Up Helly Aa literally “Up Holy [Day] All” 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 (known as guizers) that culminates in the burning of Viking galley.
The main festival held in Lerwick, Shetland’s capital, involves a procession of up to a thousand guizers who march through the streets of Ler
wick on the last Tuesday in January. Since its inception, 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.
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 even
tually 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 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.
