Stables Fiesta

A Journey Through Festivity
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-83773-253-1
Verlag: Icon Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

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.

Daniel Stables has been working as a travel writer for the last decade, first writing guidebooks for Rough Guides, and later writing articles for National Geographic, the BBC, and national newspapers. He has won acclaim and recognition for his work, having received several nominations for Travel Writer of the Year. More of his work can be found at his website, danielstables.co.uk.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Stables, Daniel

Leseproben

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...