Up-Helly-Aa: It may be horny but is it Viking?
The Sunday Times, February 1, 2004
By Kenny Farquharson in Lerwick
The temperature is -3C and falling. Standing in the snow-covered street is a 17-stone man dressed like a harem girl, an acre of goose flesh exposed around his bejewelled midriff. Idly he adjusts his fake breasts. Nearby a man in a furry orangutang suit is fiddling with a mobile phone, trying to text a message with furry paws.
A Viking in full regalia, raven feathers fluttering from a silver helmet, approaches. He barks at them to take their places alongside the other 898 curiously dressed men lining the streets of Lerwick. At precisely 7.15pm the street lights go off and the constellation of Orion stands out in the northern sky. The town holds its breath in anticipation. Up-Helly-Aa is about to begin.
We are about to watch one of the greatest performances on earth, which is rolled out annually through the streets of Shetland’s capital. Every year, by plane and ship they come, weary pilgrims drawn from every corner of the globe to witness Up-Helly-Aa’s weird and wonderful sights and sounds. And every year dramatic images of the night’s events, of a burning boat and of a mass of Viking warriors, find their way into newspapers around the world, making this extraordinary gathering almost as familiar to the residents of Melbourne or Buenos Aires as it is to the citizens of Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Each of the 900 men in front of us carries a 4ft wooden pole topped with rags soaked in paraffin. At precisely 7.30pm a naval maroon explodes overhead — the signal for dozens of hand-held distress flares to be set off along the lined street. At once the winter night is suffused in vivid red smoke, like a pantomime show of hell. Each man lights his torch from the flare and hoists it high above his head.
It is a heart-stopping moment — the loud whoosh as the flames catch the wind, the sudden heat of 900 torches banishing the chill, the train of fire snaking back as far as the eye can see, the end lost in a shimmer of heat haze.
The town’s brass band strikes up. Their chosen tune to kick off the world’s most famous winter fire festival is not one of the rousing Norse songs associated with this celebration, with proud boasts of warlike valour and Viking honour.
Instead the musicians swing into There’s No Business Like Show Business. Somehow it is the perfect choice, given the strange and wonderful beast that Up-Helly-Aa has become.
As well as a group of 40 Vikings led by their chief, the guizer jarl, there are naked ramblers wearing anatomically correct flesh-coloured suits, a group of Arnold Schwarzeneggers, and men dressed as characters from the Balamory children’s TV programme, some Johnny Cashes, a Bollywood Up-Helly-Aa cast and some large men in Fair Isle bikinis.
Most Scots have only the vaguest knowledge of Up-Helly-Aa. They may have seen a television news clip of a Viking longboat being pulled through the streets of the Shetland capital on the last Tuesday in January. Or the boat ablaze as the men gather around it in a circle and throw their torches in wave after wave of fiery arcs.
They will have an image in their minds of bearded Shetlanders dressed as Norse marauders, waving axes in front of the blazing hull. They may have heard of the night-long celebrations afterwards, with guizers travelling around the town’s 12 halls to perform skits and dance and drink with Lerwick’s womenfolk. But they are unlikely to know more.
Is it all some ancient rite? An authentic slice of warlike Viking heritage that has miraculously survived into the 21st century?
Not quite. Going to Up-Helly-Aa is like attending a handful of very different festivals that inadvertently got double-booked. It’s Red Nose day with beards, a dangerously out-of-control stag night, a pagan festival scripted by the Disney corporation. It’s also a chance for Shetland grannies to have a shindig and a sherry. It’s Transvestite Tuesday. It’s a licence for casual sex.
The definitive academic text on Up-Helly-Aa is by Callum G Brown, a Glasgow University professor. In it he treats the subject of sex directly but delicately.
“There is a sexual potency in the meeting of members of the jarl’s squad in their battle gear with young women in voluptuous short dresses, and after the dances some couples seek private space in a quiet corner of the building . . . Some of the halls are licensed premises and a few have reputations for ‘saloon’ behaviour and considerable sexual licence.”
In Lerwick last week this reputation had attracted a journalist and photographer from a London-based lad’s magazine, who did not have to work too hard to persuade two local barmaids to be photographed licking whipped cream off the nipples of a rather pleased young bare-chested English visitor.
“I’m just taking this man on to the dance floor to have sex,” said one blonde twentysomething at Anderson High school, clutching the hand of a man dressed as a beer-toting German Fräulein. She did not carry through her promise, but came pretty close.
One professional Shetland woman confides: “I think it must be genetic programming. I just see a man in his beard and his helmet, wielding his axe and shield, and I think: ‘Phwooooar’!”
Other Shetland women claim to be immune. One goes so far as to say she thinks beards are the most effective contraceptive ever invented. She appears to be in a minority. Beards are an Up-Helly-Aa status symbol, and many of the men start to grow one in about October in preparation for the end of January. In fact there is some concern among local firefighters that they will not be allowed to grow beards because of rules regarding the use of breathing apparatus. A jarl’s squad Viking without a beard? Unthinkable.
To understand Up-Helly-Aa you have to understand the squads. There are 50 of them in Lerwick, each containing about 20 men. Any man born in Lerwick can be a member, as well as any man who has lived in the town for five years or more. The residency rule was introduced to keep out itinerant oil workers who were responsible for some of Up-Helly-Aa’s rowdier and more bacchanalian excesses in the 1970s and 1980s.
Each year one squad — pronounced “squaaad” in the Shetland dialect — is picked to be the centrepiece of Up-Helly-Aa. Its leader will be the guizer jarl, the chief of Up-Helly-Aa. They will be the only ones in Viking dress on the night — the costumes designed for the occasion and painstakingly handmade by the squads themselves in the preceding 12 months.
The results are theatrical outfits with chain mail, reindeer-hide cloaks and impossibly shiny axes. The effect is rather camp, and some way short of terrifying — as if the squad is auditioning for Carry on Up the Fjord. The men also build the longship — a clinker-built boat made according to traditional methods that will never go to sea.
All of which makes it plain that membership of the jarl squad is a singular honour for Shetland men. The jarl is king for a day, leading the ceremonials and often bringing friends and relatives from all over the world for his moment in Shetland history. Men compete hard to win a place on the Up-Helly-Aa committee and so guarantee their ticket for the top job. Once they become a member they know they will be jarl in 16 years’ time, and consider it worth the wait.
But not everybody is in tune with the event. Some Shetlanders are embarrassed by what they believe Up-Helly-Aa has become, saying it does no favours to the Norse traditions it is meant to celebrate or the event’s own history.
In a small office building near the boat-burning site, Shetland archivist Brian Smith laments the loss of the values that were dear to the young socialists and temperance campaigners who thought up the festival in the late 19th century, bringing in strands from the islands’ midwinter rites.
Smith believes there is little sense of a true Viking celebration. “I think hardly anybody who dresses up as a Viking on Up-Helly-Aa day gives the Viking past a thought for the rest of the year,” he says. “It was real for the creators of Up-Helly-Aa, but not now. The sense of Viking heritage in Shetland generally is not a very serious one. Nobody, for example, tries to learn Norwegian here.”
The sceptics, though, are in a minority. Up-Helly-Aa is a defining event for most Shetlanders, and most of the adult population of Lerwick will play a part, even if it is just as an enthusiastic spectator.
This is an event for the community, by the community. Its motifs are icons of identity for Shetlanders — some even want the longship to replace the thistle on tourist signs.
