From grand old Viking centuries, Up Helly Aa has come!
And now you can join in the celebrations with our new Up Helly Aa t-shirt, just in time for Shetland's series of winter fire festivals.
Adorned with an inscription in viking-age runes, which explains the duty of every guizer taking part in the festival. It simply states that guizers should:
Honour freedom, love and beauty
In the feast, the dance, the song.
These words are taken from the Galley Song, which was written especially for Up Helly Aa in 1935, and personally I think they are also pretty good words to live by. The runes are written in what is called the Younger Futhark, which evolved in Scandinavia in the viking period. Inscriptions from the time tended to be written phonetically, with no official spelling conventions to follow, and that is what I have generally followed in my transliteration above.
