Traditional Viking Fire Festival, Scotland

Up Helly Aa is a traditional mid-winter bonfire festival, held annually on the Shetland Islands of Scotland, honouring the Viking culture, which has existed for a long time and left a great influence in the Nordic region.

Festival Origins

The Up Helly Aa festival is held in the middle of winter, to celebrate the end of the Yule season (Yule takes place in the middle of winter, celebrated by Norse, Teuton, and Celtic peoples as a cult, go-to festival. with Yule cakes and gift-giving customs). The locals named the festival “Up Helly Aa” in the viking t shirt late 19th century in the Norse language: “Up” means “end”, “Helly” means “holiday” and Aa means “all.” chief".

Up Helly Aa originated in the 1870s when a group of local youths wanted to celebrate Christmas in the Shetland Islands with a new idea. The first torch relay event on Up Helly Aa day started in 1881. From 1956, young volunteers were also allowed to participate in the festival, called Vi-kids.

Occurrence time

On the last Tuesday of January every year to mark the end of the Christmas season, Europeans are once again basking in the dazzling, warm and exciting light of the region's largest-scale fire festival. held in Lerwick - the capital of the Shetland Islands, Scotland to commemorate the mysterious Viking culture.

Up Helly Aa is a traditional mid-winter bonfire, commemorating the time when the ancestors of the Norse Vikings dominated the Shetland Islands (now part of Scotland). The festival is a fascinating, multi-event, event that takes place every year on the last Tuesday of January.

Main activities

Locals, known as guizers, celebrate with traditional Norwegian heritage, dressed as Vikings, and paraded around town with battle axes and torches, while towing a Viking longboat.

This traditional event is held on the island of Shetland with a series of monumental activities such as parades, singing, dancing, torch relay and parties. The festival commemorates and honors the Viking culture that has existed for a long time and left a great influence in the Nordic region.

These Viking groups, called Jarl, are led by a Guizer at the top. They spent the day marching through Lerwick, the capital of the Shetland Islands, Scotland. The final destination is the waterfront to burn a Viking ship together.

The ship is 9.2 meters long, simulating the previous Viking boat style, made by volunteers very meticulously. To make the boat burning event more impressive, the street lights in the city turned off very early. Every time the boat was lit, the whole city seemed to glow in flames. After the fire went out, the guizers sang the traditional song "The Norseman's Home" before kicking off the grand night party.

Jarl Squad teams spend the day marching around Lerwick, the capital of the province of Shetland. Finally, they headed for the riverbank and set fire to a warship with about 1,000 torches. When the train burned down, they returned to downtown and drank beer until the next morning.

The emergence of large ice sheets and rising sea levels have flooded many areas of Greenland. This is the main reason why they leave the "motherland".

The Vikings are world-famous for tattoo baseball jersey being brave and good warriors. However, scientists recently discovered they also cannot combat the effects of climate change. Experts have found evidence of large ice sheets and rising sea levels that flooded many Viking settlements in Greenland. Due to things getting worse and worse, the Vikings left the "motherland" of Greenland in the 15th century.

According to research by experts, the Vikings began inhabiting Greenland - the icy island located between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans - around 985 AD. In the following centuries, the Viking population in Greenland increased rapidly. Therefore, this is one of the densely populated and quite developed areas.

Research results of experts show that from the 4th to the 19th centuries, Europe and North America experienced a colder period than the previous period. Accordingly, a vast ice cover around Greenland is getting bigger and bigger.

In addition, rising sea levels flooded the Viking coastal areas. Experts calculate that, from about 1000-1400, sea level rise caused the coastal areas of the Vikings in Greenland to be submerged up to 5m deep. The affected area is up to 140 square kilometers.

Large storms occur more often. This affected agricultural activities, cattle breeding of the Vikings. Therefore, climate change is considered by experts to be the main reason why the Vikings left Greenland to find a new land to live.