Strange tales from Scotland’s thin places...with Thomas MacCalman Morton

An Up Helly Aa souvenir

The Shetland events called Up Helly Aa, usually translated from the old Norse as The Lightening of the Year, are part of a fire festival season in both Scotland and England marking the moment, deep in winter’s heart, when the days begin once more to lengthen, when the darkness starts its annual retreat.

Members of the Jarl’s squad at Uyeasound Up Helly Aa

Photo by Mike Pennington CC BY-SA 2.0

I say events, as there are a dozen Up Helly Aas which take place in communities throughout Scotland’s northernmost isles. The biggest, which is held in Lerwick, the islands’ capital, attracts most worldwide attention, and has up to a thousand all male participants, divided into 47 themed squads of guizers. Only one squad, the chief or Jarl squad, led by the Guizer Jarl, is permitted to dress as vikings, and their costumes are often spectacular and expensive.

Lerwick is alone of the various Up Helly Aas in not permitting women to be members of a squad, march in the procession, carry flaming torches,and finally set fire to full sized viking longship. Spirals of men circle the great, doomed viking galley, always circling to the sun, never anticlockwise, or widdershins as it’s called, and a bringer of bad fortune.

Women cannot participate in this or indeed the later hall dances as anything save partners, dishwashers, hostesses and preparers of food. Some women have, very forcibly objected to this, and it’s only fair to say that some others have with equal commitment, pronounced themselves happy with the situation.

Some of the Jarl's Squad at Norvik Up Helly Aa

Photo by Mike Pennington CC BY-SA 2.0

There are Up Helly Aas in places such as Unst, Northmavine, Nesting, Brae and Scalloway, and second only to Lerwick, in the South Mainland of Shetland, where a woman has been Jarl and which threatens, with its spectacular burnings of the galley at sea, to eclipse the rather more sedate Lerwick, where the longship is consumed by flame in the safe confines of a town playpark.

Up Helly Aa is generally thought to have evolved from the rather more chaotic habit of burning tar barrels in Lerwick as a winter outlet for youthful aggression, though recordings of elderly folk made in 1950s and 60s indicate much older rituals under the same name, as basic as carrying a lighted peat from house to house. It became associated with a romantic view of vikings in the 19th Century and has taken place continuously, with all its Norse trappings, ever since, apart from a suspension during the Second World War.

There was another Up Helly Aa festival, a lost burning, one which was never revived after World War Two, and it took place in a remote and now depopulated part of the western mainland of Shetland. I will call it Virdablutt.

If you go to Virdablutt now, and it’s hard to get to, with only an unmaintained track over some sizable hills and across a tidal causeway, there is little to see but the remains of two or three ruined and roofless crofthouses, one prettily sited in a lovely bay, with a shingle beach stretched in a crescent before it, facing out west to the Atlantic. A beautiful place to watch the sunset. It’s the kind of house you would imagine might have been restored, even as just a holiday home. But noone has. Not even the salmon and mussel farmers have descended on this...I was going to say unspoilt spot. But unspoilt is perhaps not quite the right word.

Virdablutt was all about fishing the far haaf, where groups of men would row six-oared, square sailed boats, sixareens, far out 40 miles to sea in search of fish, especially ling. It thrived for many years, it seemed. And then it failed, as many of Shetland’s fishing communities did, dependent as they were on a risky and fragile form of economy.

The late 18th century kirk lacks a roof now and is crumbling, but is famous for the carvings on ancient, heavily worked stones in its sheltered eastern wall which indicate that it is was built on something much older. The Virdablutt carvings are the reason a number of tourists make the difficult trek there every year, partly for the sheela nan gigs, the only examples in the isles of these giant female fertility symbols, perhaps best known for their embarrassed presence at Rodel in Harris.

These are hugely important, the only examples of these sexualised female caricatures in the isles. But it’s the other carving that interest me more. It shows something which indicates Up Helly Aa’s origins could lie not in the drunken antics of rowdy Lerwick tradesmen, or even in the simple illumination of winter darkened townships, but in the desolation of Virdablutt. In a more sinister ceremony.

My attempts to research Virdablutt at the excellent Shetland Museum and Archives proved frustrating. There are, strangely, few references to what had been after all, at one point an entire parish of Shetland, and, with the fishing, an important one. It had been nominally under the ownership of the Busta estate but a succession of landlords seem to have largely ignored it, taking their minimal crofting rents and presumably the usual punitive share of the fishing income, and doing little if anything in return. There are some references to World War Two and the forced removal of the population for military reasons, but no references to what actually happened there. I did wonder about the kind of germ warfare experiments which took place at Gruinard on the west coast of Scotland, but no post war documentary evidence of this appears to exist. Church of Scotland Presbytery records did indicate, however, that the kirk as such - had been closed “ due to evacuation” in 1939, and there are various red-faced references to the sexual archaeology and “symbols pertaining to fishing rituals, aimed at securing the benificience of nature”.

On my own single trip to Virdablutt I found where in a higher form of church there would have been an altar. There was a broken stone cross, with some withered flowers placed next it, protected from sheep, wind and rain by one of those glass domes you see in cemeteries.

Procession at Uyeasound Up Helly Aa

Photo by Mike Pennington CC BY-SA 2.0

It took a search through the Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae, the Church of Scotland’s vast and sometimes damning history of each and every minister who has been called to it, to reveal something of what had happened at Virdablutt. And even then, the ministers who served it, from the 16th century on, did not spend much time visiting the place, based as they were in the much more thriving and rewarding community of Waas, over the pass and across the causeway.

There were references, though, to ‘rumours of exceedingly sinful and dark activities’ concerning the Virdablutt folk, - about 350 of them according to one census from 1762. And there was a Rev Peter Christopher Oswaldson from the early 1820s who left his charge in Waas for a presumably less demanding one in Fife, but not without a final sermon “noted by many for its condemnatory tone as to the infamous boat burning rituals of Virdablutt.” Further back, one minister referred to ‘The Virdablutt conflagration’ and how he had banned any of his congregation from attendance or observation. “To no avail, as they are steeped in the damnable consequences of their superstition.”

This ritual, clearly much much older than any of the modern Up Helly Aas, is illustrated in the carving on the kirk’s eastern wall: A boat, crudely rendered, with what appear to be flames surrounding it. The boat is resting on a prone, plainly human figure.

My researches took me, eventually to Professor Sigurd Hakonsson at the University of Oslo. In Edinburgh for a conference, I spent a fascinating afternoon with him. He was familiar with Virdablutt, and indeed had visited during one of his many trips to Shetland. The prefix ‘VI’ was significant, he said, in viking archaeology, meanning the place of a shrine. And then he told about the viking concept of blot, or blood sacrifice.

Aimed at appeasing the gods, notably Odin, these rituals saw animals killed and often burnt. As the raiding and exploration parties began to move westward, these sacrifices became functional aspects of setting out to sea, and were part of a blessing for the boat carrying them on their latest adventure.

“The blot, according to our excavations from Norway and Denmark as far as Newfoundland and mainland Canada, developed and became quite specific” professor Hakonsson told me. “The availability of conquered or enslaved communities meant several people could be slaughtered in its name for the gods. But thought to be more effective was the death of a young woman.”

Lerwick Up Helly Aa Galley Burning

Roy Mullay CC BY 4.0

I was dumbfounded. If this was so, it meant that the colourful and largely innocent tradition of Up Helly Aa was based on human, and indeed female sacrifice. But then the Professor said something which shocked me even more.

“Our researchers in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland discovered that some, but not all of the fishing communities there practised a symbolic form of ‘blot’ until comparatively recently. Just before World War Two, in fact, when it appears to have been stopped by the authorities. As I say, symbolic of course, these things are always about symbols. But the burning of an old fishing boat with a kind of puppet or life size doll beneath it on the fire was common. And there was a young girl elected, every year to be the queen of the festival. The Blood Queen, they called her, apparently. Very Freudian.”

The Professor had to leave. We parted on good terms, but not before he shook my hand and said oddly enough, that of course there was no archaeological evidence that Virdablutt had ever been the site of such blood sacrifices. ‘Symbolic,’ he said, ‘or otherwise.’ and he added: ‘Take care. The idea of the blood sacrifice is a very potent one.’ I felt there was much he had failed to tell me.

Roy Mullay CC BY 4.0

I travelled home, my mind reeling... Why was the ‘blot’ and its fairly recent symbolic manifestation not more commonly known? The Professor’s research was, strangely, not easily accessible on the internet - it was behind a paywall at the University of Oslo, and an expensive, Scandinavian one.

It was two weeks later that the package arrived. Postmarked Edinburgh, but anonymous. Inside were several sheets of paper clearly scanned using a smartphone. Part of it was a report, redacted as we’ve learned to call it, with passages and names blacked out. But it was headed: Evacuation and resettlement of Virdablutt community, Zetland, 1939 and it had come from within what was then the War Office.

Only 100 people had been left in Virdablutt by 1939. The haaf fishing was over, steam drifters were beginning the process of industrial catching with which we are all familiar. Men were in the process of being called up for military service. One paragraph stood out:.

Guisers at Uyeasound Up Helly Aa

Photo by Mike Pennington CC BY-SA 2.0

“It has been decided that, following longstanding reports of irregular social activity including practices deemed sacrilegious, and the complaint of one mother about the kidnapping and unexplained disappearance of her daughter” - and here the name had been erased - “ the best if drastic solution is the removal of the entire population of the communtiy known as Virdablutt, and the imprisonment under wartime strictures of these male persons.” A list of names, again redacted.

The other piece of paper was a paragraph torn from a newspaper, placed on a A4 sheet, photographed and printed. It referred to the trial of one Cowan Ernest Sipsmith, trawler skipper, in 1928 at St John’s, Newfoundland, on charges of child kidnapping, murder and ‘engagement in acitivities of extremely barbarity likely to cultivate superstition and terrorisation within the community of Viblod.’ Viblod. I looked it up. On the extreme western tip of Newfoundland, a deserted village near the curiously named bay called Salvage once known for its thriving economy, entirely based on fishing.

Nothing about Virdablutt. On the other side of the Atlantic. Nothing but 200 miles of clear water between the two communities with almost the same name.

I watch the galley burnings, now, on the internet, and I feel...anxious. Circles of men and, outside of Lerwick, women, each bearing a flaming torch, marching sunwise, always sunwise, never widdershins around the blaze. Sending some invisible viking to Valhalla in flames. The Guizer Jarl is always safely removed from the galley just before it is set on fire.

Another package arrived yesterday. A local postmark. A large padded envelope and inside a plain cardboard box which held, wrapped in tissue paper, what was, even to my unpractised eye, a Barbie Doll. A vintage model, I later discovered. Her viking helmet and glittering chainmail glittered. Her plastic axed, however, was broken.

The label on the box, professionally printed, said: ‘An Up Helly Aa Souvenir, handmade in Shetland’. And then two words, ‘good luck.’

I sold her on eBay for £167, to a collector of such things. I have never returned to Virdablutt.