• Midwinter party Shetland’s Up Helly Aa
TOM MORTON FELL IN LOVE AND RAISED A FAMILY IN SHETLAND, WHERE THEY CELEBRATE WINTER WITH FIRE, MUSIC AND SONG. WELCOME TO UP HELLY AA!
Shetland is dark. Darker than dark, for a good portion of the year. That’s the time for lighting the fire, for visiting, for telling tales over a dram and a bowl of tattie soup. Despite the darkness, we are happy. This is perhaps because there are more jobs than people, and partly because we do all the best things in life so well. Music. History. Art. Community. Food. Drink. Jumpers.
There is one aspect of our culture that we do particularly well: celebration. Shetlanders enjoy a bit of revelry. They make you feel welcome, like you can only say the right thing and it’s never getting late. We call this concept ‘foy’, an old Scots word that’s still in frequent use on the isles today. Make no mistake: we don’t have any Michelin-starred restaurants. We don’t even have a strong restaurant scene. Shetland’s food stems from survival. Even today, the realities of living in a place cut off from the mainland by a very long and particularly rough sea journey will hit home. We can provide some things for ourselves, but it pays to be prepared.
NORTHERN NIGHTS
Hogmanay is a big deal on mainland Scotland, and the habits of black bun, mincemeat pies and first-footing (see page 121) have caught on to some extent in Shetland. But they’re not treated with great enthusiasm. The old Julian calendar was still followed here right into the late 19th century, which gives you Yule, a season of winter feasting lasting up to a month, and Old Yule on 5 January. So, basically in Shetland we go on celebrating Yule like crazy until we get to Up Helly Aa, on the last Tuesday in January – the first glimmerings of the year and a great shout of anger at the darkness.
No one rails against darkness better than the Vikings and there’s no question that there’s a great deal of Scandic-DNA in the native population. Shetland was part of Scandinavia until the Scots took it over in the 15th century (see opposite). The process of Britification was inexorable. It was only following the First World War, that great trauma of national identity, that some young war veterans took an interest in the history, rituals and iconography of Viking times and applied them to Shetland.
They founded or re-engineered a festival and called it Up Helly Aa – ‘The Lightening of the Year’. They took the traditional fiery elements of pagan end-of-winter celebrations, combined with the Christian festival of Candlemas, and Viking-ised them.
There is feasting, of course. Lots of feasting. Frolicking and cavorting. Reestit mutton (or just ‘reest’, dry cured and smoked on the bone over a peat fire before being boiled) and tattie soup with bannocks. There is no foy without reest, no frolicking without bannocks. There are sandwiches, fancies, or cakes, tray-bakes and tiffin. And tea, strong tea, made in gigantic aluminium pots with great ladles of loose Nambarrie leaf. Tea that catches in your teeth, and goes exceedingly well with the dark rum in many a warming hip flask.
WE’RE ALL VIKINGS NOW
Up Helly Aa is more than a boozy parade for fire-raisers, though. It’s a spectacle, a somewhat fantastical celebration of Shetland’s
history, and a demonstration of the islanders’ skills, spirit and stamina. It lasts just one day (and night). But it takes several thousand people 364 days to organise. Much of the preparation is in the strictest secrecy. The biggest secret of all is what the chieftain of the costumed Vikings, the Guizer Jarl, will wear and which character from the Norse Sagas he’ll represent.
The Jarl will have been planning the longest day of his life for many years, before he dons his horned or raven-winged helmet, grabs his shield and embarks on 24 hours of formalised partying while wearing a dress, brandishing an axe and singing with volume and cheer.
On the evening of Up Helly Aa Day, more than 800 heavily-disguised men assemble in the darkened streets of Lerwick. They carry wooden fence-posts, topped with a fist of paraffin-soaked sacking. At 7.30pm, the torches are lit, the band strikes up and the blazing procession begins, snaking half a mile astern of the Guizer Jarl, who stands proudly at the helm of his doomed longship, or galley.
It takes half an hour for the Jarl’s squad of Vikings to drag him to the burning site, through a crowd of four or five thousand spectators. The Vikings circle the ship in a slow-motion Catherine Wheel of fire. A 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. The biggest bonfire of the year ensues, there is singing, and then everyone disperses to parties, to dance and to eat and drink.
“No postponement for weather.” That’s an annual, defiant boast considering Up Helly Aa is held in midwinter on the same latitude as southern Greenland. But it’s true: gales, sleet and snow have never yet stopped the Up Helly Aa revellers from burning their Viking galley in the town’s play park and then dancing into the dawn and beyond.
As the festival developed and grew, multiple ‘squads’ – 40, these days – of men began dressing up in costumes and performing little skits commenting on local and national events. Gatherings in private homes and then in public halls, today about a dozen, were organised. The festival grew beyond Lerwick, too. There are at least nine fire festivals across Shetland these days, including the most recently-founded festival, the South Mainland Up Helly Aa, famous, infamous or indeed legendary for having the first ever female Guizer Jarl.
These ‘country’ Up Helly Aas are nearly all stalwart bastions of gender equality (unlike Lerwick, where the Committee restricts women’s involvement in proceedings), and have a relaxed, laid-back attitude to everything from alcohol availability to tickets. And food. I have seen mutton pies at Up Helly Aa – proper, pungent, hot-water-crust fountainheads of juicy minced sheep meat. And lentil soup as opposed to reestit mutton, for there appear to be more vegetarians in the Shetland countryside.
The various Up Helly Aas signal the coming of the sun and intensify the darkness. When the torches dim, when the galley embers burn low, you can walk back in the absolute blackness of a Shetland winter night, allow your eyes to adjust and actually enjoy the absence of light, or the flicker of the aurora. Up Helly Aa is about the lightening of the year, but one of its great pleasures is the celebration of darkness.