The Lerwick Up Helly Aa is held on the last Tuesday in January, with up to a thousand costumed men marching with torches and burning a replica Viking galley. Visitors often take it for a survival of Norse fire worship.
It is not. It grew out of the Yule custom of tar barrelling, in which young men dragged burning barrels through the town. The Shetland Museum says the catalyst for the festival was boredom among young men after the Napoleonic Wars. The Total Abstinence Society helped set up the Lerwick celebration in the 1870s as an alternative to drinking, tar barrelling was abolished between about 1874 and 1880, and torch processions were allowed. The first torch celebration on Up Helly Aa day was in 1881, and the festival was formalised in 1882 for a royal visit. The galley was first burned in 1889. The writer Haldane Burgess shaped its Viking identity with his 1894 book The Viking Path. The Guizer Jarl role came in the early twentieth century, and the name comes from a Lowland Scots word for Twelfth Day.
It is real, living folklore with a short history, which is how it is described here. Other festivals take place in villages across Shetland between January and March.
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