NATIONAL FESTIVALS

Evening Star, Issue 21632, 30 January 1934, Page 1

NATIONAL FESTIVALS

SHETLAND'S UP-HELLY-AA In a country tike England both the Lord Mayor’s Show and Guy Fawkes Day have to be regarded as comparatively young rather than old customs. Not until we reach the winter solstice customs which cluster about Christmas and New Year’s Day, the spring festivals which Easter and May Day have inherited, and, the oldest of them all, the pilgrimage ttt Stonehenge at dawn on mid-summer’s day, do we get into customs whose roots sink far out of sight into the folk-loke of pre-history. One of the most striking of these cus. toms, and perhaps one of the least known, is the festival of Up-Helly-Aa, which occurs annually toward the end of January at Lerwick, in the Shetland Islands, to the north of Scotland.- It is striking not only in itself, but also because it flows naturally from the Viking blood and the Viking traditions which influence so much of Shetland life. How ancient it is nobody knows, but it obviously goes back to the funeral customs of the Viking period when the bodies of Viking leaders were turned adrift in blazing' galleys at sea. Thi! festival begins early in the evening.- having set in about; the middle o‘f th 6 January afternoon. A Viking galley some 30ft long, with the uplifted dragon’s head at the prow, is ready, mounted on wheels. Twenty men with shields and the winged Viking helmets take the oars, and their leader in armour mounts the little deck aft. Then the procession begins; the great galley and its crew are dragged through the dark -streets, men with flaring torches, followed by’ hundreds of other torches, and led by a' band playing old Viking tunes. The procession moves slowly down to the sea front, where it is greeted by rockets and fireworks from the fishing trawlers lying out in the darkness of the harbour. There it stops, and the torches close up around the galley. The captain starts ‘ The Norsemen’s Home,’ and everybody within earshot takes it up. When the song is finished the crew leaves the galley, the burning torches are flung in, and in a moment the whole vessel is ablaze from stem to stern. So striking a festival would be one of the. best-known in the British Isles if it were not separated from Britain by more than 100 miles of January seas.