Up Helly Aa – Shetland’s Fire Festival

Guisers in the procession at Uyeasound Up Helly Aa 2015 by Mike Pennington, CC BY-SA

The Shetland fire festival of ‘Up Helly Aa’ is in late January each year. There is evidence that for many years, if not centuries, the people in rural Shetland celebrated ‘Antonmas’ or ‘Up Helly Night’, the 24th day after Christmas.

Around 1870, a group of young men in the main Shetland town of Lerwick devised a series of new ideas into the proceedings. They called it ‘Up Helly Aa’, and over time the celebrations were held at the end of January. ‘Guizing’, an elaborate form of costume and disguise, and a torchlight procession were introduced into the festival. In 1877, inspired by Shetland’s long Norse heritage, ‘Viking’ elements were introduced. The ‘galley’, the Viking longship built, paraded, and then set on fire, was introduced in the late 1880s.

The archaeological and textual evidence for fiery ship burials by Vikings is minimal. One source is that of the 10th century traveler named Ibn Fahdlan, who wrote about his attendance at a shipboard cremation on the River Volga, the maritime pyre for a chieftain of the Viking Rus’ (the same Rus’ that names Russia).

Another source is at the Manchester Art Gallery in England.There you can admire ‘The Funeral of a Viking’ (1883), the work of Sir Frank Dicksee. This painting shows the launch of a boat on fire carrying the armored corpse towards the stormy, wave-swept sea.

In Dicksee’s work, a horned helmet can clearly be seen on one of the Viking warriors. We are not aware of any evidence of horned helmets on Vikings prior to Dicksee’s painting. The horned helmet had been first used as a signifier in Wagner’s Ring at Bayreuth in 1876, and Dicksee most likely would have borrowed that Viking signifier from Wagner’s work.

It is perhaps no coincidence that the horned hats and fiery galley became part of the Shetland tradition not long after Wagner and Dicksee’s respective works.

Thanks to Mike Pennington, for his photo ‘Guisers in the procession at Uyeasound Up Helly Aa 2015’ CC BY-SA

10 December 2024