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Brown, Callum G. Up-helly-aa: Custom, Culture and Community in Shetland. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998. 219 pp. Sources and index included. Callum Brown opens his account of Shetland's most famous festival with a vivid description of recent (late 1990s) festivities. Up-helly-aa (from the Norn "helli," for "holy-day" or "festival," and Old Norse "uppi," for "at an end") is held early in the morning of the last Tuesday in January. Guizer Jarl, the honorary head of the festival, leads a squad of forty-three men who gather in spectacular Viking dress, with horned helmets, axes, and shields. The Vikings begin a day-long procession around the town, greeted by hundreds of onlookers. They sing "The Up-Helli-Aa Song" at various places, eventually winding their way to the pier, where they are joined by one thousand men (nearly 50 different squads) in costumes whose themes are as diverse as minstrels, pink elephants, nuns, and 101 Dalmatians. Each of the thousand men is given a torch. The town's street lights are shut off and the torches are lit by passing the flame from man to man. "Seen from afar," Brown writes, "the effect is that of a huge, luminous orange snake constantly coiling and uncoiling" (6). Row after row of guizers step forward to throw their torches into a wooden Viking ship, which immediately begins to burn. Within a few moments the galley is consumed "amidst the crackling of the 30-foot flames" (7). At this point what Brown describes as the public festival is over. However, community events such as planned parties, or "halls," take place in twelve locations throughout Lerwick. The halls center around music (ranging from Scottish country dance bands to disco), light meals, satirical skits by the guizers (who are still in costume), socializing, and drinking (though drinking is not allowed in every hall). The day following the Up-helly-aa night is a local public holiday in Lerwick, a quiet day of recovery. The galley is nothing but a heap of ashes; the guizer costumes are stored away in people's homes, never to be used again, for it is against the rules of the festival to use a costume other than that of a Viking squad member more than once. Brown's depiction of the current Up-helly-aa serves not only to introduce the reader to Shetland's customary lore; it also underscores a key conceptual point to the book, that of the ever-changing function of the festival and its usefulness as a tool for understanding the nuances of community life. First of all, although it is a symbol of Shetland, Up-helly-aa is not an artificially created tourist event. Because it is held during savage winter weather, it remains firmly within local control. Tourist boards have tried to persuade the local committee to move the festival to the summer months, when some tourists do make the 120-mile journey from Scotland's northeast coast, but they have received no support from the Up-Helly-aa Committee. Up-helly-aa is meant to be an emotional release from the burdens of winter. It gives light and heat and drama to the coldest, bleakest, and darkest days of the year. The festival program states the same message every January: "There will be no postponement for weather" (15). Second, Up-helly-aa's satirical function, established in writing on the Bill at the beginning of the festival and carried out in visual and dramatic form through the costumes and skits of guizers, helps locals voice political, environmental, and economic complaints in socially acceptable forms. The inversion of order, revealed in cross-dressing and role reversals, releases pressures that have built up during past months. A council member's poor judgment or wastefulness of local resources prior to Up-helly-aa will most certainly be mocked in the Bill or humorously recalled in a skit at one of the halls. Indeed, Brown states, it is the theme of mischief and misrule that continues to dominate Shetland's primary festival, overshadowing its more obvious ritualized tribute to Norse heritage. "What we find in living and vibrant community customs should not be treated as remnants of a preindustrial past, nor as signs of unchanging elements in society," says Brown. "Theme and form are veils on a calendar custom; meaning lies within" (196). Brown relies on local literature and local historians for much of his research on the Shetland festival. He is especially indebted to Shetland Archivist Brian Smith, who, according to Brown, has produced "by far the best research on Up-helly-aa" (44). Writing not for an academic community but for local Shetlanders, Smith has "ensured that local people in Shetland are well informed on the history of their own festival" by contributing regular articles to the Shetland Times, histories for festival programs, and the historical introduction to the Up-helly-aa Committee's Song Book (45). Brown has recognized that local information is essential for any outsider's understanding of unfamiliar cultural practices. He notes that Smith's expertise and local archival sources have helped him to reconstruct, decade by decade, the evolution of Up-helly-aa from misbehaviors of a boisterous street culture to a carefully enacted community celebration involving locally sanctioned parody and protest. Nancy Cassell McEntire |
