Participants dressed as Vikings parade around their longboat during the annual Up-Helly-Aa festival in Lerwick, Shetland Islands on Tuesday. Photo: AFP

Blaze of glory: Scottish islanders don helmets for Viking fire festival

Published: 10:13am, 27 Jan 2016

Residents of Scotland’s remote Shetland Islands brandishing swords and shields have celebrated their Nordic roots at a spectacular fire festival which culminated in them burning a replica Viking ship.

Wearing winged helmets and boasting some impressive beards, hundreds of people marched through the streets of Lerwick to mark the Up-Helly-Aa festival in the archipelago’s only town on Tuesday.

After darkness fell, the festivities culminated in a torchlit parade headed by the Guizer Jarl or Viking chief.

Not all of the “viking” costumes at the Up-Helly-Aa festival were historically accurate. Photo: AP

Revellers circled the replica boat before throwing their flaming torches on to it, setting it alight and creating a huge pyre with flames shooting high in the air.

The nine-metre long Viking boat was built by a group of local tradesmen who had been working on it since October.

The Shetland Islands are the northernmost outpost of the British Isles and are closer to Oslo than London.

Around 165km northeast of the Scottish mainland, Shetland was invaded by Vikings in the late eighth and early ninth centuries.

Up-Helly-Aa celebrates the influence of the Scandinavian Vikings in the Shetland Islands. Photo: AFP

The archipelago was pledged to Scotland by the king of Norway in 1469 but the Norwegian spirit lives on in street and place names.

“Up-Helly-Aa” is a variant of the Scots Uphaliday, denoting Epiphany as the end of the Christmas holiday, according to the New Oxford Dictionary.

Held on the last Tuesday in January, the torchlit parade, longship burning and dressing up in Viking costumes took off in the 1880s.

The Viking longboat burns during the climax of annual Up-Helly-Aa festival. Photo: AFP

Peter Malcolmson, the 1984 Guizer Jarl who portrayed a character entitled Eirik Bloodaxe Haraldson, said it was a “huge spectacle”.

“Tonight you’ll see about 1,000 men with torches lining up in the streets getting ready for the procession,” he told BBC radio.

“Shetlanders all over the world at the moment will be smelling the paraffin and that’s a sense of the anticipation of the event and the pride in it.

“The adrenaline is flowing, the fun is there; it’s just a great party.”

The merry-making goes on until after dawn on Wednesday, when Shetland has a much-needed official public holiday.

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