Name: Up Helly Aa | Scotland's Viking Fire Festival Shetland Islands
Uploaded: 2025-08-10T18:42:24.000Z
Duration: 17 min 18 s
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You are watching Vagabrothers and right now we're in Scotland dressed as Vikings.

We're here for the Apella Viking Fire Festival in the Shetland Islands.

Let's go Okay everyone, welcome to our exploration of the Shetland Islands.

Before we get into the heart of the festival of Apella, we are exploring around the various islands here in the Shetlands and really trying to get a hold of the Viking culture.

The Shetland Islands are unlike any other part of Scotland.

Closer to Western Norway than Edinburgh, they're just below the Arctic Circle, higher than Stockholm on the same latitude as Greenland.

The Shetland Islands were conquered by the Vikings over 1,200 years ago, and they remained part of Norway until the 15th century.

Even today, although it's Scottish, you can still feel the Viking heritage, and that's best expressed in Apella, the festival of fire that begins in just a few days.

To this day, 90% of the place names come from Old Norse.

Two-thirds of all Shetlanders have Norwegian DNA, and the dialect is peppered full of Nordic words.

The Shetland Islands are full of Viking history and heritage, and to get a better grasp on why the Vikings chose to settle here, we're at Viking Unst in the northernmost island of Scotland with archaeologist Val Turner.

I'm Val Turner, and I'm the regional archaeologist for Shetland, and we are standing at a place called Haraldswyk, which means the bay where King Harald came ashore, the Viking King Harald.

In terms of its Viking archaeology, it's absolutely amazing, because we have at least the remains of 60 Viking farms in the island, which is more rural settlement than we found anywhere else, including in Scandinavia.

There's not that density of rural Viking farms anywhere.

Well, I think because Unst is bang in the middle of the Viking seaways, so wherever they set out from when they went out from Norway, wherever they were going, whether they were going down to the west of Scotland or north up to Faroe and Iceland or across to Newfoundland and America, Shetland was bang in the middle of their route.

There's plenty of different theories as to why the Vikings left Scandinavia, but when they did, it was ships like this that carried them to the far corners of the earth.

And it's pretty mind-boggling to think that the Vikings crossed the North Atlantic.

They made it to Canada hundreds of years before Columbus made it to the New World as the first European, and they were even rumored to have made it all the way east to Afghanistan.

So being out here, being on this ship, it's pretty awesome.

The Vikings arrived in Shetland 1,200 years ago when an exploding population in Scandinavia forced them to flee overseas in search of resources and farmland.

There's too many people, and it's not enough smorgasbord to feed the babies.

Five months paid paternity leave to help out mom around the longhouse?

Village!  Using the revolutionary technology of their long ships, they reached 37 countries from Canada to Afghanistan, building extensive trading networks and striking fear into the hearts of many millions more.

As the Vikings made their way across the North Atlantic from Iceland to Greenland to Newfoundland, the Shetland Islands, just a couple hundred miles off the west coast of Norway, became an ideal jumping-off point for further raids and excursions in the British Isles.

They conquered the local Picts and introduced Norse laws, language, and forms of fishing, farming, and building that still exist today.

I got it from some old bald Christian guys down in England, and then I killed them.

All right, ladies and gents, welcome to Lerwick, the capital of the Shetland Islands.

Today is the Apella celebrations here in the capital.

It's a festival that happens in various forms from January to March all across the islands and different villages.

It's actually the biggest fire festival in Europe.

We hear lots of, and there is a procession coming down the main street here, and I think it's a procession of Vikings.

Five years ago, we came to Scotland for New Year's, or Hogmanay, and that's where they have a big fireball celebration in Stonehaven.

We've also been to the York Viking Festival in York, England.

This is a combination of the Stonehaven fire ceremony and Viking Festival.

Let's go.  Fire!  We're right here in front of this big bill.

It's kind of like a proclamation that kind of lampoons the local population.

It's tongue-in-cheek jokes, and it has its roots back in the Viking saga, like a lot of this festival.

The procession of the Jarl Squad, which are the guys dressed up as Vikings, are going past us right now.

As part of the Scotland Life campaign, Visit Scotland has teamed us up with a local to experience the festival.

We're here with Stephen Mercer, a local filmmaker who has recently made a film about Vikings.

I think it's quite a spectacle, actually.

I'm going to try and get to every single fire festival in Shetland.

We're down by the waterfront right now here in Lerwick, and this is the Viking longship, the replica longship that's going to be burnt tonight.

They've aptly named it Blaze Away, but it has a dragon head on the front, the tail on the back.

Traditionally, Viking longships would have animal heads, whether it's a wolf or a dragon or a sea monster, and they would use that to scare away enemy spirits in different lands.

When they landed, they wanted to have the Norse gods behind them ready to conquer, ready to pillage, and ready to burn, and this ship is ready to burn.

The festival itself only lasts an hour from lighting the torches to burning the ship, but there's a full year of preparation that goes into this.

There's a lot of artisans who are working to build not just the ship, but all the armor that people have, and there's all sorts of antique armor from previous festivals displayed in storefront windows throughout town.

Now we're going to go meet some of the Jarl Squad.

There's the head Jarl who is basically the Lord of Lerwick for the day and his Vikings that go with him.

We're going to go meet them and find out about all the preparation that goes into this festival throughout the year and why it's such an honor to be part of it.  I'm Hayden Jimmison.

I'm the Jarl's son of the 2018 guys at Jarl Squad for El Pelea and the Shetland Islands.

So at the moment you can see I'm dressed up in our Viking outfit that we've made completely from scratch.

It's been a lot of hard work throughout the year, all for this big day.

My first experience at El Pelea was in 2004 when I was nine years old.

My father's the guys at Jarl, so he's in charge of the festival today.

It took him 13 years to get to this stage and you serve your time on the committee and from there you get to have the big day.

Now we have learned a little bit about the background of this festival, and it's time to experience it.

The Jarl Squad has reassembled, hopped on their buses, and they're going into town to start the procession.

We can actually hear the Jarls getting a little bit further away.

The entire festival is going to culminate when the longship is burnt to a crisp.

We're now walking down to where they're going to burn the ship.

There are about a thousand people with torches, but they're not all Vikings.

The rest of them are known as geysers, which is a word that derives from the same word as to wear a disguise, like an outfit.

I've never heard it before, but that's what they say down here.

If you're a pyromaniac, this is the best festival in the world.

And I also think that everyone has a little bit of pyromaniac.

I'm sticking by my theory, Burning Man of Scotland.

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Up Helly Aa | Scotland's Viking Fire Festival Shetland Islands

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