Dictionary defines helly, probably derived from the Old Norse helgr (helgi in the dative and accusative case, meaning a holiday or festival), as "[a] series of festive days, esp. the period in which Christmas festivities are held from 25th Dec. to 5th Jan.", while aa may represent a', meaning "all".
Up Helly Aa: inside Shetland's spectacular festival of fire
Ever since she heard about Shetland's annual Up Helly Aa festival, when a Viking ship is set ablaze, Anna Hart had wanted to attend. But would it be as debauched as she'd heard?
It is a blustery January night on Scotland’s northernmost cluster of islands, and while the rest of the UK is bemoaning their bank balances and swearing off alcohol, Shetland is in the middle of a party like nothing I have seen before. Up Helly Aa is one of the world’s most spectacular festivals,
A series of fire festivals held around Shetland throughout winter, Up Helly Aa sometimes makes it into the national news, but most accounts end with the procession of flaming-torch-wielding, creatively costumed ‘guizers’, or performers, parading darkened streets in organised squads, all converging on the dramatic burning of a full-sized replica Viking longboat.
For Shetlanders, that is just the beginning; in Lerwick, the capital of the islands, the festivities go on until the following morning at community halls across the town. This is why, nine hours after the boat met its fiery end, I’m in the back of a lorry with one of the 47 squads, comprising nearly two dozen men in pink velour Clanger costumes, all dancing to the Clash.
We lurch from side to side, passing around bottles of Buckfast, the fortified wine with cult status across Scotland, before pulling up at the Islesburgh Community Centre, where the men tug back on the mouse-like snouts of the psychedelic characters.
Each year a Viking longship is built, only to be set on fire. PHOTO: Simon Crofts
Inside the hall revellers have encircled the previous act, a group of men dressed as belly dancers who are still hip-swivelling their way across the floorboards. Throughout the night the squads take turns to entertain in halls presided over by ‘hostesses’, who keep the platters piled high, the tattie soup on the boil and the Famous Grouse flowing. This is the fourth time tonight I’ll watch the men perform their routine – a satirical skit about the various financial ‘clangers’ Shetland Islands Council has made – on their circuit of 11 venues in Lerwick, including community halls and schools.
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‘Up Helly Aa is 36 hours of lawlessness, where by-laws are bypassed, marital vows are suspended, and health and safety becomes very subjective,’ says Bryan Peterson, a Clanger and the music development officer at Shetland Arts, who has invited me to tag along with his squad. ‘And for many Shetlanders, it’s bigger than Christmas and New Year put together.’
• Up Helly Aa: Shetland's fire festival in pictures
For all its nods to Shetland’s Norse heritage, Up Helly Aa is a relatively new phenomenon: the first Yule torch procession took place in 1876; the first galley-burning in 1889. ‘This was to replace the much more dangerous tradition of tar-barrelling: setting barrels of tar alight and rolling them down the lanes,’ Peterson explains.
The Lerwick Up Helly Aa is the grandest of all with as many as 1,000 guizers, and the only one that has stuck to the tradition of male-only squads – a subject of fierce, whisky-fuelled debate in the halls. This concoction of flames, performance, historical melodrama and hedonism had been on my bucket list since my Shetland-born husband, Sean, showed me a photo of the burning galley a few years ago.
I was astonished: why had I never heard of it? ‘We don’t really want people to know,’ he replied with a grin. ‘It’s for us, not for tourists.’
Shetland has a history of being misunderstood, and the Up Helly Aa committee has a cagey attitude towards the media. Past press reports have lingered over drunkenness or Wicker Man comparisons.
They focus on the Viking costumes, when in fact only the ‘jarl squad’ wear traditional clothing. ‘It is just so easy to paint us all as a bunch of drunken Neanderthals,’ Peterson says.
Every year the main guizer, dubbed the ‘jarl’ (an honour requiring a good decade or two’s loyal service on the Up Helly Aa committee), leads proceedings, and the pressure is on every jarl to make his concept for the costumes unique and memorable within the brief. This year, guizer jarl Neil (a 52-year-old engineer) opted for a manga twist on Norse legend, taking inspiration from a cartoon character from the game Viking: Battle for Asgard.
Shetland has never needed the rest of us; and it certainly doesn’t need tourists at Up Helly Aa. Visitors will always be made warmly welcome but on a remote, barren island your commitment is to your own people. With a population of 22,000, it has the feeling of a place where, as Sean puts it, nobody’s really a stranger – and you never know who you will need a favour from.
A common misconception is that Shetland is poor, with zero industry and no real job prospects beyond fishing. While for a long time a lack of opportunity sent vast numbers of the younger generation to the Scottish mainland, America or New Zealand, today Shetland has one of the most robust economies in Scotland, thanks to the Sullom Voe oil terminal, run by BP, which handles about a quarter of Britain’s oil production, and the adjacent Total gas terminal.
Shetland’s residents enjoy one of the highest rates of employment in Great Britain, and visitors expecting a time capsule of quaint cottages and ‘simple folk’ are astonished by the excellent, empty roads, the gleaming leisure centres and the smattering of high-spec Scandinavian kit-homes, which sprang up during the 1970s oil boom. Remote islands are also often assumed to be insular and backward, but Shetland has the highest percentage of women in the workforce in Scotland, and has welcomed immigrants for thousands of years: the original Pictish people were succeeded by the Norse and Scots, while a generation ago it became a magnet for hippies and artists craving beauty and solitude.
The main event begins at 7pm on the last Tuesday of January (there is also a procession through town with the boat earlier in the day), and it is thrilling. Street lights are switched off as crowds line the roads, then more than a thousand men parade, brandishing flaming torches and dressed variously as exotic dancers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, in vintage 1970s velvet suits…
In the country districts, smaller, less formal (and more progressive) Up Helly Aas are held from January to March, where women are admitted into the squads and men might find themselves on kitchen duty in the halls. The South Mainland Up Helly Aa this year made history by appointing a female jarl, Lesley Simpson, a local primary school head. Plenty of Shetlanders view the Lerwick Up Helly Aa, with its men-only rule, with a healthy dose of scepticism, dubbing it ‘Transvestite Tuesday’ thanks to the consistently high turnout of squads in tights and heels. (I’m told the local lingerie store, Smiths of Lerwick, does a roaring trade every December as men lumber in to get measured for their first bra.)
‘Though the Lerwick Up Helly Aa could be seen to be sexist by some, most locals – including myself – don’t see it that way,’ Irena Coubrough, a 31-year-old Shetlander who now lives in London, says. ‘But when I was 12 I got to be a princess in the jarl squad of the Northmavine Up Helly Aa because my best friend’s dad was jarl, and I absolutely loved that, so maybe I am missing out…’
I am watching the parade with my friend Amy Gibson, a fashion designer for Alexander McQueen. Two of her brothers, Fred and Carn, are in the jarl squad this year, and tonight their parents’ house is sleeping three generations of Gibsons. ‘I haven’t been to Up Helly Aa in 17 years, but this is a brilliant excuse for a get-together,’ she says.
It was in 2000 that Carn’s best friend, Neil, was informed by the committee that he would be jarl in 2015,
and began selecting a squad of 70 guizers and musicians.
Fred and Carn started paying monthly sums into the shared squad account right away; the men are suited in handcrafted metalwork and chainmail, sheepskin boots and hand-knitted tunics, each outfit costing £1,500; most of this is crafted on the islands. ‘We had a weapons team, a helmet team, a leather team and a shield team all working for the best part of a year on producing 70 identical costumes,’ Fred says. ‘For most of the autumn it was taking up two or three nights a week. It’s like planning a wedding.’
At the parade’s end, all 47 squads form concentric circles around a galley built over months by local craftsmen, carpenters and anyone who can be roped in. Following a yell from the jarl, they hurl their torches into the bow. ‘There’s something decidedly Dadaist about it all,’ Peterson says. ‘Building something so beautiful, pouring your heart and soul into it, and then destroying it with fire.’
At this point, the families with small children peel away and the tourists head back to the hotels. But not us – we’re downing soup and whisky before jumping on the truck.
‘For me the real Shetland tradition, heart and soul of Up Helly Aa is the guizing,’ Peterson says. ‘The practice of visiting people’s homes in disguise or fancy dress, telling a joke, doing a dance, singing a song and sharing a dram.
The easiest comparison for outsiders is Hallowe’en, but in Shetland guizing has been an integral part of any celebration for hundreds of years – it’s not just something we do for Up Helly Aa.’
Peterson is Up Helly Aa’s biggest fan, even if he refuses to take the rules too seriously. At 14 he was appointed junior jarl for the 1990 Lerwick Up Helly Aa (a less fiery and Buckfast-free rendition of the adult role) then did his time as a ‘fiddlebox carrier’ (apprentices who function as runners, stage managers and minders throughout the night) before being invited to join a squad himself.
‘None of the guys in these squads would consider themselves artists, performers or anything like that – so there’s something beautiful about watching a tough oil-rig worker perfecting a dance routine, or a shy teenager gaining the courage to perform in front of a crowd,’ he says. ‘Every year you’ll see a mix of music, dance, satire, vaudeville, slapstick – the full spectrum of performance traditions – with no stigma, pretension or airs and graces attached.’ For him the guizing, dancing and general debauchery of the festival is ‘the social glue’ of Shetland.
‘Some folk take Up Helly Aa very seriously, but most of us just want to have a spree and rummel [Shetlandic for ‘rumble’] around in a truck,’ he says. ‘Since October we’ve been meeting up, coming up with ideas for our act, and then making our costumes out of strips of foam and rubber and pink velour. We’ve got a helicopter pilot, a teacher, a lawyer, a carpenter – aged from 15 into their 50s. Being in a squad is a bit like supporting a football team: you didn’t choose the guys you’re with, but you all muck in and get along.’
Most Shetlanders view these meet-ups, and Up Helly Aa in general, as a very necessary support network during the bleak winter months. ‘There’s something ritualistic, pagan, nihilistic about it all, but you need some sort of catharsis,’ Sean says. ‘For many years, life was tough up north. This helps.’
And for all the reports of drunken debauchery and wife-swapping, Up Helly Aa proves to be far more civilised than advertised. While at 10am the next morning the pubs are filling up with refugees from the emptying halls – a man in laddered tights with a lipstick-smeared face sits next to a Viking, while a Power Ranger gets the pints in – there is no evidence of the loutishness or crime that often comes with drunkenness in big, anonymous cities. After all, nobody’s disguise is that good, and you never know who might be acquainted with your mother.
Tuesday 31st January 2017
"There will be no postponement for weather". That's a defiant boast by Shetland's biggest fire festival, considering it's held in mid-winter on the same latitude as southern Greenland. But it's true: gales, sleet and snow have never yet stopped the Up Helly Aa guizers of Lerwick from burning their Viking galley - and then dancing the dawn away.
Up Helly Aa is a lot more than a sub-arctic bonfire and booze-up. It's a superb spectacle, a celebration of Shetland history, and a triumphant demonstration of the islanders' skills and spirit. This northern Mardi Gras lasts just one day (and night). But it takes several thousand people 364 days to organise. Much of the preparation is in strictest secrecy. The biggest secret of all is what the head of the festival, the 'Guizer Jarl', will wear and which character from the Norse Sagas he'll represent
The Guy's A Jarl!
The Jarl will have been planning (and saving up for) the longest day of his life for 12 years or more, before he dons his raven-winged helmet, grabs axe and shield, and embarks on a 24-hour sleepless marathon.
On the evening of Up Helly Aa Day, over 800 heavily-disguised men (no women, thank you, we're vikings!) form ranks in the darkened streets. They shoulder stout fencing posts, topped with paraffin-soaked sacking.
On the stroke of 7.30pm, a signal rocket bursts over the Town Hall. The torches are lit, the band strikes up and the amazing, blazing procession begins, snaking half a mile astern of the Guizer Jarl, standing proudly at the helm of his doomed replica longship, or 'galley'.
It takes half an hour for the Jarl's squad of burly Vikings to drag him to the burning site, through a crowd of four or five thousand spectators.
Amazing Blazing
The guizers circle the dragon ship in a slow-motion Catherine Wheel of fire. Another rocket explodes overhead. The Jarl leaves his ship, to a crescendo of cheers. A bugle call sounds, and then the torches are hurled into the galley.
As the inferno destroys four months of painstaking work by the galley builders, the crowd sings 'The Norseman's Home' - a stirring requiem that can brings tear to the eyes of the hardiest Viking.
The Procession
Tears of mirth are more likely as the night rolls on and more than 40 squads of guizers visit a dozen halls in rotation. They're all invited guests at what are still private parties - apart from a couple of halls where tickets are on sale to the general public.
At every hall each squad performs its 'act', perhaps a skit on local events, a dance display in spectacular costume, or a topical send-up of a popular TV show or pop group.
Every guizer has a duty (as the 'Up Helly Aa Song' says) to dance with at least one of the ladies in the hall, before taking yet another dram, soaked up with vast quantities of mutton soup and bannocks.
The Burning Galley
That's not the end of it, for throughout the rest of the winter each gang of guizers will hold their own 'squad dances' for family and friends. By early autumn, there'll be the first meetings to arrange the next year's performance, while at the Galley Shed in St Sunniva Street the shipwrights, carpenters and their helpers will be starting work on the new galley, not forgetting 'the boys who made the torches'.
'From grand old Viking centuries, Up Helly Aa has come...' That's what the guizers sing but in fact the festival is only just over 100 years old in its present, highly organised form. In the 19th century Up Helly Aa was often riotous. Special constables were called in to curb trigger-happy drunks firing guns in the air - and dragging a blazing tar barrel through the streets, sometimes leaving it on the doorstep of the year's least popular worthy burgher. Today's festival is much better behaved.
The History of Up Helly Aa
UP-HELLY-AA is a relatively modern festival. There is some evidence that people in rural Shetland celebrated the 24th day after Christmas as "Antonsmas" or "Up Helly Night", but there is no evidence that their cousins in Lerwick did the same. The emergence of Yuletide and New Year festivities in the town seems to post-date the Napoleonic Wars, when soldiers and sailors came home with rowdy habits and a taste for firearms.
On old Christmas eve in 1824 a visiting Methodist missionary wrote in his diary that "the whole town was in an uproar: from twelve o clock last night until late this night blowing of horns, beating of drums, tinkling of old tin kettles, firing of guns, shouting, bawling, fiddling, fifeing, drinking, fighting.
This was the state of the town all the night – the street was as thronged with people as any fair I ever saw in England."
As Lerwick grew in size the celebrations became more elaborate. Sometime about 1840 the participants introduced burning tar barrels into the proceedings. "Sometimes", as one observer wrote, "there were two tubs fastened to a great raft-like frame knocked together at the Docks, whence the combustibles were generally obtained. Two chains were fastened to the bogie asupporting the capacious tub or tar-barrel . . . eked to these were two strong ropes on which a motley mob, wearing masks for the most part, fastened. A party of about a dozen were told off to stir up the molten contents."
The main street of Lerwick in the mid-19th century was extremely narrow, and rival groups of tarbarrelers frequently clashed in the middle. The proceeding were thus dangerous and dirty, and Lerwick's middle classes often complained about them. The Town Council began to appoint special constables every Christmas to control the revellers, with only limited success. When the end came for tar-barrelling, in the early 1870s, it seems to have been because the young Lerwegians themselves had decided it was time for a change.
Around 1870 a group of young men in the town with intellectual interests injected a series of new ideas into the proceedings. First, they improvised the name Up-Helly-Aa, and gradually postponed the celebrations until the end of January. Secondly, they introduced a far more elaborate element of disguise - "guizing" - into the new festival.
Thirdly, they inaugurated a torchlight procession. At the same time they were toying with the idea of introducing Viking themes to their new festival. The first signs of this new development appeared in 1877, but it was not until the late 1880s that a Viking long ship - the "galley" - appeared, and as late as 1906 that a "Guizer Jarl", the chief guizer, arrived on the scene.
It was not until after the First World War that there was a squad of Vikings, the "Guizer Jarl's Squad", in the procession every year.
Up to the Second World War Up-Helly-Aa was overwhelmingly a festival of young working class men - women have never taken part in the procession - and during the depression years the operation was run on a shoestring. In the winter of 1931-32 there was an unsuccessful move to cancel the festival because of the dire economic situation in the town. At the same time, the Up-Helly-Aa committee became a self-confident organisation which poked fun at the pompous in the by then long established Up-Helly-Aa "bill" - sometimes driving their victims to fury.
Since 1949, when the festival resumed after the war, much has changed and much has remained the same. That year the BBC recorded a major radio programme on Up-Helly-Aa, and from that moment Up-Helly-Aa - not noted for its split-second timing before the war - became a model of efficient organisation. The numbers participating in the festival have become much greater, and the resources required correspondingly larger.
Whereas in the 19th century individuals kept open house to welcome the guizers on Up-Helly-Aa night, men and women now co-operate to open large halls throughout the town to entertain them.
However, despite the changes, there are numerous threads connecting the Up-Helly-Aa of today with its predecessors 150 years ago.
which takes place in Lerwick, Shetland, on the last Tuesday in January every year. Up Helly Aa day involves a series of marches and visitations, culminating in a torch-lit procession and the burning of a galley.
The following Wednesday is a public holiday in Lerwick to allow for recovery.
You can learn much more about the festival in the 'About Up Helly Aa' section.
Preparations
Up Helly Aa is a community event, with countless volunteers contributing many hours each winter towards organising and planning the following year's festival.
The Guizer Jarl and his squad begin their preparations in February, and many long hours of hard work go into the design and production of their fabulous outfits.
The Up Helly Aa Committee begin their year preparing the Up Helly Aa Exhibition that runs from May until September in the Galley Shed.
This boasts a full size Galley, Jarl Squad suits, other Squads memorabilia and an extensive collection of photographs recording the suits worn and the guizers involved.
In early September the Guizers of the remaining 45 squads begin their squad meetings and preparations. This involves determining the character(s) that they wish to portray with their suits, making the suits while also creating and practising their act to perform in the halls they visit through out the evening.
At the end of September the Galley shed is transformed back into to a working shed where the Galley and the torches are constructed during the winter. During this same period the Committee progress preparations including the Collecting Sheet and Bill.
We hope you enjoy the site and the information it provides.
The Scottish National Dictionary defines helly, probably derived from the Old Norse helgr (helgi in the dative and accusative case, meaning a holiday or festival), as "[a] series of festive days, esp. the period in which Christmas festivities are held from 25th Dec. to 5th Jan.", while aa may represent a', meaning "all".
Up Helly Aa: inside Shetland's spectacular festival of fire
Ever since she heard about Shetland's annual Up Helly Aa festival, when a Viking ship is set ablaze, Anna Hart had wanted to attend. But would it be as debauched as she'd heard?
It is a blustery January night on Scotland’s northernmost cluster of islands, and while the rest of the UK is bemoaning their bank balances and swearing off alcohol, Shetland is in the middle of a party like nothing I have seen before. Up Helly Aa is one of the world’s most spectacular festivals,
A series of fire festivals held around Shetland throughout winter, Up Helly Aa sometimes makes it into the national news, but most accounts end with the procession of flaming-torch-wielding, creatively costumed ‘guizers’, or performers, parading darkened streets in organised squads, all converging on the dramatic burning of a full-sized replica Viking longboat.
For Shetlanders, that is just the beginning; in Lerwick, the capital of the islands, the festivities go on until the following morning at community halls across the town. This is why, nine hours after the boat met its fiery end, I’m in the back of a lorry with one of the 47 squads, comprising nearly two dozen men in pink velour Clanger costumes, all dancing to the Clash.
Each year a Viking longship is built, only to be set on fire. PHOTO: Simon Crofts
Inside the hall revellers have encircled the previous act, a group of men dressed as belly dancers who are still hip-swivelling their way across the floorboards. Throughout the night the squads take turns to entertain in halls presided over by ‘hostesses’, who keep the platters piled high, the tattie soup on the boil and the Famous Grouse flowing. This is the fourth time tonight I’ll watch the men perform their routine – a satirical skit about the various financial ‘clangers’ Shetland Islands Council has made – on their circuit of 11 venues in Lerwick, including community halls and schools.
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‘Up Helly Aa is 36 hours of lawlessness, where by-laws are bypassed, marital vows are suspended, and health and safety becomes very subjective,’ says Bryan Peterson, a Clanger and the music development officer at Shetland Arts, who has invited me to tag along with his squad. ‘And for many Shetlanders, it’s bigger than Christmas and New Year put together.’
• Up Helly Aa: Shetland's fire festival in pictures
For all its nods to Shetland’s Norse heritage, Up Helly Aa is a relatively new phenomenon: the first Yule torch procession took place in 1876; the first galley-burning in 1889. ‘This was to replace the much more dangerous tradition of tar-barrelling: setting barrels of tar alight and rolling them down the lanes,’ Peterson explains.
The Lerwick Up Helly Aa is the grandest of all with as many as 1,000 guizers, and the only one that has stuck to the tradition of male-only squads – a subject of fierce, whisky-fuelled debate in the halls. This concoction of flames, performance, historical melodrama and hedonism had been on my bucket list since my Shetland-born husband, Sean, showed me a photo of the burning galley a few years ago.
I was astonished: why had I never heard of it? ‘We don’t really want people to know,’ he replied with a grin. ‘It’s for us, not for tourists.’
Shetland has a history of being misunderstood, and the Up Helly Aa committee has a cagey attitude towards the media. Past press reports have lingered over drunkenness or Wicker Man comparisons.
Every year the main guizer, dubbed the ‘jarl’ (an honour requiring a good decade or two’s loyal service on the Up Helly Aa committee), leads proceedings, and the pressure is on every jarl to make his concept for the costumes unique and memorable within the brief. This year, guizer jarl Neil (a 52-year-old engineer) opted for a manga twist on Norse legend, taking inspiration from a cartoon character from the game Viking: Battle for Asgard.
Shetland has never needed the rest of us; and it certainly doesn’t need tourists at Up Helly Aa. Visitors will always be made warmly welcome but on a remote, barren island your commitment is to your own people. With a population of 22,000, it has the feeling of a place where, as Sean puts it, nobody’s really a stranger – and you never know who you will need a favour from.
A common misconception is that Shetland is poor, with zero industry and no real job prospects beyond fishing. While for a long time a lack of opportunity sent vast numbers of the younger generation to the Scottish mainland, America or New Zealand, today Shetland has one of the most robust economies in Scotland, thanks to the Sullom Voe oil terminal, run by BP, which handles about a quarter of Britain’s oil production, and the adjacent Total gas terminal.
Shetland’s residents enjoy one of the highest rates of employment in Great Britain, and visitors expecting a time capsule of quaint cottages and ‘simple folk’ are astonished by the excellent, empty roads, the gleaming leisure centres and the smattering of high-spec Scandinavian kit-homes, which sprang up during the 1970s oil boom. Remote islands are also often assumed to be insular and backward, but Shetland has the highest percentage of women in the workforce in Scotland, and has welcomed immigrants for thousands of years: the original Pictish people were succeeded by the Norse and Scots, while a generation ago it became a magnet for hippies and artists craving beauty and solitude.
In the country districts, smaller, less formal (and more progressive) Up Helly Aas are held from January to March, where women are admitted into the squads and men might find themselves on kitchen duty in the halls. The South Mainland Up Helly Aa this year made history by appointing a female jarl, Lesley Simpson, a local primary school head. Plenty of Shetlanders view the Lerwick Up Helly Aa, with its men-only rule, with a healthy dose of scepticism, dubbing it ‘Transvestite Tuesday’ thanks to the consistently high turnout of squads in tights and heels. (I’m told the local lingerie store, Smiths of Lerwick, does a roaring trade every December as men lumber in to get measured for their first bra.)
‘Though the Lerwick Up Helly Aa could be seen to be sexist by some, most locals – including myself – don’t see it that way,’ Irena Coubrough, a 31-year-old Shetlander who now lives in London, says. ‘But when I was 12 I got to be a princess in the jarl squad of the Northmavine Up Helly Aa because my best friend’s dad was jarl, and I absolutely loved that, so maybe I am missing out…’
I am watching the parade with my friend Amy Gibson, a fashion designer for Alexander McQueen. Two of her brothers, Fred and Carn, are in the jarl squad this year, and tonight their parents’ house is sleeping three generations of Gibsons. ‘I haven’t been to Up Helly Aa in 17 years, but this is a brilliant excuse for a get-together,’ she says.
and began selecting a squad of 70 guizers and musicians.
Fred and Carn started paying monthly sums into the shared squad account right away; the men are suited in handcrafted metalwork and chainmail, sheepskin boots and hand-knitted tunics, each outfit costing £1,500; most of this is crafted on the islands. ‘We had a weapons team, a helmet team, a leather team and a shield team all working for the best part of a year on producing 70 identical costumes,’ Fred says. ‘For most of the autumn it was taking up two or three nights a week. It’s like planning a wedding.’
At the parade’s end, all 47 squads form concentric circles around a galley built over months by local craftsmen, carpenters and anyone who can be roped in. Following a yell from the jarl, they hurl their torches into the bow. ‘There’s something decidedly Dadaist about it all,’ Peterson says. ‘Building something so beautiful, pouring your heart and soul into it, and then destroying it with fire.’
At this point, the families with small children peel away and the tourists head back to the hotels. But not us – we’re downing soup and whisky before jumping on the truck.
‘For me the real Shetland tradition, heart and soul of Up Helly Aa is the guizing,’ Peterson says. ‘The practice of visiting people’s homes in disguise or fancy dress, telling a joke, doing a dance, singing a song and sharing a dram.
Peterson is Up Helly Aa’s biggest fan, even if he refuses to take the rules too seriously. At 14 he was appointed junior jarl for the 1990 Lerwick Up Helly Aa (a less fiery and Buckfast-free rendition of the adult role) then did his time as a ‘fiddlebox carrier’ (apprentices who function as runners, stage managers and minders throughout the night) before being invited to join a squad himself.
‘None of the guys in these squads would consider themselves artists, performers or anything like that – so there’s something beautiful about watching a tough oil-rig worker perfecting a dance routine, or a shy teenager gaining the courage to perform in front of a crowd,’ he says. ‘Every year you’ll see a mix of music, dance, satire, vaudeville, slapstick – the full spectrum of performance traditions – with no stigma, pretension or airs and graces attached.’ For him the guizing, dancing and general debauchery of the festival is ‘the social glue’ of Shetland.
‘Some folk take Up Helly Aa very seriously, but most of us just want to have a spree and rummel [Shetlandic for ‘rumble’] around in a truck,’ he says. ‘Since October we’ve been meeting up, coming up with ideas for our act, and then making our costumes out of strips of foam and rubber and pink velour. We’ve got a helicopter pilot, a teacher, a lawyer, a carpenter – aged from 15 into their 50s. Being in a squad is a bit like supporting a football team: you didn’t choose the guys you’re with, but you all muck in and get along.’
Most Shetlanders view these meet-ups, and Up Helly Aa in general, as a very necessary support network during the bleak winter months. ‘There’s something ritualistic, pagan, nihilistic about it all, but you need some sort of catharsis,’ Sean says. ‘For many years, life was tough up north. This helps.’
And for all the reports of drunken debauchery and wife-swapping, Up Helly Aa proves to be far more civilised than advertised. While at 10am the next morning the pubs are filling up with refugees from the emptying halls – a man in laddered tights with a lipstick-smeared face sits next to a Viking, while a Power Ranger gets the pints in – there is no evidence of the loutishness or crime that often comes with drunkenness in big, anonymous cities. After all, nobody’s disguise is that good, and you never know who might be acquainted with your mother.
Tuesday 31st January 2017
"There will be no postponement for weather". That's a defiant boast by Shetland's biggest fire festival, considering it's held in mid-winter on the same latitude as southern Greenland. But it's true: gales, sleet and snow have never yet stopped the Up Helly Aa guizers of Lerwick from burning their Viking galley - and then dancing the dawn away.
Up Helly Aa is a lot more than a sub-arctic bonfire and booze-up. It's a superb spectacle, a celebration of Shetland history, and a triumphant demonstration of the islanders' skills and spirit. This northern Mardi Gras lasts just one day (and night). But it takes several thousand people 364 days to organise. Much of the preparation is in strictest secrecy. The biggest secret of all is what the head of the festival, the 'Guizer Jarl', will wear and which character from the Norse Sagas he'll represent
The Guy's A Jarl!
The Jarl will have been planning (and saving up for) the longest day of his life for 12 years or more, before he dons his raven-winged helmet, grabs axe and shield, and embarks on a 24-hour sleepless marathon.
On the evening of Up Helly Aa Day, over 800 heavily-disguised men (no women, thank you, we're vikings!) form ranks in the darkened streets. They shoulder stout fencing posts, topped with paraffin-soaked sacking.
On the stroke of 7.30pm, a signal rocket bursts over the Town Hall. The torches are lit, the band strikes up and the amazing, blazing procession begins, snaking half a mile astern of the Guizer Jarl, standing proudly at the helm of his doomed replica longship, or 'galley'.
It takes half an hour for the Jarl's squad of burly Vikings to drag him to the burning site, through a crowd of four or five thousand spectators.
Amazing Blazing
The guizers circle the dragon ship in a slow-motion Catherine Wheel of fire. Another rocket explodes overhead. The Jarl leaves his ship, to a crescendo of cheers. A bugle call sounds, and then the torches are hurled into the galley.
As the inferno destroys four months of painstaking work by the galley builders, the crowd sings 'The Norseman's Home' - a stirring requiem that can brings tear to the eyes of the hardiest Viking.
The Procession
Tears of mirth are more likely as the night rolls on and more than 40 squads of guizers visit a dozen halls in rotation. They're all invited guests at what are still private parties - apart from a couple of halls where tickets are on sale to the general public.
At every hall each squad performs its 'act', perhaps a skit on local events, a dance display in spectacular costume, or a topical send-up of a popular TV show or pop group.
Every guizer has a duty (as the 'Up Helly Aa Song' says) to dance with at least one of the ladies in the hall, before taking yet another dram, soaked up with vast quantities of mutton soup and bannocks.
The Burning Galley
That's not the end of it, for throughout the rest of the winter each gang of guizers will hold their own 'squad dances' for family and friends. By early autumn, there'll be the first meetings to arrange the next year's performance, while at the Galley Shed in St Sunniva Street the shipwrights, carpenters and their helpers will be starting work on the new galley, not forgetting 'the boys who made the torches'.
'From grand old Viking centuries, Up Helly Aa has come...' That's what the guizers sing but in fact the festival is only just over 100 years old in its present, highly organised form. In the 19th century Up Helly Aa was often riotous. Special constables were called in to curb trigger-happy drunks firing guns in the air - and dragging a blazing tar barrel through the streets, sometimes leaving it on the doorstep of the year's least popular worthy burgher. Today's festival is much better behaved.
The History of Up Helly Aa
UP-HELLY-AA is a relatively modern festival. There is some evidence that people in rural Shetland celebrated the 24th day after Christmas as "Antonsmas" or "Up Helly Night", but there is no evidence that their cousins in Lerwick did the same. The emergence of Yuletide and New Year festivities in the town seems to post-date the Napoleonic Wars, when soldiers and sailors came home with rowdy habits and a taste for firearms.
On old Christmas eve in 1824 a visiting Methodist missionary wrote in his diary that "the whole town was in an uproar: from twelve o clock last night until late this night blowing of horns, beating of drums, tinkling of old tin kettles, firing of guns, shouting, bawling, fiddling, fifeing, drinking, fighting.
As Lerwick grew in size the celebrations became more elaborate. Sometime about 1840 the participants introduced burning tar barrels into the proceedings. "Sometimes", as one observer wrote, "there were two tubs fastened to a great raft-like frame knocked together at the Docks, whence the combustibles were generally obtained. Two chains were fastened to the bogie asupporting the capacious tub or tar-barrel . . . eked to these were two strong ropes on which a motley mob, wearing masks for the most part, fastened. A party of about a dozen were told off to stir up the molten contents."
The main street of Lerwick in the mid-19th century was extremely narrow, and rival groups of tarbarrelers frequently clashed in the middle. The proceeding were thus dangerous and dirty, and Lerwick's middle classes often complained about them. The Town Council began to appoint special constables every Christmas to control the revellers, with only limited success. When the end came for tar-barrelling, in the early 1870s, it seems to have been because the young Lerwegians themselves had decided it was time for a change.
Around 1870 a group of young men in the town with intellectual interests injected a series of new ideas into the proceedings. First, they improvised the name Up-Helly-Aa, and gradually postponed the celebrations until the end of January. Secondly, they introduced a far more elaborate element of disguise - "guizing" - into the new festival.
Thirdly, they inaugurated a torchlight procession. At the same time they were toying with the idea of introducing Viking themes to their new festival. The first signs of this new development appeared in 1877, but it was not until the late 1880s that a Viking long ship - the "galley" - appeared, and as late as 1906 that a "Guizer Jarl", the chief guizer, arrived on the scene.
Up to the Second World War Up-Helly-Aa was overwhelmingly a festival of young working class men - women have never taken part in the procession - and during the depression years the operation was run on a shoestring. In the winter of 1931-32 there was an unsuccessful move to cancel the festival because of the dire economic situation in the town. At the same time, the Up-Helly-Aa committee became a self-confident organisation which poked fun at the pompous in the by then long established Up-Helly-Aa "bill" - sometimes driving their victims to fury.
Since 1949, when the festival resumed after the war, much has changed and much has remained the same. That year the BBC recorded a major radio programme on Up-Helly-Aa, and from that moment Up-Helly-Aa - not noted for its split-second timing before the war - became a model of efficient organisation. The numbers participating in the festival have become much greater, and the resources required correspondingly larger.
Whereas in the 19th century individuals kept open house to welcome the guizers on Up-Helly-Aa night, men and women now co-operate to open large halls throughout the town to entertain them.
which takes place in Lerwick, Shetland, on the last Tuesday in January every year. Up Helly Aa day involves a series of marches and visitations, culminating in a torch-lit procession and the burning of a galley.
The following Wednesday is a public holiday in Lerwick to allow for recovery.
You can learn much more about the festival in the 'About Up Helly Aa' section.
Preparations
Up Helly Aa is a community event, with countless volunteers contributing many hours each winter towards organising and planning the following year's festival.
The Guizer Jarl and his squad begin their preparations in February, and many long hours of hard work go into the design and production of their fabulous outfits.
The Up Helly Aa Committee begin their year preparing the Up Helly Aa Exhibition that runs from May until September in the Galley Shed.
In early September the Guizers of the remaining 45 squads begin their squad meetings and preparations. This involves determining the character(s) that they wish to portray with their suits, making the suits while also creating and practising their act to perform in the halls they visit through out the evening.
At the end of September the Galley shed is transformed back into to a working shed where the Galley and the torches are constructed during the winter. During this same period the Committee progress preparations including the Collecting Sheet and Bill.
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