Viking Weddings, Part 5

[Gunnora Hallakarva]

Courtship, Love and Marriage in Viking Scandinavia
 Part V: Reconstructing the Wedding Ceremony
======================================================

        In attempting to reconstruct the details of the Viking wedding
ceremony, the reseracher is immediately struck by the paucity of information
available.  The sagas are full of married couples, much mention is made of
negotiating a marriage alliance; the laws carefully prescribe details
pertaining to the marriage contract; rarely a saga will divulge a few
details of a wedding feast.  Mythology is no more helpful on the facts of
the matter, but does provide some background for conjecture.  After
reviewing the few facts known about the Viking wedding, one is left with the
question of why more details weren't recorded.  There are several answers.
First, by the time the sagas were written, Christianity had replaced many of
the older pagan practices.  Along with this fact, one should recall that of
all aspects of pagan religions, Christianity has most fervently attempted to
stamp out worship of the deities of fertility, thus obliterating temples,
artifacts, and even mention of the gods and goddesses of love, sex, and
marriage.  Even if the pagan Vikings had possessed a technology of writing
similar to that of their Christian successors, some details of the rites of
marriage would not have been recorded, being restricted to oral transmission
from the *go(dh)i* or *gy(dh)ja* in their role as priest and priestess,
being kept sacred by limiting the dissemination of the secret rituals to the
initiates of their cults.  Even the public portions of such a ritual would
not often be recorded, because the elements that were common knowledge were
so well known that the authors of the Eddas and sagas took for granted their
audience's familiarity with the rite and so failed to elaborate upon it in
their works.

        In order to fill in the gaps to provide a workable reconstruction of
the Viking wedding ceremony, researchers must turn to the work of
folklorists, the rituals of related Germanic peoples, and to the structural
outlines produced by anthropologists and ethnographers who have studied
modern peoples.  If marriage is defined as a rite of passage, marking the
change in status of two individuals from that of mere adults to a
reproductive social unit, some of the pieces of data begin to fall into
place.  A rite of passage incorporates certain standard features:

        (1)     Separation of the individual from the larger social group
        (2)     Destruction or removal of the individual's old social identity
        (3)     Creation of a new social identity via instruction and/or ritual
        (4)     Reintegration of the new initiate into the larger social
group within
                the new social role.

All of these features can be identified among the fragments of information
we possess regarding the Vikin wedding.

A.  Setting a Wedding Date
=====================================================

        The traditional day for weddings in the North was Friday, sacred to
the goddess Frigga (Hilda R. Ellis-Davidson.  Gods and Myths of Northern
Europe.  NY: Penguin.  1964.  pp. 110-112).  

        For the Vikings, the date of the wedding would have been further
limited by climactic conditions.  Travel for the guests, witnesses, and the
groom's or bride's party to the wedding location would have been difficult
or even impossible during the winter months.  The wedding celebration was
frequently a week-long affair, so ample food supplies had to be available,
dictating a date near harvest time.  The legal requirements for a wedding
included the stricture that the bride and groom would drink together the
bridal-ale, usually mead, which meant that honey must be available to brew
the drink, and in dufficient quatities so that the couple couls share mead
together over the month following the wedding, the "honey-moon" (Edwin W.
Teale.  The Golden Throng.  NY:  Universe.  1981. p. 127; also see John B.
Free.  Bees and Mankind.  Boston:  Allen & Unwin.  1982.  p. 103).  Probably
most weddings, taking all these factors into account, occurred towards the
end of summer through the early aprt of winter.

B.  Preparations for the Wedding Ceremony
=====================================================

Following the model of the rite of passage, the bride and groom would
undergo preparations for the rite that both separated them from their former
roles as unwed adults, and prepared them for their new roles as man and
wife.  This transition could be much more extreme for the woman marrying,
since she would not only undergo transformation from woman to wife, but also
from maiden to mother in many instances.

1.  The Bride
=====================================================

        The bride would probably be sequestered before the wedding with
female attendants, presumably her mother, other married women, and perhaps a
*gy(dh)ja* to supervise her preparations.  In order to provide a visible
symbol of the loss of her former role as a maiden, the new bride might be
stripped of her old clothing, and any symbols of her unwed status such as
the *kransen*, a gilt circlet that was worn by medieval Scandinavian girls
of gentle birth upon the outspread hair that was likewise a token of her
virginity (Sigrid Undset.  The Bridal Wreath. trans.  Charles Archer and
J.S. Scott.  NY: Bantam. 1920. p. 331.  This information is from Undset's
carefully researched historical notes at the back of the book.)  The
*kransen* would be solemnly removed by the bride's attendants, and wrapped
to be put away for the bride until the birth of a daughter of her own.

        The next step is the bride's preparations was a visit to the
bath-house, the Scandinavian equivalent of the Finnish sauna, which featured
wooden tubs of water, soap for cleansing, and a steam room.  Heated stones
were sprinkled with water to produce steam in which the bathers luxuriated,
switching themselves with bundles of fine brich twigs to stimulate
perspiration (Williams, pp. 85-87).  The symbolism of the steam bath
included both the "washing away" of the bride's maiden status, and a
purification to prepare her for the religious ritual that would follow the
next day.  While "baking" in the bath house, the new bride's attendants
could instruct her on the duties of a wife, religious observances to be
followed by married women, advice on the best ways of living with a man, and
the like.  Part of the contents of these teachings may have been taken from
collections of gnomic wisdom such as the verses preserved in *Sigrdrifumal*,
which touch upon the magical knowledge necessary to the housewife, and ways
in which to advise and guide her husband (Holander, Poetic Edda, pp. 14-41).
The final step of the steam-bath, a plunge into cool or cold water to cool
the bather and close the pores, completed the cleansing.  The rinse water
might be further associated with the wedding ritual by having herbs, flowers
or oils added to it, not only to scent the water but also to add magical
potency to the cleansing rite via the supposed aphrodisiac and
fertility-encouraging powers associated with such additives.

        The final preparations of the bride would involve dressing her for
the ceremony.  The bride apparently did not wear a special costume as is the
case in modernm weddings, but late sources (ca. 1700's) record that brides
often wore cloaks "the color of soft blue spruce" (James Reynolds, "Saga of
the Seven Spruce Trees," in Gallery of Ghosts. NY: Grosset & Dunlap. 1965.
pp. 167-173).  The bride's hair would be left outspread:  the wedding
ceremony and the feast would be the last times when she would wear her hair
unbound and uncovered.  To replace the *kransen* she wore as a maiden, the
bride would instead wear the bridal-crown, a heirloom kept by her family and
worn only during the wedding festivities (Undset, p. 331).  A modern
fictional account describes a wedding crown as being made of silver, with
pints ending alternately in crosses and clover leaves,s et with
rock-crystal, and garlanded with red and green silk cords (Ibid., p. 310).
At least some bridal-crowns used to the present day were elaborately woven
from straw and wheat, then garlanded with flowers (Marta Kashammar.  Skapa
Med Halm.  Halmstad, Sweden:  Bokforlaget Spektra.  1985) .  Although none
of the sources I have seen have confirmed the use of the bridal crown in the
pagan Viking period, it was worn in the Middle Ages in Scandinavia, and the
age of the custom is further attested in the Continental Germanic tradition
of the Feast of St. Lucy, where a maiden designated as the "Lucy Bride" is
dressed in a crown ornamented with burning candles.

2.  The Groom
=====================================================

        Like the bride, the groom would experience the characteristic
features of the rite of passage, including spearation and removal of the old
identity.  The groom's attendants would be his father, married brothers,
other married men, and perhaps a *go(dh)i*.  SInce men did not wear a
visible token of their bachelor status, the symbolic removbal of their old
identity followed a much different ritual from that being followed by the
bride.  The groom was required to obtain an ancestral sword belonging to a
deceased forebear for use later in the wedding ceremony.  There is a string
tradition in the sagas of breaking grave-mounds in order to retrieve a sword
belonging to a deceased forebear, to be given to a son of the family, and
Hilda Ellis-Davidson finds evidence for the importance of such a sword at
the wedding (Hilda R. Ellis-Davidson.  "The Sword at the Wedding,"  in
Patterns of Folklore.  Ipswich UK:  D.S. brewer, 1978.  p. 123).  This would
indeed be a powerful ritual of separation and destruction of the man's
identity as a bachelor, with the descent into the grave-mound to recover the
sword serving as a symbolic death and rebirth for the groom.  If an
appropriate barrow was not available, the ancestral sword may have been
concealed by the groom's relatives in a mock-tumulus (Ibid., p. 109).  This
would provide an opportunity for the groom to be confronted by a man
costumed as a ghost or *aptrgangr* of his ancestor, who might elaborate on
the young man's instruction by remining him of his family history and
lineage, the importance of tradition, and the need to continue the ancestral
bloodline.  On the other hand, the sword which the groom had to obtain might
instead be gotten from a living relative, complete with the lecture on
family history:  the sagas are not clear on this point and nowhere actually
describe grave-breaking as a part of the wedding ceremony.

        Regardless of how the groom got hios sword, he would next pay a
visit to the bath house as his bride-to-be had done before him.  There the
groom would also symbolically wash away his bachelor status, and purify
himself for the wedding ceremony.  His instruction on the duties of a
husband and father, conferred upon him by his attendants, may have included
information garnered from sources such as *Havamal*, which advises young men
in their dealings with women, not only warning of their fickle ways, but
also providing instruction in the ways to win a woman's love, and how to
live comfortably with her (Hollander, Poetic Edda, pp. 14-41).  After
bathing, the groom could then be dressed for the wedding.  Again, no special
costume is recorded for the groom, although he would bear his newly-acquired
sword during the eceremony, and may have also carried with him a hammer or
an axe as a token of Thorr, intended to symbolize his mastery in the union,
and to ensure a fruitful marriage (Hilda R. Ellis-Davidson, "Thor's Hammer,
" in Patterns of Folklore.  Ipswich UK:  D.S. Brewer.  1978.  p. 123).  

=====================================================
See the next post for Part V: Reconstructing the Wedding Ceremony, including
Section C: The Wedding Ceremony, Section D: The Wedding Feast, Section E:
The Wedding Night and Section F:The Morning-Gift

If you wish to print any or all of this paper in a newsletter for the S.C.A.
or Asatru, please contact me for permission first.  In general, I will grant
permission so long as a copy of the publication that my work appears in is
mailed to me for my files. 

::GUNNORA::


Gunnora Hallakarva
Herskerinde
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