Fiesta E-Book

Daniel Stables

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 406

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

A journey through human festivity, told through colourful travel narratives set at some of the world's most eye-catching festivals and interweaved with insights from the fields of anthropology, history, psychology, and folklore, examining why we celebrate festivals in the ways we do. Fiesta explores the vibrant tapestry of human festivity, delving into the extraordinary lengths we undertake to express our cultures and commemorate life's milestones. From drunken pilgrimages to sacrificial funerals, national days to neo-pagan necromancy, festivals represent human culture at its most vivid and varied, and the resulting account is both a rich collection of travel writing and an anthropological exploration of the roles that festivals play in society. Through colourful characters, vibrant sights, and varied locales, Daniel Stables takes a curious, humanistic look at festivals across the globe, unravelling the universal threads which run through our diverse global celebrations.

Leseprobe

 

 

Published in 2025 byIcon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DPemail: [email protected]

ISBN: 978-183773-251-7 ebook: 978-183773-253-1

Text copyright © 2025 Daniel Stables

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typesetting by SJmagic DESIGN SERVICES, India

Printed and bound in the UK

Appointed GPSR EU Representative: Easy Access System Europe Oü, 16879218 Address: Mustamäe tee 50, 10621, Tallinn, Estonia Contact Details: [email protected], [phone]

For my father, Andy Stables

CONTENTS

Introduction

1Begin Again: Rituals of Renewal

2Masquerade: Travels in Identity

3Jesus Raves: Pilgrims, Passage, and Threshold People

4Hungry Ghosts: Food, Festivals, and Meaning

5Ego Altars: Ritual Madness, Ecstasy, and Altered States

6The Golden Threads: Festivals as Roadmaps of Religion

7Them: Festivals and Tribalism

8Nation Fêtes: Festivals, Nation Building, and Ethnic Identity

9Utopia: Experiments in Society

10Last Rites: Festival, Ritual, and Death

11Mischief: Festivity Beyond the Grave

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION

What is a festival, anyway? Depending on who you ask, the word might conjure several different images. Dancing till dawn in a muddy field. Gathering with like-minded people in celebration of a shared hobby or interest. Sitting with family and friends for a period of quiet religious reflection. Explore more deeply, and many more expressions of the festival phenomenon reveal themselves: debauched costumed carnivals, mass annual pilgrimages, jingoistic national parades. We even find funerary festivals: howls of collective grief. I have long been fascinated by festivals, and during my career as a travel writer, I’ve been privileged to attend many of them, close to home and in distant corners of the earth. What I’ve come to believe is that festivals represent human culture in its most distilled form. They are special times in the calendar when a culture expresses itself more explicitly and deliberately than at any other time of year. As such, they are potent – not only physically, in their sounds and smells, colours and costumes, but symbolically, as illustrations of the motivating forces which underpin human culture. Luminescent, effervescent and life-affirming, festivals represent humanity in all its absurdity, its cracked beauty and its gorgeous variety. They are the birds-of-paradise of human cultural expression.

I chose the title Fiesta for this book because in its various meanings – a saint’s day, a secular festival, a feast, a party – it is the word I could best think of which comes closest to embodying the many different facets of the festival phenomenon. There is only one Spanish fiesta featured in depth in this book, but the many meanings of the word map on to the many types of festival that we find across languages, cultures and borders.

Festivals vary wildly, but most of them centre on collective acts of transcendent ritual, aimed at achieving some kind of union: with history, nation, nature, society at large, something divine. The means by which festivals achieve these ends are as varied, as kaleidoscopic, as human culture itself. In the course of researching this book, I watched the Taoists of Phuket mutilate their faces with skewers and knives, waded through pig blood at an animist funeral in the highlands of Sulawesi, and met the Dark Lord of the Underworld in a Lancashire garden shed. The experience of festivals allows us to celebrate and immerse ourselves in cultural difference and variety, at home and far away – but by examining that variety, in all its diverse madness and with all its apparent contradictions, we can end up perceiving more clearly the similarities and motivations which we all share, across cultures and throughout history.

I wanted to take a journey through festivity in all its forms, so did not limit myself to festivals with huge crowds – although these feature, too – but included smaller-scale rituals and cultural traditions, all rooted in some way in community, rather than just the individual. This is the thing which all festivals share, and which distinguishes them from other kinds of ritual: their communal nature. Festivals are not solitary experiences, but shared ones – what the sociologist Émile Durkheim described as events of ‘collective effervescence’, in which participants forgo their individual identity for a stronger sense of kinship with that which is greater than themselves.

As I delved more deeply into the festival world, themes emerged: instincts and patterns in cultural behaviour which run through human festivity like golden threads. Some of these – the desire to transcend mortality, the confusion as to why there is something rather than nothing and the need to explain it, the capacity to enter trance states and travel in identity, our enormous facility for tribalism – are part of our human hardware. The festivals themselves, and the cultural worlds which give rise to them, are the software, the operating systems: hugely diverse, always evolving, often indecipherable and infuriating; prone to be corrupted, and, sometimes, to crash and burn.

Certain themes seem to be particularly potent, cropping up in festivals time and time again. One of these is the relationship between humans and the wider natural world, often marked at equinoxes and solstices – festivals which root us in the earth, allowing us to experience the changing seasons and live, as Icelandic Neopagan chieftain Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson put it, ‘like a farmer’.

Another recurrent theme is the dissolution of the ego, an objective of many festivals which is achieved through various means: costumery, quiet meditation, chemical transportation into altered states of consciousness. At Turkey’s Şeb-i Arûs, pious Sufi dervishes whirl themselves into a state of ecstatic bliss, obliterating the ego in pursuit of union with the divine. Meanwhile, at contemporary music festivals, another kind of ego sacrifice is taking place: communal, deliberate derangement of the senses at the altar of the sound system.

This desertion of the individual ego leads naturally to a lurch towards the collective, which is another characteristic of festivals. From national days to ceremonial team sports, fancy dress parades to acts of collective ritual violence, festivals are vehicles for the creation and consolidation of cultural identity – but always in communal, not individual, ways.

Festivals are best understood through experience, and so this is a travel book, based on first-person narrative accounts. The travel writer is doomed to dilettantism, but I was not just interested in providing superficial accounts of how people engage in festivity around the world; I wanted to try and understand why we do it in those different ways, too. That’s why, throughout the book, I’ve looked to experts in various fields – psychologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, historians – in the hope that their insight can further illuminate some of the more enigmatic and indecipherable extremes of human behaviour which we encounter as we travel through the twilight of the festival world.

Of these expert insights, the one that feels the most potent is the concept of liminality, the state of being on a threshold. Coined by the folklorist Arnold van Gennep in 1909, and later greatly developed by the anthropologist Victor Turner, liminality is an in-between state, when the normal rules and structures of life are suspended – ‘life drawn out of its usual rut’, as the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin described the carnivalesque. Festivals make permissible those extreme reaches of human behaviour which may usually be considered transgressive or downright strange: ecstatic trances, wanton sexuality, mask wearing and criminal damage, dipsomania and ritual mutilation. During which, we become stripped down: our inhibitions dissolve, and something raw and unaffected is revealed.

The anthropologist and folklorist James Frazer saw festivals ‘as acts which reproduce the great systems of beliefs and mythologies’,1 and it’s true that when we are in their midst, festivals can make life feel mythic and folkloric. We recognise tropes and archetypes in ourselves and each other – even as they are being subverted – and can feel like we are taking part in some primal theatre play, connected by a behavioural wormhole to the distant past, to our ancestors themselves.

But for all their elevated grandiosity, the real beauty of festivals lies in their universality. Every culture has produced them, and everybody has taken part in them. Throughout the year, proceeding alongside our humdrum lives on a parallel track, there is another place, a mirror-world of symbolism and meaning: the festival world. It is always there for us to dip into when we feel the want or the need, which, judging by the packed festival calendars of societies across the world, is often. Our festival selves are unseen dancers, shadow shapes which twirl with our everyday forms, pulling their strings throughout the year; but it is only on those special days, those festival days, that they reveal their true forms, awesome and terrifying and many-eyed, pulsating in vivid technicolour, there to lead us in a tango, hold us close and throw us high, garland us with mundamalas and festoon us with streamers; make us remember and forget ourselves all at once.

__________

1.https://www.jstor.org/stable/43861801?read-now=1&seq=2#page_scan_tab_contents

1

BEGIN AGAIN

Rituals of Renewal

SHETLAND, Scotland

‘I’m not sure I can do this anymore,’ sighed an ashen-faced man as he passed a hip flask to his friend, both shivering against the bone-rattling morning breeze. ‘I’ve been in the boozer for four days. But I’m useless with it in my old age.’ He was about 30, but it’s a hard life up here in Shetland. On his head was a crocheted Viking helmet, complete with knitted horns, and his open jacket revealed a woolly jumper that said, Where do old Vikings go? The Norsing home!

‘I know, mate,’ his friend said in sympathy. ‘But it’s only once a year, isn’t it? That’s how I think about it, anyway.’ I recognised this sentiment. It’s hard sometimes, but you do it anyway. You suffer for your art. The boozehound’s lament.

Many a hard-drinking Viking will have lived and died by just this credo, and their Shetlandic descendants fly the flag of their legacy proudly, not to mention literally – a vermillion banner, printed with the black raven silhouette of the Old Norse kings, flapped above our heads in the cold wind. It was barely eight o’clock in the morning, but the sunrise had yet to announce the new day, and high in the raw January sky the wolf moon shone bright as a coin. A couple of fireworks thundered above. An old man standing next to me jumped out of his skin. ‘Ye bastard!’ he exclaimed, holding a hand to his heart.

I was standing in a modest crowd of spectators who had dragged themselves out of bed to witness the opening procession of Up Helly Aa, the fire festival which marks the end of winter in the Shetland Islands. The object of our attention – a set of corrugated iron doors on the front of a large shed – clanked and screeched open, revealing a great beast with eyes of fire and a belly of iceberg blue; it groaned forwards on tractor tracks, its vast weight heaved on ropes by a team of struggling young men, looking Lilliputian next to their towering cargo. This was the big reveal of the galley, a Viking longship which is built each year by a team of volunteers only to be ritualistically burnt in the ceremony which would form the festival’s centrepiece later that evening.

As the galley creaked into the cold dawn, I got talking to Lyall Gair, a big man with long hair tied back in a black headband and a brown, bushy beard, patched with white. ‘The Scandinavian spirit is strong here – I feel Scottish by birth, but Viking by blood,’ he said. ‘Up Helly Aa is massive for the community of Lerwick. It’s the biggest event of our year.’ Hogmanay, Christmas and New Year’s Eve, he said, pale in comparison. ‘We’ll have a dram, but that’s about it.’ Far more than a dram, I was about to discover, heralds the passing of Up Helly Aa, the Shetlandic ritual of renewal.

The galley building starts each October, Lyall said, and is carried out by volunteers who give up their evenings and weekends to lay down blueprints, gather materials, cut wood, and carry out the assembly and painting. All that monumental effort, only to see it all go up in flames at the end of January. Similar ritual sacrifices are carried out at festivals across the world: the Zozobra of Santa Fe, New Mexico, which culminates with an effigy of Zozobra, a personification of distress and anxiety, being set ablaze; and the Festa della Bruna in Matera, Italy, in which an elaborate and expensive festival float is ripped to shreds by frenzied townsfolk. It reminded me of the sand mandala, the Tibetan Buddhist practice of painstakingly creating cosmological artworks from coloured sand only to ritualistically destroy them as a symbol of transience and rebirth. I suggested that the burning of the galley represents renewal for the year ahead, and Lyall agreed – but a listening local suggested another, more prosaic motivation. ‘There’s fuck all else to do around here all winter,’ he said, chuckling and blowing some warmth into his cold, cupped hands.

The galley was dragged up to the road, which bore the name Saint Sunniva Street – Sunniva being the patron saint of Western Norway. Many of the street names in Lerwick have a similarly Scandinavian ring; 96% of all the place names in Shetland, in fact, are derived from Old Norse. From around the corner, along King Haakon Street, came the rattling and jabbering of a marauding Viking mob. This was the Jarl Squad, the chosen few who would lead today’s festivities. There were four dozen of them, wearing grey tunics and studded leather breastplates, pinned at the shoulder with turquoise cloaks. Their heads were crowned with round helmets. They carried painted wooden shields in one hand, and in the other they brandished axes inlaid with tendrilled, foliate patterns, which they thrust to the heavens with throaty cries of ‘Eh!’ and ‘Oggy Oggy Oggy!’

At the head of the procession was this year’s chief Viking (known as the Guizer Jarl), Richard Moar, a man whose beard alone was enough to qualify him for the role: down to his sternum, almost as wide as it was long; mostly white with a coal-black heart. His outfit differentiated him from the rest: he wore a helmet crowned with large black wings, a cloak of rich burgundy, and fish-like scale armour which glinted in the nascent dawn. Each year, the Guizer Jarl chooses to represent a different historical Viking. Richard Moar chose Haraldr Óláfsson, thirteenth-century King of Mann and the Isles, who died in a shipwreck in the Sumburgh Roost south of Shetland on the way home from his wedding in Norway. When Lyall himself served as Guizer Jarl in 2017, his outfit was modelled after Sweyn Forkbeard Haraldsson, who ruled (for five weeks) as the first Viking King of England in 1014 AD. It’s fair to say that the Guizer Jarl’s whole life leads up to this moment – they are elected fifteen years in advance by the Up Helly Aa Committee, a revolving board of seventeen volunteers, and spend the intervening years working their way up through a ladder of supporting roles within the Up Helly Aa structure. This year’s new electee, a 33-year-old photographer called Scott Goudie, will be taking the reins in 2039.

Most of the procession, physically speaking, were in a similar mould to their leader – large men with fearsome beards. But there was a handful of fairer faces among their number this year, too. For the first time in history, women and girls were being allowed to join the Jarl Squad. Viking culture was taking its first baby steps into the twenty-first century.

In reality, there is nothing authentically Viking about Up Helly Aa. Historians believe that it originated in the mid-1800s, after Shetland’s soldiering and seafaring men returned home from the wreckage of the Napoleonic Wars with wild, staring eyes, a newfound aptitude for pyrotechnics, and an appetite to party. They initially channelled this energy into tar barrelling, celebrating each ‘Old Christmas’ (Twelfth Night – traditionally celebrated on 1 January in Scotland) by lashing wooden barrels together, soaking them in tar, and setting them ablaze.2 They would then parade them through town all night and the following day, while indulging in what a visiting missionary – who can always be relied upon to provide timorous, goggle-eyed accounts of native festivities – described as ‘the blowing of horns, beating of drums, tinkling of old tin kettles, firing of guns, shouting, bawling, fiddling, fifeing, drinking, fighting … the whole town was in an uproar.’

Lerwick’s chattering classes found all this boisterousness distinctly unsavoury, so around the year 1870 a group of intellectuals got together and proposed remodelling the festival as a celebration of Shetland’s Nordic heritage. These islands were part of the Kingdom of Denmark until 1472, when they were gifted by King Christian I as part of a dowry for the marriage of his daughter, Margaret, to King James III of Scotland. The Nordic influence abides not only in the place names, but in the wider Shaetlan language – filsket, meaning high-spirited or frisky, is one Norse-sounding local word which could appropriately be applied to Up Helly Aa. Then there’s the folk music, which is dominated by the Norwegian-style fiddle rather than the Scottish bagpipes, and the folklore, which tells tales of sprites called trows, equivalent to Scandinavian trolls, who are said to have taught the islanders their tunes by whispering into their ears. Finally, and most verifiably, the Nordic influence on Shetlanders is evident in their DNA, with a 2019 study finding the population to be around 20% Scandinavian in their genetic makeup.3

The reformers could not have completely removed the pyromaniac element from Up Helly Aa – that would have been unthinkable – so they refocused it into a torchlit procession, and later the burning of a Viking longship, which would be built and set ablaze every winter as a symbol of renewal for the year ahead and of the driving away of the winter darkness by the return of warmth and light. The masks, which provided opportunities for anonymous violence and other troublemaking, were replaced by Viking costumes, and the rival ‘squads’ of tar barrellers who once brawled in the streets eventually evolved into the entertainment squads of the modern festival, who tour venues across town throughout the night’s celebrations, staging comedy and dance routines and generally making mischief.

The Lerwick event was the original Up Helly Aa, but nowadays it is just the biggest in a series of twelve fire festivals which take place across the towns and islands of the Shetlands between January and mid-March. ‘If you get really into it and go to all twelve festivals, you can get a bit swept away by it all,’ Lyall had told me, with the air of lived experience. At some of them, the galleys are pushed out to sea once they have been set alight, but at the Lerwick event the inferno is raised in the centre of town, in a children’s playpark – a concession to marine conservation, perhaps, or, in a rare sign of the influence of mainland Scotland, a blazing expression of Calvinist rage towards the very concept of children having fun.4

As a general rule, however, Up Helly Aa is anything but puritanical. I followed the procession as it joined up with the galley and made its merry march through the streets of the town, which had been closed off to traffic for the day. I and the rest of the watching crowd followed the procession into the Toll Clock shopping centre, where this horde of lusty Vikings was suddenly surrounded by shopfronts selling postcards and mugs, and decorative wooden boards saying things like ‘Coffee is my morning wine!’ and ‘I don’t need a man, I need a bikini and a tan!’

The Jarl Squad stood marching on the spot, their armour clanking a metallic rhythm, and broke into song:

In distant lands, their raven-flag flew like a blazing star;

And foreign foemen, trembling, heard their battle-cry afar;

And they thundered o’er the quaking earth, those mighty men of war;

The waves are rolling on.5

They finished the song to rapturous applause and came down like wolves upon rows of makeshift tables which were heaving with the weight of bottles of beer, wine and whisky; they helped themselves greedily, as did any stewards and spectators within arm’s reach. A large black dog, which had been barking madly throughout the singing, tore from its owner’s grasp and knocked out the leg of one of the tables, sending bottles crashing to the ground in a roiling wave of foam and green glass. It was quarter to nine in the morning.

An appetite for chaos is characteristic of the festival world, and the turning of the year seems as good a time as any to descend into madness. Thailand celebrates Songkran (held on 13 April) with nationwide water fights to represent ritual cleansing ahead of the turning of the lunar year. The party lasts a week, and during this heightened time, arrests for public indecency skyrocket, traffic accidents soar on the slick roads, and many participants find themselves beginning the new year by getting well acquainted with the toilet bowl, the cumulative effect of gallons of alcohol curdling with accidentally imbibed Bangkok khlong water. The Danes, for their part, come over all Greek on New Year’s Eve, smashing unwanted plates and mugs against their neighbours’ front doors. Neapolitans, meanwhile, let go of the cares of the old year by hurling unwanted crockery, furniture and even household appliances off their balconies into the street below.

This kind of thing has a long and distinguished history. In medieval Europe, members of the clergy, no less, would engage each 1 January in a bacchanalian rite known as the Feast of Fools, which saw the Church hierarchy subverted as a peasant or minor cleric assumed the title of Lord of Misrule (known in Scotland, rather brilliantly, as the Abbot of Unreason). They would oversee a series of festivities described, in a condemnatory letter from the Theological Faculty of Paris in 1445, as follows:

Priests and clerks may be seen wearing masks and monstrous visages at the hours of office. They dance in the choir dressed as women, panders or minstrels. They sing wanton songs. They eat black puddings at the horn of the altar while the celebrant is saying mass. They play at dice there. They cense with stinking smoke from the soles of old shoes. They run and leap through the church, without a blush at their own shame. Finally they drive about the town and its theatres in shabby traps and carts; and rouse the laughter of their fellows and the bystanders in infamous performances with indecent gestures and verses scurrilous and unchaste.6

The British are particularly good at marking the turn of the year in eccentric and eye-catching ways. A few weeks before my trip to Shetland, I had travelled to the Welsh border town of Chepstow, which was marking the new year with its annual Mari Lwyd celebration. This strange ritual exhibits the very best qualities of British cultural tradition: obscure origins, baffling practices, and a healthy dose of folk horror. It goes like this. A horse’s skull is decorated: festooned with ribbons, crowned with a mane of flowers and ivy, its eye sockets stuffed with baubles, bike lights, or something similarly round and colourful. It is then affixed to a pole, covered by a bedsheet, and worn as a costume by an individual who, traditionally, would go from door to door at sundown, accompanied by a group of men, begging for food and drink. This would play out in the form of a kind of prototypical rap battle, with the horse demanding entry to the house through the medium of poetry; the householder would then respond with a verse of their own, explaining why they couldn’t let them in. This would continue until one of the parties could think of no further riposte. If that was the horse, they would move on to the next house; but if it was the householder left speechless, that was the horse’s cue to charge inside the premises, eat and drink everything in sight, terrorise children and the elderly, and generally cause chaos.

‘They tend not to go door-to-door anymore, though,’ a woman called Yvette told me in Chepstow’s Three Tuns pub on the morning of the event. ‘They’d probably get thumped.’ Instead, she said, Mari Lwyds make a ceremonial visit to the door of Chepstow Castle, before facing off in a ritualised Welsh–English border ceremony on the town bridge. Each Mari is accompanied by a squad of Morris dancers, who give performances at locations across town throughout the day while their associated horse-demon torments the gathered crowd.

Yvette was a member of one such Morris squad, known as the Widders. She was wearing a black outfit covered in rags of purple, crowned with a black top hat, and had a large purple handprint painted on her face, obscuring her features. Her fellow Widders, who had packed out the pub on this weekday morning, were dressed similarly, some having chosen to accessorise with steampunk goggles or gothic capes; one man wore a T-shirt emblazoned with an inverted cross. They looked halfway between Morris dancers and Hells Angels, which is no surprise, considering they were formed by a biker gang at the GuilFest music festival in 2001.

The Widders’ rags are a common element in costumes related to traditions of guising, the practice of going door-to-door asking for food – a kind of ritualised begging also seen at Halloween and Día de los Muertos. ‘Begging was illegal in the past, so the costumes originated as a way of people hiding their identity,’ Yvette said. The origins of the Mari Lwyd itself, though, are far harder to pinpoint. Although its chaotic atmosphere, skeletal equine aspect, and history of being suppressed by the Christian authorities give it a decidedly paganistic feel, the earliest mention of it dates to as recently as 1800.

‘The Mari Lwyd is just weird,’ Yvette said, with some understatement. ‘I think it means Grey Mare – like the pale horse from Celtic mythology. But it was probably just drunk Welsh people who found it hilarious; a rapping horse coming into your house and drinking your beer.’ The association with Morris dancing is even more recent, probably arising in the Victorian era, and equally difficult to ascribe. ‘Morris dancers tend to just go where the beer is,’ Yvette explained cheerfully.

A poster in the pub window depicted the head of a Mari Lwyd, grinning broadly, with the slightly threatening exhortation: You’re cold. She’s cold. LET HER IN. There is something vaguely lascivious about the Mari Lwyd. They are physically imposing, for one thing – usually commandeered by men, who hold the huge horse’s skull above their own head height, swooping and snapping its jaws in the faces of innocent bystanders – and with their white lacy veils, their hideous decomposed grins, their tinsel and their baubles and their ivy, they resemble an equine corpse bride reanimated for one night only to barrel through Wales in pursuit of a partner, willing or otherwise, for their weird wedding night. Or maybe that’s just my imagination.

After their chaotic procession through the Toll Clock shopping centre, the Jarl Squad were diverted for the next few hours – first by a civic reception in the Town Hall, then by an afternoon spent touring local schools and hospitals. With some time to explore, I walked through the streets of Lerwick, where it was clear that the Scandinavian influence on Shetland extends to the architecture. Sitting brightly amid the buildings of grubby, darkened limestone were colourful, Nordic-looking houses, built from timber or corrugated iron and painted fire-engine red or ultramarine blue. The whole scene brought to mind a cross between Reykjavík and Glossop.

The wind had picked up significantly. I collected my rental car and embarked on a wobbling, weatherbeaten drive to my hotel in the village of Veensgarth (‘Old Norse: Vikingsgarðr, Viking’s Farm’, the road sign informed me). The wind was blowing so hard there were waves on the loch at Tingwall, the site of Shetland’s first parliament. On the road, the gale was pushing puddles uphill; in the fields, Shetland ponies hid behind hay bales, bracing their stocky frames against the wind, their manes whipped into gravity-defying mohicans.

That afternoon, I had arranged a meeting with Jolene Garriock, a tour guide originally from the west side of Shetland who now lives in the Tingwall Valley, not far from where I was staying. I met Jolene in a seafront café called Fjarå, the name itself a nod to the Nordics – ‘fjara’ is Icelandic for beach.

‘People come to Shetland expecting to find tartan and kilts, but what they find is Fair Isle knitwear and Vikings,’ Jolene said. She herself was wearing a dark blue Fair Isle jumper, a style named for the southernmost Shetland island. Around its neck was a band of geometric patterns – zig-zags, crosses and diamonds in red, white and green – virtually identical, to my untrained eye at least, to the traditional knitwear of Iceland or Norway. ‘We’ve only belonged to Scotland for just over 500 years; clan culture never made it here, and we weren’t involved with the Jacobite Rising,’ Jolene said. ‘To this day, in Shetland you’re more likely to put your flag up on the 17th of May for Norwegian national day than you are for St. Andrew’s.’

Much of this is down to geography; Shetland has long served as a crossroads for the culture and trade of northern Europe, sitting in between Britain, Norway, Denmark, America, Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands. Certainly, it feels far away from Scotland – Jolene told me that when she was studying at university in Edinburgh, she met many mainlanders who couldn’t place Shetland on a map or even seemed unaware that it was an offshore archipelago. ‘One girl asked me if my boyfriend had seen me off at the train station when I came down for the new term,’ she said, with a roll of her eyes. ‘Ultimately, though, Shetland has a mixed culture. We don’t identify with Scotland, but we don’t quite identify as Scandinavian, either. We’re our own thing.’

Jolene echoed Lyall’s comments to me from earlier that morning, that Up Helly Aa was the biggest event in Shetland’s calendar. ‘Hogmanay’s dying in Shetland; nobody makes an effort for that anymore. Christmas is still big, although religion’s on the decline. But it’s the same across most of the UK – Christmas has grown arms and legs and become its own thing. Most kids start off celebrating it without knowing why or where it came from.’

The most prominent festivals in the calendar are often so entrenched that most of us take them for granted; they come and go without us stopping to consider their origins, or why we celebrate them. In its celebration of the return of light and warmth amid the darkness of winter, Up Helly Aa reflects some of the same perennial festival themes as Christmas, and the pre-Christian celebrations of Yule which preceded it. But these motivations seem more explicit in modern festivals like Up Helly Aa, which allow us to see more clearly that although their manifestations may change, there are underlying motivations running through human festivity, across cultures and throughout the ages, like veins of ore.

Evening drew a veil over the short day. Crowds had begun to pack out the roads – around 5,000 people, according to official estimates – and all around me was a cosmopolitan chorus, with accents from England, Italy, America, even Australia interspersing the lilting Shetlandic chatter which emanated from most of the crowd. The streetlights had all been extinguished, to better allow the procession’s torchlight and the blazing galley to illuminate the dark night. A flare blazed a molten trail through the evening sky, heralding the start of the procession down King Harald Street. Just like the Vikings of old, you smelt them before you saw them – but this time it was not the odour of rotten seal blubber and mead breath, but the bittersweet smell of kerosene, blown from their torches on the northern wind. There were some 900 torchbearers in the procession; at the front were the Jarl Squad, still in full voice, still crying ‘Eeeehhh!’ and ‘Oggy Oggy Oggy!’, the cumulative effect of the day’s libations beginning to show itself in red eyes, slurred words, and sloppy grins. Behind them, making up most of the procession, were members of the 47 other squads who would be providing the evening’s entertainments. They were already bringing an atmosphere of misrule to proceedings, many of them in drag, wearing French maids’ or nuns’ outfits complete with huge fake breasts. One man was dressed as a can of Tennent’s lager; everyone around him was drinking it, too, holding beers in one hand while their torches hung, often a little laxly, in the other, sparks flying off them into the faces of the assembled crowd, who were arrayed right up along the side of the road without any barriers to keep them out of harm’s way. One torchbearer started flapping about – his red, bushy beard had caught light from a wandering spark. His neighbour pointed and laughed, poured a full can of beer over him, and the march went on without missing a step.

At the centre of it all was the galley, being pulled along on a truck bed like a carnival float. After a lap of the town centre, the procession entered the playpark, pulling the galley in their wake. It was manoeuvred into the centre of the field and doused in paraffin. The sound of bagpipes, fiddles and drums rose as a band struck up a tune, and the 900 torchbearers of the procession, beginning with the Jarl Squad, approached the galley in turn and hurled their torches into its belly. A small fire flared in the centre of the boat around the heap of criss-crossed torches, which grew and grew until after fifteen minutes or so the blaze reached some kind of terminal velocity, eliciting gasps of excitement from the watching crowd as the dragon’s head and tail were swallowed by flames.

The wind was bitterly cold, but it was a double-edged sword – on its icy back were carried currents of warm bonfire air, as well as showers of sparks, which we in the crowd turned our faces away from in unison. Parents stood with young children on their shoulders, asking them, ‘Can you see it? Has the head gone yet? What about the flag?’ – and right on cue, the flames climbed higher up the mainmast, and the flapping flag, whose raven markings had been silhouetted against the background of smoke and firelight, was gathered into the blaze; at the same time there was a great crack as the dragon’s neck gave way, and the head and the mast collapsed inwards together into the belly of the beast. The crowd applauded and began to dissipate – it was growing colder, and they had places to be, with the promise of drink and dancing, soup and sandwiches, and long hours of revelry.

After the burning of the galley is complete, Up Helly Aa moves into twelve venues across town, known as halls, for an all-night jamboree. Shetlanders like a party, or a foy, to use the Shaetlan word, which originated as a term for a feast held by a boat’s crew when the fishing season was over. The halls are organised and paid for by the community, and take place mainly in repurposed community venues, like primary schools and leisure centres. Tickets are like gold dust, particularly those which grant entry to the most hallowed and glamorous of the events, which is held in Lerwick’s stately Town Hall. I had been badgering every local I met to try and find me a ticket, and had been directed through several different channels to an enigmatic woman named Deborah who was involved with the Town Hall event. She was very responsive to my enquiries, and kindly offered to help me find a ticket, although her messages, infused with Shaetlan words, betrayed a consistent and curious fixation.

‘Will ask Dave about ticket da night ... plenty sandwiches to make today’ read one; ‘Think av got dee a ticket ... 60 sandwiches made this morning already!’ read another. She seemed to be a woman overcome by a mania for making sandwiches, but she still found the time to do me a favour, and before I had taken my place in the crowd to watch the galley burning, I had followed Deborah’s instructions to visit Harry’s Department Store, down on Lerwick’s waterfront, where a hall ticket – a Town Hall ticket, no less – had been reserved in my name for the princely sum of £40 (cash).

Clutching my ticket, I hurried through the chill towards the Town Hall, where a warm, glowing halo-light shrouded the heavy wooden door. I checked in my coat and bag of cans (the halls are a bring-your-own-booze affair) and climbed the stone stairs into the main hall, where rows of chairs had been lined up on either side of the room. It felt like being inside an upturned galley; the ceiling was huge and vaulted, panelled in wood, and the oak floor was so well-polished that it cast back blurred impressions of everything above it. Reflected most prominently were the Town Hall’s glorious stained-glass windows, which told in vibrant technicolour of Shetland’s Nordic past: there was Magnus Erlendsson, ruler of the islands in the twelfth century, and Harald Hardrada, who a hundred years before had invaded England and died in spurious glory at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, an arrow in his throat, apparently armour-less and consumed by the sound and fury of the berserkergang, the frantic rage-trance which propelled the most potent Norse warriors.

There were more than a few berserkers in attendance tonight, too, forged in the crucible of the day’s long hours of festivity. I saw a scuffle break out in the queue for the cloakroom, where two behelmeted warriors almost came to blows as they wrestled for ownership of a box of cheap wine. Lots of people were engaging in the kind of enthusiastic slanging match which is ostensibly banterous, but unmistakably pregnant with the potential for violence. Most of the energy, though, was channelled into cheerful shouting, full-throated singing, and, in particular, the dancing of spirited jigs on the polished floor. The alcoholic sloppiness which was blurring everybody’s speech and movements seemed to vanish as soon as they stepped onto the dancefloor, where they exhibited the nimble grace of penguins entering the water; they spun in pairs and then in a wider figure-of-eight as they swapped partners, elegantly playing out moves which Shetlanders learn from their first years of primary school.

Setting the tempo, on a stage at the end of the room, was the band: two fiddlers, a drummer, and a tiny, perfectly round accordionist, who seemed engaged in a Sisyphean struggle against his huge-looking instrument, crushed beneath it like an overzealous bench-presser – but his fingers never stopped playing, as he rocked back and forth in the blue, sacral glow being cast from the stained-glass window above his head.

The whole ensemble seemed themselves to be seized by the berserker spirit, fingers moving at a million miles an hour, jerking in an epileptic dance, propelled by the fear of it all coming to an end. ‘This one’s a sleep-fighter!’ roared one of the fiddlers as he introduced a new reel to howls of approval from the baying crowd. At one point a guest accordionist was welcomed onto the stage, with the introduction, ‘Please welcome, all the way from Arbroath, Wayne Robertson!’ An elderly woman in the seat behind me turned to her neighbour and said, ‘Arbroath! Fancy that.’

For the most part it was wholesome, but people-watching revealed glimpses of lechery – young men were asking girls to dance and then, after repeated rejections, trying to drag them by their arms to the dancefloor; others, who had found a partner, were leaning in, mid-jig, for uninvited kisses. This year’s festival had been the first in which women and girls were allowed to be members of the Jarl Squad, while the previous year had been the first in which they were allowed to participate as members of the other squads, which take part in the procession and tour the halls at night giving performances. Prior to that, women had been limited to contributing as organisers and hostesses, stitching uniforms, and preparing and serving Himalayan mountains of sandwiches. In 2019, then-Member of the Scottish Parliament for the Highlands and Islands, Maree Todd, claimed that the exclusion of girls and women from the proceedings was ‘harmful’ and ‘indefensible’. Even now that women were allowed to be involved, I saw hardly any in the squads apart from the daughter and three nieces of Guizer Jarl Richard Moar, who had been accompanying him in the main procession.

Far more common were men in drag, a team of whom entered the hall now, to widespread applause – the French maids I had seen in the torchlit procession earlier. This was the first of the evening’s entertainment squads, 47 of which would be gracing us with their presence over the next twelve hours or so, as they made their merry way around all twelve of the halls across town. There were around a dozen maids in this squad, and just as many others who were dressed as insects, in horrible beige skinsuits with fabric feelers wobbling out of their heads. The dancefloor cleared, and a stage set was hurriedly assembled: a couple of camp beds, and a whiteboard hung with a picture of the Eiffel Tower. The squads go round the halls performing skits, some of which are satirical in nature – this one was a send-up of the bedbug epidemic which was then ravaging the hotel rooms of Paris. The bugs lay down on skateboards and pushed themselves at speed around the dancefloor, grasping at the legs of spectators in the front row, while the maids followed them in hot pursuit, cackling wildly and pushing at them with brooms, like a deranged match of hurling imagined by William Burroughs. The crowd roared with laughter.

References to death and disease fly particularly well with festival crowds. The plague doctor mask has been a fixture of Venice Carnival for centuries, Halloween revels in imagery of skeletons, zombies, and rotting flesh, and the ghost festivals of East Asia have turned folk tales about the afterlife into a whole genre of festivity. A general state of frenzied hedonism has permeated nearly every festival I have attended in the years after the Covid-19 pandemic, since which festivity has returned with a fresh urgency, here to restore vitality in the face of pestilence and death. The festival spirit is half memento mori, half wild celebration of life – which, after all, are two sides of the same coin.

As I was pondering this fact, minding my own business, I felt someone’s gaze burning a hole into me. A large Viking had taken up residence in the seat next to mine, and, in between grunts and dribbles, had asked me that simple question which, in circumstances such as these, can feel spiked with threat: ‘Where you from?’

I told him.

‘Hmm,’ he grunted, and nodded, as if this was a piece of information which explained everything. ‘You look English.’ He meant this as an insult. His breath smelled of mutton and onions, and the legacy of an egg and cress sandwich bobbed on the hairs of his beard like dewdrops on wild grass.

This did not stoke my appetite, but I needed a reason to leave, so I left the boor raving to himself and headed downstairs to the dining hall, where I realised for the first time why Deborah had been so preoccupied by her task of food preparation. Tables groaned under the weight of sandwiches, rolls, baps and barms – hundreds, if not thousands, of them – while great vats bubbled and popped with gallons of steaming tatty soup, a hearty pottage made with onions, potatoes, and swede. To accompany the soup were servings of Shetland’s national dish, reestit mutton – the meat of older sheep which is salted for several weeks and hung up to dry until it’s so impenetrably stiff you’d need a diamond drill to bore through it. I took a portion and gnawed on a corner, almost cracking a tooth in the process. ‘That’s how you know it’s the good stuff,’ said a proud local standing next to me. ‘So hard you could hammer a nail into it.’

I stopped by the cloakroom to pick up another can from my bag before heading back upstairs to watch some more of the squad performances. They weren’t all as searingly political as the Parisian bedbug satire; some of the squads phoned it in a bit and just danced to an ABBA medley in light-up shoes or did a jig to Darude’s ‘Sandstorm’ while dressed in Braveheart costumes. Other skits lampooned local current affairs in ways which went over my head – one of them, featuring men dressed as trees who fell to the earth to be replaced by tall, white figures with spinning propellers on their hats, seemed to be protesting the Viking Wind Farm, a huge onshore energy project which was currently under construction on Shetland’s main island.

The Jarl Squad swung in around 4am, holding it together with varying degrees of success, although it was admirable they were still standing at all. Some were basically non-verbal by this point; others were vaguely vocalising the same tunes they had been singing earlier, but the lyrics had by now degenerated into wordless syllables which dribbled spittle onto their Viking beards. The flesh was willing, but the spirit had deserted them; the energy levels were as high as ever, but with red eyes and frothing mouths, feet marching on autopilot, and winged helmets all skew-whiff, they resembled a crew of lobotomy patients set loose in a fancy dress shop. The torches were lit, but no one was home. They would be continuing in this vein until 9am.

One of the squads was a group of men dressed as Wombles, who bowled in wearing expensive-looking costumes to the tune of ‘The Wombling Song’. All very wholesome, you might think, except that by this time the long day and night were beginning to take their toll, and the Wombles, alcoholically incapable of sticking to their rehearsed dance moves, were careening about the hall like Mr Blobby-style agents of chaos, stumbling into seats and knocking plates of sandwiches out of people’s hands, slipping arse over tit on spilt drinks on the polished floor. The soundtrack assumed a horrific quality – lyrical snippets about litter-picking and wombling free, crackling through the PA amid the screams of disturbed spectators. A Womble bowled past me; through the costume’s mesh face covering, I caught a glimpse of its wearer’s eyes, rolling back in his head.

The party had hours left to run, but I sensed that it was time for me to leave. I took my coat from the cloakroom and nodded a goodnight to the doorman, who could scarcely conceal his disgust that someone would want to leave the party after barely eleven hours. I walked back to my hotel. Sunrise was still hours off; my breath blew fluffy clouds into the dark morning air. The streets were mostly deserted, but I saw the odd wandering soul, lost on their way home or in vain pursuit of something to eat – a woman was slapping on the darkened window of the Happy Haddock fish and chip shop, screaming, ‘Let me in! Or I’ll shove a catfish up your arse!’

I walked along the waterfront. Just ahead of me, amid the blackness, moved a large shape, struggling to support itself against a lamppost. I walked a little closer, squinted, and realised it was a Womble – was that their wise old patriarch, Uncle Bulgaria, grappling with his costume’s front zip? I wasn’t sure; I looked away. There are certain events which signal the unequivocal death of childhood, and the irredeemable loss of innocence; seeing Uncle Bulgaria with sick in his beard, relieving himself against a lamppost, would doubtless be one of them.

In its symbolism of fire and ash, its marking of the end of winter and the return of warmth and light, and its frenzied, hedonistic desire to rip things up and start again, Up Helly Aa is an exemplar of a genre: the festivals of rebirth. In the western world, we resolve to be fitter, stronger, and kinder each 1 January, telling ourselves that the turning over of the year is a moment potent enough to kickstart in our bodies and souls some profound process of insect metamorphosis. The bars are quiet, and the gyms are packed – for a week or two, anyway.