Jenna Moar will win a small place in history next week, marked by the sizzling sound and heat of her flare being lit in the darkness of a January night in Lerwick, Shetland. Jenna, 16, wearing her handmade Viking warrior’s uniform, will be among the first female participants, alongside three cousins, at the heart of one of Scotland’s most famous cultural events, Lerwick’s Up Helly Aa fire festival.
After decades of quiet complaints, covert attempts at subversion and then open rebellion from feminist Shetlanders, she and her cousins are full members of the jarl squad, the axe-wielding Viking-dressed celebrants who will lead Up Helly Aa on Tuesday.
Her father, Richard, 47, is this year’s guizer jarl, or chief. He has overseen, in conditions of some secrecy, the building of a replica longship by his squad, which includes 31 family members from Shetland, Norway and London.
After parading through the town alongside the boat, all four girls will join Moar and the rest of the squad in throwing their blazing torches in an arc of fire on to the longship.
Jenna has been brought up watching Up Helly Aa with her brothers. Her father has taken part in 30 of them, serving his apprenticeship first as a fiddle case carrier in 1990, aged 14, and then as a member of Lerwick’s junior jarl squad.
Jenna said: “Every year my favourite part is the procession at night with the torches lit and you hear the crack of a flare, so I think this year it will be even more special having Dad going up the ranks with the galley surrounded by his squad.”
The event, whose name comes from the islands’ Norse-derived dialect of Norn, has punctuated Shetland’s long, harsh winters for more than 140 years. The first torchlit procession took place in 1881 and the Viking theme began in 1889.
It spawned other Up Helly Aas across Shetland. Those have allowed women and girls to take part for decades, with women recently elected as jarls. But in Lerwick the male-only tradition remained dominant, rooted in early 20th-century social codes under which women rarely drank and never went to the pub.
Instead, women were expected to look after the Up Helly Aa reception halls, run by different families and social groups, that the jarl squad visits throughout the night after the longship is burned, operating as hostesses.
One or two women dressed up as men to surreptitiously join the non-Viking participants in Up Helly Aa, known as guizer squads. There were protests more recently with women trying to form guizer squads only to be turned away, and furious arguments on Shetland’s news and community webpages.
Change came quickly and without resistance when two women were elected in May 2022 to run Shetland Islands council. Andrea Manson became convener, or provost, and Emma Macdonald became the political leader, joining Maggie Sandison, who was the council’s female chief executive.
Last year several women took part as non-Viking guizers, including Sandison, while 27 schoolgirls took part in the junior Up Helly Aa, lobbing their torches into a smaller longboat.
Manson said Tuesday’s festival would be a particularly poignant moment for Richard Moar after investing several decades of his life in the festival, and she said the arrival of women was inevitable and natural.
“It’s wonderful. I’m very happy for the girls, and the daughter especially, that they’re able to go out their brothers. It’s just how it would’ve happened with the Vikings: the brave women warriors would’ve gone out with their family,” she said.
Jenna said this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. “I think some people will be happy and some people will be mad, but it’s going to change. If I didn’t do it I might have regrets,” she said.
Zara Pennington, one of the leading activists for including women in the festival with the campaign Reclaim the Raven, said it was a “fantastic moment”. She said: “For Shetland as a whole it is transformative; it’s a symbol that Shetland is gender inclusive, that women’s equality is embraced in such a public spectacle.”
