Up Helly Aa can refer to any of twelve fire festivals held annually from January to March in Shetland, Scotland, to mark the end of the yule season. Each festival involves a torchlit procession by squads of costumed participants that culminates in the burning of Vikinggalley. The main festival held in Lerwick, Shetland's capital, involves a procession of up to a thousand guizers who march through the streets of Lerwick on the last Tuesday in January. The other rural festivals see lower numbers of participants in accordance with their lower populations. , women and girls have been excluded from participating as guizers in the Lerwick festival. This has become a controversial issue and is the subject of ongoing debate in Shetland.
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. Concern over public safety and levels of drunkenness led to a change in the celebrations, and saw them drawing inspiration from the islands' Viking history. 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 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. In reality, despite many sources claiming these ancient origins, the festival, and many like it, were products of Victorian do-goodery. The Lerwick Up-Helly Aa was first established by the Total Abstinence Society in the 1870s to give the young men who would otherwise drink themselves silly something to do. The name itself derives from Upholiday, the lowland Scots' word for Twelfth Day, and was brought by them to the Shetland Islands in the 19th 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 eleven locations – Scalloway, Lerwick, Nesting and Girlsta, Uyeasound, Northmavine, Bressay, Cullivoe, Norwick, Waas, the South Mainland and Delting. After the procession, the squads visit local halls, 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 dancing.
Meaning
According to John Jamieson's Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, up is used in the sense of something being at an end, and derives from the Old Norse word ' 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, as " series of festive days, esp. the period in which Christmas festivities are held from 25th Dec. to 5th Jan.", while aa may represent ', meaning "all".
