My night of Viking mayhem at Up Helly Aa

“Dry so far,” one Viking says to another, tipping back his feathered helmet to peer up at the sky, which has been slowly brightening in the half-hour since dawn.

“Don’t jinx it,” his friend replies in an undertone. Then their conversation is drowned out as the bagpipers following them strike up again, and the other 70 men processing through the streets of Lerwick begin to roar, battle axes thrust aloft.

Up Helly Aa, the annual Viking-inspired fire festival held on Shetland, is one of the stranger things I have witnessed. As a blow-in from way down south, I find something exhilaratingly weird about seeing men marching in full, handmade Norse army regalia at eight o’clock in the morning, a replica longboat hauled on wheels behind them past the Golden Wok Chinese takeaway, an upholstery shop and the local dentist.

To the people who live here, though, this is an exciting day in the calendar but it’s one they are well used to. As the procession moves through the streets, residents stand on their doorsteps in dressing gowns, holding cups of tea, waving mildly at those among the Viking horde they recognise. There’s a sense of energy being conserved. Everyone in town has a very long 24 hours ahead of them.

This is roughly how the last Tuesday in January has begun in Lerwick for more than 100 years. Up Helly Aa, which means Up Holy [Day] All, is the name given to the celebrations that run from January to March in Shetland, of which the Lerwick one is the largest. They mark the end of the Yule period and welcome back the sun after the punishingly long and cold winter in this part of the world. Back in the mid-19th century, locals had a tradition of dragging barrels of burning tar through the narrow streets, which is a remarkably effective way to accidentally set fire to buildings, and so eventually it was decided that a change should be made.

Instead, Up Helly Aa would involve a torchlight procession, and a theme to tie the celebrations together, one that reflected the heritage of the islands. There are signs of a Viking past all over Shetland. It’s peppered with well-preserved archaeological sites where graves, houses, boats and other treasures have been discovered in the 13-odd centuries since Norsemen first landed here looking for land and other spoils, and the Shetland dialect has a strong Norse influence. So the choice was obvious: theme it on the Vikings.

For several decades now, the formula of the Lerwick Up Helly Aa has remained more or less unchanged. The Jarl’s Squad, the guys dressed as Vikings, process through the town and spend the daytime visiting schools, being greeted by local government and singing songs. In the evening, this squad is joined by smaller squads, who each dress up to a theme of their own choosing, and they form a procession of what is known as “guizers”: around 1,000 torchbearers who march through the streets, converging on a playground, where they set fire to a replica longboat.

This year, various locals tell me during the course of my three days in Shetland, is a special one. For starters, the pandemic means that the last Up Helly Aa happened in 2020. But there is something else different about this festival. For the entire history of Lerwick’s Up Helly Aa, it has been only boys who have been able to join a squad and hold a torch. In 2023, for the first time, women are being allowed to join in.

“It’s a really controversial topic, the participation of women,” Claire White, a Shetlander whose husband has been in nine Jarl’s Squads in total, tells me, “and there are strong feelings on both sides.” On the one hand, she says, many people feel that women should have the option to participate as guizers, and on the other hand, the craftsmanship involved in putting on the festival has always been done in this part of the world by men: the costume making, the boat building. And when anything has been done a certain way for a long time, there is always resistance to changing it.

The preparations are intense. Every member of the Jarl’s Squad is elected up to 15 years before they actually get to march. They then begin to save for their outfits, which cost about £2,000 each, while the process of making the costumes and organising other elements of the festival takes many months. The longboat alone takes around 1,200 man hours to build, and work begins almost immediately after the preceding year’s festival ends. Preparing for this year’s event, White’s husband has been out of action from family life since September, she says.

Because of how far in advance Jarls are elected, there aren’t any women Vikings marching today, though there will be some in the smaller squads this evening. But something that seems unlikely ever to change about Up Helly Aa is how local it all feels. In order to join a squad you must have been resident on Shetland for five years, and there is also a natural limit on how many tourists can get here to watch. There are only so many guesthouses on Shetland. Spaces on flights and ferries, too, are limited and subject to unpredictable January weather. Being here to see this feels like a privilege, and should probably continue to feel that way. It’s primarily for Shetlanders, not for me.

That said, the atmosphere on the island is decidedly welcoming to outsiders: everyone’s too busy having a laugh to care particularly where you’re from, for one thing. The night before the big day, I went to the Douglas Arms pub, where a group of off-duty oil-rig workers were bellowing, to the tune of “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean”, “Pull back, pull back, oh pull back my foreskin for me, for me.” Later still, I followed the faint sound of music from somewhere on the upper floors of my hotel and found a room of 100 or people sitting around getting merrily inebriated and watching an accordion and fiddle “stramash”.

The Shetland Islands are known for their rolling stretches of treeless, wind-stripped landscape, peat bogs giving way to cliffs battered by the north Atlantic. Driving across the islands, you’ll see more sheep — or Shetland ponies, if you’re lucky — than people. But for these few days a year, Shetland feels almost bustling. I didn’t expect there to be a dozen other tourists looking around Jarlshof, a Norse archaeological site on the very southern tip of Shetland’s mainland, on a freezing day in late January.

As night falls on Tuesday, the streets near the playground are full of people cracking cans, hoisting children on to shoulders, pulling beanies with felt Viking horns further down over their ears. It’s cold, and gusts of rain and ice blow through the crowd periodically. A single loud firework goes up, and in the distance, behind a row of houses, the torches begin to be lit, throwing a deep red light and smoke into the night sky. The procession moves at a pace down the hill, and soon the streets are filled with Vikings again.

“We should have a female Jarl and have her in the biggest, pinkest Viking outfit, glitter cannons firing at everyone,” a woman standing near me suggests to her friend.

But it’s not just Vikings. The other torchbearers are a much more motley crew. There are Smurfs, sheep, hippies, reindeer, flamingos, prisoners, some lads dressed as tins of Celebrations. A little girl screams “rainbow guy!” and, lo and behold, there is indeed a rainbow guy. A middle-aged man dressed as a mouse yells “Alright Kev!” as he points to someone in the crowd.

Gradually, the procession moves into the playground itself, where the torchbearers approach the longboat in tightening circles, like fire ants around the colony. Then they throw their torches. Cheers go up as the boat ignites, and again as the mast and then the dragon’s head at the prow succumb to the flames.

There are, I notice, very few women in the squads. I am told later on by Maggie Sandison, one of the handful of women who marched this year, that this makes sense. Joining a squad is by invitation only, and places are hotly sought after, as few ever want to give up their squad status. Sandison is chief executive of Shetland Islands Council, and was approached by a squad and asked if she’d like to join.

“I was quite worried about it — what happens if I can’t carry the torch for the whole length of time? I can’t let women down!” she says. She also heard that there were some younger Shetland girls joining squads. “I had to show my support for them, because they’re being really brave, being the first to go out. Not everybody was fully supportive of the change.”

But it’s not as if women haven’t been heavily involved in Up Helly Aa in ways other than being in the squads. It is only after the procession, arguably, that the real fun begins. All over Lerwick, parties known as “halls” are about to begin, where the hosts, mainly women, have laid on banquets of mutton soup, bannocks, tea, cake, scones with salt beef and butter, cheese-and-pickle sandwiches, millionaire’s shortbread: you name a picnic food and somewhere on Shetland it’s being served tonight. The reason so many provisions are required is that these BYOB parties run right up until 9am. All night, the squads who marched in the procession tour from hall to hall, performing a piece of entertainment they’ve devised for the occasion: dances, songs, satirical skits about local life.

I have a ticket to a hall being held at a primary school on the south side of town. And it is here, somewhere between watching a human Bounty bar and a crash-test dummy enjoying a sausage roll together on chairs built for seven-year-olds, looking on with my mouth hanging open as 12 blokes in vinyl skirts lurch through choreography to Rihanna’s “Umbrella” and seeing a very drunk Snow White wearing his Air Max on the wrong feet dance to happy hardcore, that I reach a state of near-hallucinatory joy I hadn’t anticipated.

It is so, so much fun. Between each clutch of squad performances there is a ceilidh with a live band. Women of all ages are here in their best clothes, enjoying what many of them describe to me as the best night of their year. If the boys still own the procession, the girls own the dance floor. After I am released from “Strip the Willow” by the perhaps 19-year-old squad member in an England football strip with the number 69 on the back who hauled me out of my seat, I get talking to Avie, 20. She is a former Jarl’s Squad member’s daughter. She’s glad they have let women into the squads, but she wouldn’t do it herself. “That’s just not how I was raised,” she yells in my ear. “But God, I like the party bit.”

“The reality is that a winter in Shetland is very dark, very cold and very long,” Sandison tells me, “and I think Up Helly Aa — people coming together, the whole process of squads planning their entertainment — keeps people going.” Carousing — maybe not exactly like this but something like it, fewer sexy nun costumes almost certainly — is, I suppose, what their Viking ancestors would also have done to survive through to springtime.

I don’t last until 9am. At a certain point in the small hours, the cold I’d developed exploring Shetland in the wet and the wind of January got the better of me. But Sandison fills me in on the scenes in Lerwick the morning after. “I think if somebody arrived in Shetland at this moment, and could see a banana walking down the street with a man in a hunting costume with a pretend horse between his legs, they’d just think we were mad,” she says, laughing.

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